Internet law pornography

When it comes to Internet law, pornography was one of the first reasons why there was a demand on international regulations. Unfortunately, a cross-border agreement cannot as easily be accomplished as demanded for. Some countries, predominantly Muslim, bar their Internet users from accessing any sites deemed pornographic. They have employed rigorous Internet laws on pornography and are enforcing these vigorously.

The anonymous nature of the Internet allows many people who would not normally watch porn to snoop in and see what the ruckus all about is. Even before the invention of the World Wide Web, porn material used to be distributed by means of the newsgroups. At that time, copyrights were ignored and any available material was posted without inhibition. Then the Web got invented, the Internet bloomed and suddenly even web pages providing free content could earn money.

Most of the Internet law pertaining to the pornography is actually directly derived from existing laws. Copyright infringement, privacy violations, protection of minors, they all exist in regular law, only they were extended to meet the requirements of the new media and distribution means. But some specific cases related to the internet started to arise, so new approaches had to be developed in order to properly enforce the Internet law on pornography.

To better explain the situation, here are some examples. In the virtual world “Second Life”, which started out as an online game and developed into a whole new virtual existence, there are no limits what a virtual character can do, just like in real life. The virtual human then can do all kind of things, including the nasty ones like engaging in unsafe sex, buying a prostitute and even preying on children. Such virtual pedophiles were classified by psychologists as predators who are not yet ready to attack and entrap real children and are using the virtual world to work up the nerve. Such cases raised the question who programmed the sheer possibility, but more importantly, how to stop such a predator to transfer from the virtual into the real world? The child protection specialists who were already working on predators using chat rooms to get in contact with underage victims, extended their operations to this new medium and posed as underage children in relevant areas to see if the predator tries to persuade them to meet in real life. Through IP and routing logs, real underage customers of “Second Life” were tracked down and the parents were notified. In some weird cases, grown men and women were identified as children looking for sex with adults. Such people were warned and are being monitored by the Internet watchdogs.