Internet law

The exploding development and popularity of the Internet in the nineties of the 20th Century created a new world where no legal regulation existed. Ever since the problem became apparent, there has been a strong movement towards defining an Internet Law, but all tries as of yet failed. The jurisdiction problems, the cultural differences, local interpretations and other problems torpedoed the international effort until this very day.

When mentioning the Internet Law, people usually think of the illegal downloads, the Napster story, the movie War Games, viruses, trojans and hackers. But there is much more to that extent. Besides these, to a certain extent, romantic and robin hood-esque law breakers there are plenty of issues that need to be addressed by a unified Internet Law, starting with the illegal e-mail and keystroke tapping by the US government through the Carnivore “sniffer” and “Magic Lantern”, as well as the Echelon program tapping any and all data with satellite interception, to the virtual pedophiles preying on virtual children in the virtual world of “Second Life”.

Many advocates of an Internet Law argue that there has to be something to prevent the “Big Brother” government from accessing private and seemingly guaranteed confidential correspondence and data. Perhaps us mere mortals may be too unimportant for them to check us out or spy on us, but how about industry secrets, private correspondence related to a business deal, or even new inventions discussed with a colleagues? In any case, there are such crawling sniffers going around, where certain patterns, words and other material alert someone to take action.

The main problem is that currently local laws are being extended to cover the Internet, because an Internet Law does not exist. The jurisdiction needs to be decided upon by international agreements, because if the crime happened in one country, on one server bearing the data, the owner of the data is in a different country and the culprit is from a third country, then the problem with the jurisprudence becomes obvious. Currently the perpetrator is being prosecuted in the country where he lives, by employing existing local Internet Law, which is evident in the many cases of copyright infringement lawsuits, mainly for bootleg films and music, but other areas are not as easily implemented. For instance, the USA PATRIOT Act from 2001 gives the US Government agencies almost unlimited authority to violate any existing law in the pursuit of terrorism, whereby terrorism is defined as anything which is against the American interest. So theoretically, the Internet Law the way US may implement it could land any bootleg DVD dealer a permanent stay on Guantanamo Bay.