At some point it dawned on the lawmakers that the access to the private users’ information stored on local computers or the personal data stored elsewhere shall not be subject to unauthorized use and abuse by the involved parties or third persons. Private e-mail addresses, home addresses, phone numbers were distributed, even sold, whereby the owner of the data was unaware of such occurrences. The call erupted to establish an Internet privacy law, whereby the rights of Internet users will be protected.
Very soon such an Internet privacy law became standard, web sites not abiding to the regulations were blacklisted and seemingly the privacy protection worked. But most of the big companies, governments and their agencies are poking holes into the privacy of uses, mainly for no other reason but to better control, manipulate or extort the oblivious user. Some paranoid users use proxies to hide their IP, use firewalls and port blockers to obstruct any incoming contacts, there is even several underground programmed programs, like peer guardian, which protect peer-to-peer users from being located by government and law enforcement agencies when sharing files and data over the Net.
Although there is an Internet privacy law, it is employed differently according to the location, country, local law it has been based on and local culture and decency customs. Besides that, government and their agencies usually do not succumb to such controls, quite at the contrary, do everything they can to undermine the privacy of Internet users in order to better control, manipulate and exploit the broad public. As an example, the American government, unhappy about the Internet privacy law, implemented into the Patriot Act that if the government or any of the agencies suspect a terrorist activity, they have the right to invade anyone’s privacy in every possible way, without a warrant, without having to substantiate such a claim. For good measure they added a new definition for terrorism, which more or less boils down to “everything that endangers, works against or puts into jeopardy any aspect of the American interest, stability and way of life” may be deemed as terrorism, which means that the American government now has the power to spy on, invade the privacy of any person or even abuse any data they can obtain for any purpose they deem fit, making the Internet privacy law obsolete, when it comes to the government.
To bring it to a point: the Internet privacy law is good, only it is not being implemented or is not binding for many government departments and agencies. In terms of consumer, businesses and personal interactions, it works just fine.
“The Apollo 11 mission was the first manned mission to land on the Moon. It was the fifth human spaceflight of Project Apollo and the third human voyage to the Moon or Moon orbit. Launched on July 16, 1969, it carried Mission Commander Neil Alden Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene ‘Buzz’ Aldrin, Jr. On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans to land on the Moon, while Collins orbited above.
The mission fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s goal of reaching the moon by the end of the 1960s, which he had expressed during a speech given before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin deploys a foil sheet for collecting solar particles near the Eagle lunar lander in July 1969. July 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. Today Aldrin advocates a return to space targeted at Mars and other long-distance exploration missions.
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.
It happens pretty often and we hear about it every other day: a celebrity’s sex tape or nude pictures have been leaked to the Web. The famous Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee tape or Vanessa Hudgens naked cellular phone photograph, we all heard about it, but did not care that much. But what happens if the private horseplay with boyfriend or then husband gets leaked on the net? What to do if something personal and deemed erased reappears and is widely available to anyone, your parents, your priest, your kid?
The actual reason why such photos exist is irrelevant. Was it his idea, yours, was this a one-time-thing, you were young, needed the money, it does not matter. Lucky for you, the celebrities paved your way for suing the publisher of unauthorized material, even if he or she professes you did know that one day they will be published and such. Without a written release form, allowing him or her to publicly display and/or use your name and likeness for profit, you have a clear open and shut case.
The problem is a bit more difficult with underground web pages, porn oriented web pages, private pages, and pages you don’t even know exist. If the pictures are loaded under any name that you have no knowledge of and which is other than yours on a public picture host, you will have to find out all the locations of such photographs to have them taken down. If the pictures have been given to an adult web page host, who publishes it with permission of the former lover/spouse, then short of a court injunction you have no say. That means legal battle, proving harmful intent, or why these pictures are damaging for you, having been secretly taped helps, but is almost never the case, lawyer expenses through the roof.
The worst is if the pictures have been purchased by a big house, engaged in exploiting porn and sexual material. If they have received written consent by one of the participants, which would be your former whatever, then to receive an injunction in time to stop the publishing would require serious money or an Act of God. If your former disgruntled lover is out only to punish you by publishing the photos in order to humiliate you, then there is nothing you can do to stop the pictures appearing on the Net. All you can do is pray that they do not become viral and sue the perpetrator for everything he’s got, adding criminal charges for intentional harassment and public humiliation.
Every day millions of articles are being published on the Internet and the Web. Every single active web page has received an update and some new copyright protected material has seen the light of day. The enormous speed that the Internet provides for publishing purposes is unparalleled and therefore required a tailored law regulation to make it work.
While many do not want to put up any limitations on what may or may not be published on the Net, some other nations, for whatever reason, see the situation differently. China came up with a very controversial proposal for regulating publishing on the Internet. The National Copyright Administration of China decided that unauthorized publishing needs to be harnessed by new regulations, which should look like this: Any and all online publication may be republished without the beforehand approval of the author and copyright holder, unless there is clearly stated that these works may not be used and reused.
That the regulation makes no sense is evident, when you know that all published material falls under the copyright protection and cannot be republished without prior approval of the copyright holder. In a manner of speaking, China just said they don’t intend to uphold existing copyright laws.
But lately all internet pages have a publishing policy written somewhere, mostly within the terms of use or the disclaimer, stating exactly what may be done and what may not. In most of the cases, the published content is not only copyright protected, but also protected by publishing and release agreements which most commonly are posted somewhere on the site.
Publishing on the Internet is the most widely discussed issue in the Internet law circle, mainly because of the extensive plagiarization of content happening everywhere on the Web. Blogs being copied, with only names and dates changed, articles being completely or partly republished without permission, most of the time someone else claiming authorship and other such occurrences raise the question to what extent is the copyright law in Internet publishing enforceable and how do you take somebody to court who has just stolen your written work which you were providing for free and republished it for free on another website?
If every act of plagiarism on the Internet is being taken to court, then the courts of the world would be tied up in litigation for centuries to come. How to regulate, enforce, protect and punish in such cases, where there is clearly too much happening and too many perpetrators are at work? Perhaps it is best to just ask the administrator of the web page publishing copyrighted material to simply take it down.
Since the early days of the World Wide Web, the Internet boomed with all kind of gambling sites that provided possibilities to bet on everything, from electronic black jack to the winner of the American Idol competition. Besides the United States based gambling sites, many such sites appeared with very shady backgrounds all over the world. Some legitimate sites that seem to have been approved by local authorities were almost impossible to find and gambling enthusiasts simply took the biggest gamble by picking the site.
The many abuses resulted in many laws being passed regulating the gambling activities on the Net; one of the primary sources for such legislation is the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act from 2006. This Act prohibits interstate online gambling of any kind, transfer of money for gambling purposes, gambling on offshore gambling web sites and many other prohibitions, rendering the online gambling basically illegal. Nevertheless, local laws are not affected by this federal ruling, which means that online gambling within the state where it is not prohibited to gamble is permitted, furthermore Nevada, Indian tribal lands and some other places are excluded, by the local law exclusion, only the interstate money transfers are deemed illegal, which does not regulate credit cards and banks that have branches in the state where gambling takes place. This will not outlaw internet gambling, it just outlaws the sites to be located within the US and bars anybody who wants to bet online from within the US to participate. To express this in plain English, all online gambling leaves the US.
The problem is that the US does not filter outgoing traffic, so every single gambling site owner or employee is a criminal, according to this act, and once he or she enters the United States, he or she may be arrested and charged with a felony, for not barring the US citizen from gambling online. This will have as a result that the US will be banned from participating in such betting enterprises, bet in such ventures and even access such sites, servers or networks. As if not enough has been done to alienate the US from the rest of the world! One of the biggest losers will be Poker. Online betting on Poker tournaments was a big revenue magnet for Internet betting businesses, it is estimated that up to 80% of such revenue will in future go elsewhere, outside the US.
The overall hope is that this Internet gambling law never passes and the whole problem goes away. But American history is full of such government missteps, just think of the prohibition in the thirties, and the future does not look bright for online gamblers.
The growing number on e-commerce and Internet based businesses, as well as regular companies extending their operations; the need grew to legally regulate these ventures, existing primarily in the virtual world of the Web. The main idea was to extend the local laws of business ventures and to implement these onto the net, but the Internet principle of the unlimited freedom encompassed the free enterprise idea, where virtually anyone could open a business online.
To standardize legally these virtual stores, the business concepts were transferred to the net and imposed on the venture owner. This created a loophole, where Internet business holder could open a legal, fully operational business and extend the operations to subcontractors who would then operate mini businesses on their own, without the entire legal burden. Some disclaimers and terms of service were still necessary, but the mini venture could be underway in mere minutes. This way the e-bay was born, the yahoo stores, the e-bay stores, the amazon.com supplier stores…
Contrary to other laws regarding the internet, the Internet business law was created almost instantly. Nevertheless, there is no additional or separate law book with the title “Internet business law”. All the applicable laws were either extended or added to the existing law books, only the regular business and commerce regulating laws were extended with the e-commerce and e-business parts.
The main problem with the business law for the Internet was the international nature of doing business. While it may appear that a business operates locally, it may be incorporated or have its official location in another country, perhaps even on a completely different continent. Trade regulations in foreign countries may be very dissimilar to local applicable laws, therefore every website running a business needs to have the definition of the applicable law, the terms of service, the privacy policy and the jurisdiction clearly defined and on public display.
How complicated the international facet of doing business on the Internet can become, when viewed from a legal angle, explain the many courses and seminars held by Internet behemoths like Google and Yahoo for lawyers and interested individuals looking to understand all the implications. Selling an item from Bangladesh in Turkmenistan to an American customer may have all kind of legal humbug attached to it, therefore people are advised to shop with reputable businesses, which lead to the rating and comment system established by amazon.com, e-bay and other huge internet operators providing not only own merchandise but sub-businesses offering services and products of their own. Although legislation has tried to harness Internet fraud, such self-imposed rating systems seem to have a much larger impact on the final buying decision.
