Internet and the Law

This book considers the threarts to free speech and online commerce posed by international goverment attempting to impose such territorial statutes and standards within cyberspace.

This visionary book presents an interdisciplinary and cogent approach to the issue of Internet governance and control. By examining five critical areas in which the tension between freedom and control is most palpable--fair competition and open access, free expression, intellectual property, privacy rights, and security--Spinello guides the reader on a tour of the emerging body of law and public policy that has attempted to control the anarchy of cyberspace. In so doing, he defends the credo of Internet self-regulation, asserting that the same powerful and flexible architectures that created the Internet as we know it today can be relied upon to aid the private sector in arriving at a workable, decentralized regulatory regime. Except in certain circumstances that require government involvement, self-regulation is not only viable but is a highly preferred alternative to the forced uniformity that centralized structures tend to impose.

Explores the many complex issues & challenges that confront governments, technocrats, business people, & others as they try to create & implement rules for a truly global, interoperable Internet.

The world of law is a world of information. Rules, judgments, decisions, interpretations, and agreements all involve using and communicating information. Today, we are experiencing a significant transition, from letters fixed on paper to information stored electronically. The digital era, where information is created, stored, and communicated electronically, is quickly approaching, if not already here. The future of law will no longer be found in impressive buildings and leather-bound books, but in small pieces of silicon, in streams of light, and in millions of miles of wires and cable. It will be a world of new relationships and greater possibilities for individual and group communication, an environment where the value of information increases as it is shared. In Law in a Digital world, M. Ethan Katsh explores how these new technologies will alter one of our most central institutions. He considers the different ways in which people will not only electronically read and write, but also interact with our vast storehouses of legal knowledge and information. He envisions how sounds and pictures will play into the largely imageless print world of law, and looks at the future importance of graphic and nontextual communication. He explores how the flexible, personalized organization of data will transform the way we gather information, and whether information can or cannot be contained, raising questions of copyright and privacy. What happens to the law when information is more plentiful and accessible? What happens to those people who suddenly have access to information never before available? Does the use of information in a new form change the institution, the user, and those who come in contact with the user? And, what role does the lawyer play in all of this? For citizens, for lawyers, for all those who will be part of the digital world rushing toward us, Katsh answers these questions while considering the implications of this new era.

Is the internet really powerful enough to allow a sixteen year old to become the biggest threat to world peace since Adolf Hitler? Are we all now susceptible to cyber-criminals who can steal from us without even having to leave the comfort of their own armchairs? These are fears which have been articulated since the popular development of the internet, yet criminologists have been slow to respond to them. Consequently, questions about what cybercrimes are, what their impacts will be and how we respond to them remain largely unanswered. Organised into three sections, this book engages with the various criminological debates that are emerging over cybercrime. The first section looks at the general problem of crime and the internet. It then describes what is understood by the term 'cybercrime' by identifying some of the challenges for criminology. The second section explores the different types of cybercrime and their attendant problems. The final section contemplates some of the challenges that cybercrimes give rise to for the criminal justice system.

TyAnna K. Herrington explains current intellectual property law and examines the effect of the Internet and ideological power on its interpretation. Promoting a balanced development of our national culture, she advocates educators' informed participation in ensuring egalitarian public access to information. She discusses the control of information and the creation of knowledge in terms of the way control functions under current property law.

An outstanding line-up of contributors explore the regulation of the internet from an interdisciplinary perspective. In-depth coverage of this controversial area such as international political economy, law, politics, economics, sociology and internet regulation. Regulating the Global Information Society covers the differences between both US and UK approaches to regulation and establishes where policy is being made that will influence the future direction of the global information society, from commercial, democratic and middle-ground perspectives.

Jeremy Harris Lipschultz is communication graduate chair and associate professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

When the U.S. Congress created the Federal Radio Commission in 1927, what we now call cyberspace was just "ether." Broadcasting had only begun to carry tinny human voices and music across the fields and prairies, while Sunday afternoon phone calls to Aunt Mabel snaked through wires below, courtesy of an army of operators who switched each circuit by hand. It didn't take long, though, for the wires and airwaves to fill up with untrammeled chatter, so much so that by 1934 after complaints by the Navy that ship to shore communications had become hopelessly chaotic, and under the unproved but widely held belief that the broadcast spectrum was a finite natural resource all federal authority over electronic communications was forged into a new, powerful Federal Communications Commission. The amount of information traversing the airwaves has increased a million fold since 1927, but has the FCC changed along with the technology? The answer, according to Peter W. Huber, in Law and Disorder in Cyberspace: Abolish the FCC and Let Common Law Rule the Telecosm, is an emphatic No. In this well researched, lively, even witty polemic, Huber recounts the history of telecommunications over the last century to argue that the FCC "should have been extinguished years ago." With scarcity of communications channels no longer an issue, and the virtual elimination of distinctions between carriage and broadcast,the Commission's anachronistic laws have no basis for existence, and have in fact impeded growth and progress to the tune of billions of lost dollars. Today, the "telecosm," that complex universe of invisible communications traffic, has expanded, supplanted, and subdivided itself many times over with each new technological breakthrough. Cable television, direct broadcast satellite, cell phones, the V chip, Caller ID, personal computers, and the Internet have transformed the world. Huber argues that large bureaucratic entities like the FCC fail to adjust to such rapidly changing technologies because they see their mission as maintaining the status quo, and that instead of preserving the rights of common citizens they actually favor rich monopolies. Addressing charged points of conflict such as free speech vs. censorship, privacy vs. right to know, and market vs. controlled pricing, Law and Disorder in Cyberspace energetically proposes that sensible national telecommunications policies evolve through common law--the accretion of decisions arrived at in specific cases where basic principles such as private property and fair business practice are challenged and upheld--and not through the top down, government imposition of inflexible regulatory mandates created in the vacuum of uninformed, theoretical disussion. Given the heated climate on Capitol Hill surrounding debate over ways to reduce federal spending, Peter Huber's arguments are timely, urgent, and meticulously documented. Law and Disorder in Cyberspace is not only informative and entertaining, but will be one of those rare books that will influences public policy before the end of this decade.

This is a source for students on e-business courses, but also for students taking modules in e-business as part of traditional degrees in business, marketing, computing, and information systems.

A debate on the theory of intellectual property, the