Internet Law

Nominet UK won $1,300,000 AUS (about $970,650 USD) in a data mining lawsuit over a company that scraped data out of their public whois database and then mailed registration “invoices” to the domain owners. The defendants were found “liable for copyright infringement and breaches of Australian fair trade laws.”

What you write online, be it a blog, forum, or website, can be used as legal evidence against you. One teen blogger found this out the hard way and is now facing 5 years in prison.

Although Ranking later retracted his words — deleting them from the blog and penning an explanation — they came back to haunt him, forcing him Monday to plead guilty to DUI manslaughter.

This is a good reason why corporations should be aproaching employee blogging cautiously. There are countless cases of employee e-mail being used in lawsuits and criminal cases; I except we will start seeing more of blogs in the courtroom too.

I’m sure you’ve noticed Golden Palace’s crazy antics that range from buying dumb stuff on ebay to paying streakers to display their name. Have you ever noticed the ads for PartyPoker on TV that say PartyPoker.net and not PartyPoker.com?

Tonight I read a very interesting case study from MarketingSherpa. It turns out that this multi-billion dollar industry has more than a few tricks and gimmicks up its sleave to rake in the cash.

“We have BoSpoker.net, for example,” he explains. The concept is that the average consumer won’t type dot-net. Rather, they type dot-com, landing on the pay gambling site rather than the free site. With that in mind, Griffiths is spending millions of dollars on radio, newspaper, and internet ads for BoSpoker.net. Interestingly, even on the dot-net site, he can’t advertise for the dot-com, because other sites — ESPN for example — won’t take the dot-net advertising if the dot-net links to the dot-com.

Oh, and advertising gambling websites in the United States isn’t exactly illegal, but there are some people who would like you to think it is.

Scary stuff. The EU is planning new rules which would control television programming both online and offline. No word on how this would effect a company in a non-EU country serving video in the EU.

“In the proposals, the definition of television is ditched in favour of “moving image”, with or without sound and distributed by electronic networks, so that moving images over the Internet are also covered.”

First the AFP sued Google over Google News, now book publishers are going after them over Google Print.

This isn’t exactly new either — anyone remember MP3.com’s RIAA fiasco?

In a statement, specifically aimed at Google News (and possible Google Print as well) the head of the European Publishers Council revealed that he believes people are going to pay for news content, as opposed to the domination of free ad-supported news today.

“It is fascinating to see how these companies ‘help themselves’ to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenue off the back of other people’s content”

Are these guys nuts for not only turning down free traffic, but spending millions on legal fees in the process?

Making sure you aren’t breaking the law isn’t easy. Making sure you aren’t breaking the law in every country in the world is downright impossible. For web publishers who want to safely travel abroad its a serious issue — unfortunately the issue just got a little more complicated.

Declan McCullagh has an interesting article over at CNet’s News.com concerning an international cybercrime treaty. The treaty allows foreign nations to investigate other country’s citizens.

Requiring dual criminality would let the FBI investigate actual transnational crimes, such as computer intrusions and virus creation. But trumped-up offenses, like a blogger “questioning President Putin,” would not trigger U.S. aid…. Unfortunately, neither the Bush administration nor the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been willing to make that change, calling it too “rigid.”

Its clear to me that the current U.S. administration wants to see expanded personal freedoms in countries such China. In other cases, they’d like to see much more (ie: North Korea and Iran.) Other countries aren’t nearly as bad, such as Russia, but still apply strong pressure to critical voices, often resulting in the use of the law to silence these voices. Its no secret, dissidents are using the internet to communicate. That makes them cyber criminals.

Here is the problem — according to the treaty “the FBI must conduct electronic surveillance “in real time” on behalf of another government.” So what happens if I want to start up a website on human rights and China decides I’m a criminal? I’d like to know, because as it stands right now, I’d be an international crook.

I’ll take it a step further, why should your money (whether you are a U.S. citizen, or a citizen of another country which has signed this treaty) be spent to enforce another country’s political speech laws?