Legal
change is darned difficult.
| Laws
change slowly. Technology changes fast. |
| Laws
are geographically bounded (municipality, state, nation). Contemporary
communication technologies are unbounded and global. |
| No
one owns or, when you get right down to it, controls the Internet,
a “network of networks.” |
Tension
between capitalism and democracy -- between a marketplace of
goods and a marketplace of ideas -- can be particularly challenging
when legal change is considered.
|
|
Privacy,
which is both a legal and an ethical issue, is a highly contested area
online.
| Most
privacy issues relating to new comm tech revolve around the Fourth
Amendment (protection from unreasonable search, seizure.) That
said, we typically have VERY little privacy in digital, interconnected,
database-rich environment. |
In
the United States, industry self-regulation is the preferred
method for protecting (you should pardon the expression) consumer
privacy.
In
Europe, privacy as seen as a human right, one that governments
have an active role in protecting. |
The “Panopticon.com” reading
suggests not only that surveillance is inescapable online but
also that commercial forces have successfully reconceptualized
the whole
notion of privacy to their advantage.
As
consumers, we now see privacy not as a right or civil liberty
but as a commodity --
divorced from ourselves and something to barter with. |
|
Copyright is also a problem online. How do you balance a desire to safeguard
and reward creativity with the need
to ensure public accessibility to creative works? How do you do it
in an environment
in which:
| An
infinite number … |
| Of
absolutely flawless copies can be made … |
| Or,
if you prefer, indetectably manipulated ... |
| And
disseminated to millions instantly? |
Oh, and
by the way, our nation’s No. 1 export just happens to be intellectual
property. Copyrighted material contributed $400 billion a year to the
national
economy by the late 1990s. |
How
about free speech (even awful free speech)?
In the United
States, the First Amendment protects speech
except in very narrowly defined areas, such as when that speech is
obscene (Miller) or poses a clear and present danger (Brandenburg).
But what
about hate speech -- particularly online? The issue comes down to whether
it has harmful effects, which are hard to assess.
The study
you read suggests short-term effects may be minimal for most of us.
Should long-term effects
be considered? On whom? How might they be measured?
|