The first major legal case that comes to mind is, in my opinion, the cornerstone on which all future precedents were set: Napster. Brothers Shawn and John Fanning and Sean Parker came up with the idea for a universal file system sharing system. It's based on the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) protocol to share what was mainly music files between friends and eventually grew legs and branched out on it's own, but the growth was very short lived. The long legal arm of the Recording Association of America (RIAA) stepped in and put the legal brakes on hard. Oddly enough the first song was Metallica "I Disappear" that spearheaded controversy and ultimately brought the Napster boys into court defending themselves against the likes of Lars Ulrich and even Dr. Dre. Copyright infringement and racketeering were the main focal points Lars pointed out during his testimony at the State Judiciary Hearing. Metallica "won" so-to-speak and the judge ruled a filter be put on the Napster software to eliminate copyrighted songs. The ruling didn't do what it was intended to do and Napster went live in 1999. By February 2001 they had an estimated 80million users to Yahoo's measly 54million each month. Napster lived a healthy life for a few months at the same time it was fighting a legal battle that would deal a death blow. In July of 2001 the Ninth Circuit Court issued an injunction and forced Napster to shut down permanently. In September they partly settled and paid out $26million in damages and by June of 2002 Napster was filing for bankruptcy. The rise and fall was so quick that 14 years later it's hard to remember what Napster even was. Those that were born the year Napster launched are now in Junior High.
Issues like Napster have created an entire legal subculture that deal with nothing but what is right, wrong, legal and illegal on the Internet. Keep in mind that I'm still talking about a space that doesn't exist beyond what you see on your screen when you navigate to any website. Lawyers have risen up to defend and prosecute for issues like file sharing, net neutrality, censorship, privacy, copyright....the list goes on and on. Where does the law actually start and stop? Who governs cyberspace? Where are the boundaries and borders? Let me show you a picture and you see if you can tell me:
This picture is a visual representation of "The Internet" as we know it. Keep in mind a few things when looking at this picture: roughly 30% of the world's population has internet access of some kind, over 1 billion searches are done daily on Google alone, 294 billion emails are sent daily and there are over 144 million active domains as of this post. Those numbers are absolutely staggering, mind boggling and almost hard to reconcile.
Statistics aside, look a little closer.....what else do you see, rather, what DON'T you see? There are no borders, no countries, states or even time zones defined. It is next to impossible to define a line that doesn't really exist in the first place. The Internet is a one dimensional place and only exists when a convergence of data packets align themselves to form the very page you are reading this blog from. All this brings to mind a ton of questions: How does one make laws and regulations pertaining to such a place as the Internet especially when it's very existence is so fluid and ever-evolving? Who is responsible for enforcing these laws? If no one person, state, country or governing body "owns" the internet then should it just self-regulate? In the case of Napster how does one regulate the sharing of the intangible INSIDE the intangible? It is a deep, deep rabbit hole with no end in sight and it's enough to make your head swim.
I didn't write this post to try and sway your opinion of file sharing, privacy and the like when it comes to your presence on the Internet. What YOU do in Cyberspace is your business as far as I'm concerned and I'm not here to judge. Maybe we as "cyber citizens" should develop a Digital Constitution of sorts much like our fore fathers did when the country was in it's infancy. If my history serves me, the people of the New World were in turmoil and chaos while those who were appointed leaders developed our own Bill of Rights and eventually the US Constitution. The Inernet is in a similar growth stage as our own country once was. There are those out there that strongly feel the Internet should self-regulate. Personally I think that is a very very bad idea. If history has taught us anything it is that as a species we are poorly equipped to self-regulate anything that has legal defining lines. I have been on the Internet since around 1995 and there is one thing that has continued to amaze me: for a place that is so intangible it sure has created a lot of tangible outcomes. Lives have been saved, criminals caught and long lost family members reunited all due in large part by a place that none of us can physically visit or really ever get closer to than our own computer screens. Simply amazing.
Just remember........
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