Internet Law Overview

[Ferran]

Internet Law Overview

Internet Law encompasses all cases, statutes, and constitutional provisions that impact persons and institutions when they go online. Issues include free speech, intellectual property, privacy, safety, equity, jurisdiction, and e-commerce.

The balance between First Amendment freedom of expression and copyright creates a problem which cannot be solved easily in the field of Internet Law. The Internet is a medium that promotes freedom of expression as an interactive service of communication and social interaction.

Perhaps one of the biggest issues in Internet Law is the ongoing disputes involving music piracy, or illegally downloading music files from the Internet. The music industry is involved in an intense effort to find ways to protect and license the use of music over the internet.

There are also numerous cases pending before courts around the country regarding the legality of linking. In a recent case between Ticketmaster & Microsoft, a federal court judge in California ruled that linking does not infringe upon the linked site's copyright.

Another of the larger issues confronting Internet Law is spam, or unsolicited commercial email. Spam, on average, takes up 40 percent of email volume in the United States. Although there are no federal laws yet enacted to confront the spam problem, several states have already passed such legislation. Current legislation floating around in Congress, such as RID-Spam, calls for commercial emails to state that it is advertising and include a return address.

CAN-SPAM Laws

A new anti-spam law was passed by the United States and went into effect on January 1, 2004. Under this new law, CAN-SPAM, marketers must remove customers from their lists when requested, they must provide automated opt-out methods as well as complete contact information (address and phone) with alternate means of removal.

CAN-SPAM also bans common spamming practices such as false headers and email harvesting (the use of software that spiders websites to collect email addresses). Subject lines must be truthful and contain a notice that the message is an ad.

CAN-SPAM required truthful email header information (including the from line), accurate subject lines, an opt out tool that works 30 days after mailing, that opt-out requests happen within 10 days, that emails have a physical postal address in all messages, that the messages are labeled as advertisements, and that warnings are displayed for email with sexually oriented material.

-CAN-SPAM Lawsuit

On March 10, 2004, four of the nation's largest e-mail providers sued hundreds of online marketers under a new CAN SPAM legislation. The lawsuits, filed by EarthLink Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., and America Online, mark the first time the law has been tested since going into effect in January 2004.

Six lawsuits were filed claiming the defendants obscured their identities and used other deceptive tactics to send out hundreds of millions of pitches for get-rich-quick schemes, pornography and other types of spam. The defendants allegedly falsified return addresses, routed their messages through other computers to cover their tracks, and engaged in deceptive advertising. One group of defendants in Canada allegedly sent nearly 100 million messages to Yahoo customers in January alone and resold the e-mail addresses of those who responded.

Copyright Laws and the Internet

Works put on the Internet are considered “published” and therefore qualify for copyright protection. A work put on the Internet is not considered public domain simply because it was posted on the Internet and free for anyone to download and copy. You need permission from the site owner to publish any materials, including photographs, music, and artwork from the site.

The best way to enforce Internet copyright is through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 is designed primarily to limit the liability of Internet service providers for acts of copyright infringement by customers who are using the providers' systems or networks. The DMCA was enacted both to preserve copyright enforcement on the Internet and to provide immunity to service providers from copyright infringement liability for passive, automatic actions in which a service provider's system engages through a technological process initiated by another without the knowledge of the service provider.

To protect your rights under the DMCA, you should write a DMCA letter to the infringing person’s Internet Service Provider and the major search engines, such as google at http://www.google.com/dmca.html.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 is designed primarily to limit the liability of Internet service providers for acts of copyright infringement by customers who are using the providers' systems or networks. The DMCA was enacted both to preserve copyright enforcement on the Internet and to provide immunity to service providers from copyright infringement liability for passive, automatic actions in which a service provider's system engages through a technological process initiated by another without the knowledge of the service provider.

Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act

A domain name is a unique string of characters or numbers that typically is used to designate and permit access to an Internet website. The widespread use of domain names in recent years has been accompanied by a phenomenon known as "cybersquatting," which involves the registration as domain names of well-known trademarks by non-trademark holders who then try to sell the names back to the trademark owners. Since domain name registrars do not check to see whether a domain name request is related to existing trademarks, it has been simple and inexpensive for any person to register as domain names the marks of established companies. This prevents use of the domain name by the mark owners, who not infrequently have been willing to pay "ransom" in order to get "their names" back. In order to combat such bad-faith registration or use of domain names, Congress has enacted the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) as a supplement to the federal trademark statute. To succeed on a claim for cyberpiracy under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, an infringer must show that he or she has registered, with a bad faith intent to profit, a domain name that is identical or confusingly similar to a mark that is distinctive or famous at the time of defendant's registration of the domain name.

Children's Internet Protection Act

The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) was signed into law on December 21, 2000. The Children's Internet Protection Act requires libraries that receive federal aid for Internet technology to use anti-pornography filtering software. In order to receive discounts for Internet Access and Internal Connections services under the universal services support mechanism, school and library authorities must certify that they are enforcing a policy of Internet safety that includes measures to block or filter Internet access for both minors and adults to certain visual depictions.

Software Piracy

Software piracy is the unauthorized duplication of computer software. Although most computer users today are aware that unauthorized use and duplication of software is illegal, many show a general disregard for the importance of treating software as valuable intellectual property. Copying software is an act of copyright infringement, and is subject to civil and criminal penalties. It's illegal whether you use pirated software yourself, give it away, or sell it. All software is copyright-protected, and the copyright is enforceable for 95 years. Copyright infringers are liable for any damages suffered by copyright owners plus profits attributed to the infringement, up to $150,000 per title infringed, or up to $250,000 and five years in jail.


Trademarks, the Internet, and Cybersquatters

Many people believe that if they register a particular domain, for example www.arkansascoffee.com, then the person has trademarked that as a business name an no one else can use the name Arkansas Coffee for their business. This is not necessarily true. You must not only register the domain, but use the business name enough to achieve distinction, such as through customer awareness and marketing.

However, if a domain name is registered under bad faith, i.e. someone has register the domain name with the intent of selling it to the company with the same name, the domain name will not be protected under the Trademark Law. People who register domain names in bad faith are known as cybersquatters.

Domain Name Disputes

A domain name is a unique string of characters or numbers that typically is used to designate and permit access to an Internet website. The value of a trademark is diluted when a company owns a domain name that is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark registered by a different company. Potential customers may become discouraged if they cannot find the web page for the company that owns the trademark, and may fail to continue to search out of frustration or an assumption that the page does not exist. In addition, the domain name registrant's use of a trademark as a domain name places the trademark owner at the mercy of the registrant, allowing the registrant to associate the owner's trademark with all types of messages and preventing the owner from using its trademark as a unique identifier of its goods and services on the Internet. This further weakens the trademark owner's ability to protect its reputation and goodwill.

If you have a domain name dispute, you may be able to sue under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act .

File Sharing

Downloading music, movies, games, or software from the Internet without paying and sharing these materials without appropriate permission is considered a breach of copyright laws.Recreational file-sharing, or the trading of movies, music, games, and/or software, is more easily detectable than you might assume. Copyright holders have been intensifying enforcement using automated scanning software to identify infringements, no matter how small.

The music industry association has commissioned the building of locator bots that systematically scan IP addresses looking to see if any of the common music sharing programs is active on a port. The bot asks the music program whether it has music titles by particular artists. If the music program answers positively, the bot reports the IP address and title to an authority, who then sends out violation notices.Copyright holders can determine just about all the details of the copyright violation, including the name of the infringing file and the exact time it was traded.

When your music is under the custody of a music-sharing program, anyone can access it and download a copy. This makes you a distributor of copyrighted materials. Under the law, this is illegal unless you have permission from the copyright holder to distribute the materials.


What can I do about Email Harassment?

Law enforcement agencies estimate that electronic communications are a factor in from 20 percent to 40 percent of all stalking cases. If you are being harassed, or even stalked, via email, you have a couple of options, particularly if you know who the person sending you the emails is. First, contact the senders ISP (Internet Service Provider) and make a complaint, which could result in this person losing their email account, and, at any rate, sets up a trail of evidence. Second, keep all the emails sent to you as further evidence. Third, do not reply to the harasser. Fourth, if there are threats of violence, or of a sexual nature, you should contact your local law enforcement agency immediately, because this can constitute a crime.

Many areas do not have specific laws that cover email harassment, or cyberstalking. However, in most areas, previously existing laws covering stalking are often applicable to cyberstalking. You can get a complete list of cyberstalking laws, or at least state laws that apply to email harassment at the National Conference of State Legislators.



Source: http://www.legal-database.com/internetlaw.htm