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The Internet vs. The Law

Warning! Reading this article may be illegal. The very existence of it on the internet may be illegal. In fact, the internet itself, my be illegal. Read on at your own risk.

Your honor. Members of the jury. Although my previous attempts at explaining my point of view were objected to and that objection sustained, please listen as I try to clearly explain why the case of the Internet vs. the Law is the most powerful, life altering legal ruling that will ever happen in the history of humankind.

I will use several landmark cases of the past to help make my point that several mistakes can be more powerful then the sum of their total.

As News.com reported, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that domain names are "the product of a contract for services," and not intellectual property as many of us thought they were.

You may spend years building your business based on domain name recognition, but that may be legally destroyed with the single agreement between one person and the domain registrar. They may decide that you did something illegal. "Illegal" in this case refers to something that you do in your legal business that someone else decides is not fair or ethical. They don't even have to be right. They just have to convince a few others. Boom! Your domain name is taken away from you. This is similar to building a thriving supermarket business in the heart of New York City and Los Angeles based on location and good services to your customers and then someone coming in one day and deciding that your "prime location" will better suit them and you not being able to do a thing about it.

Imagine that every two years, all your favorite stores are forced to move and get a new address, yet aren't required to tell you about it. Where will you go shopping?

Do NOT build your business. Simply wait for someone to build a huge business and simply convince some judge that the domain name is being used illegally, then snatch it up when it becomes public domain again.

You know, I've always wanted to own the amazon.com domain name.

Without going into technical specifics, the "domain name" should be considered intellectual property based upon a service agreement to allow the public to arrive at the intended I.P. address. If I want to go to Yahoo.com and some schmuck takes over that domain name and points it toward a porno site, many people will be very upset.

Unless we agree to some laws that will permit people to keep the domain names that they legally purchase.

As reported by News.com, federal judge Ronald Whyte issued a preliminary injunction to keep Bidder's Edge from spidering eBay's auction site.

Judge Whyte said "It is undisputed that eBay's server and its capacity are personal property, and that Bidder's Edge's searches use a portion of that property," Whyte wrote in his order. "Even if its searches use only a small amount of eBay's computer system capacity, Bidder's Edge has nonetheless deprived eBay of the ability to use that portion of its personal property for its own purposes. The law recognizes no such right to use another's personal property."

This ruling currently states that if you own a web site, you can legally keep people from searching your site and "potentially damaging your personal property". In this case the property is publicly accessible html pages and images.

If this order holds up, web site owners have the ability to sue anyone (including search engines) for "illegally trespassing on our property". I, as a web site owner, can now sue Excite, Alta Vista, Inktomi and every other web search spider that dares to cross my web pages. I may even make money at this too. The fact that I don't place up the required "robots.txt." or any other standard practice is irrelevant, since this injunction was performed on web pages that were designed with the intention of letting the public see them.

The power of the internet lies in one word: LINK. As in linking pages on different servers together to allow anyone to find them. Due to the large size of the internet (and it will only get larger) Specially designed programs called search spiders have the ability to find and process links at the rate of 50-200 links per second. This kind of speed and efficiency is just plain impossible to do by hand.

We must allow the spiders to do their job, within their limits even if we think that job might hurt us.

We already have established methods to keep certain spiders out of sensitive (i.e. not publicly accessible) areas such as meta tags, robots.txt etc. This ruling does nothing good for anyone.

Once again, News.com reported that Dr. Dre has followed Metallica's lead and forced Napster to boot some users off it's server for "illegally downloading copyrighted music"

Due to the widespread nature, it is impossible to track down and sue every person they find with an illegal copy of a singers music. The thought is that by financially attacking the method of distribution, music artists can recover their "losses" with out having to resort to even worse scenarios.

OK so we can now sue the distribution channel of "illegal items"? If we take this technique to its next step then if a thief makes his get-away in his Mustang, then we can sue Ford for providing the transportation vehicle that allowed the criminal to commit the crime.

There are already lawsuits going against the gun manufacturers because their guns were used in robberies and murders.

Wait. People smuggle items on cars, trains, airplanes and buses all the time, but they aren't getting sued.

Who's with me in one huge multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Southwest Airlines, Greyhound, Amtrak, Ford, General Motors and every other transportation channel out there?

We'll bring them too their knees for being the distribution channel for drugs, illegal firearms, and kiddie porn. That much worse than a copy of some music. Those are real crimes.

If someone gives illegal information over the telephone, do you sue the phone company? NO.
If someone sends illegal stuff throughout the mail do you sue the post office? NO

You should never sue the distribution channel. That opens up too many doors.

The problem here is that music writers, recording artists and the music industry in general want to be paid for EVERY single instance of their work. They claim that the free music on Napster cuts into their sales and they're losing money.

They site a study that music sales around colleges (the highest concentration of Napster activity occurs there) are dropping.

However they don't mention that the decrease in sales started a year before Napster even existed, or that many college kids now purchase their music online.

Nor do they mention that CD sales are at an all time high and artist like 'N Sync, Britney Spears, and Eminem are breaking music sales records right now, even though one of their target audiences is, guess what, college students.

Trading music is not currently making a dent in overall music sales.

If they are scared about free distribution, they should work with Napster and any other digital distribution to figure out a way to make money on this in "non-traditional" fashions.

That is the way it must be.

Long story short, Wired news alerted us that according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it is illegal to disable any part of any software you own, even if it is spying on you without your permission.

If you own software that gives the software company personal information without your knowledge or permission, you are not allowed to tinker with the program to protect yourself.

The most well known example of this is when RealNetworks' RealJukebox player was found to be sending personal information back to the company.

I foresee a time when some big company will create a program that will send personal information back to the company and someone deciding to tinker with his copy in order to protect their privacy.

The internal anti-tinker alarm is executed, the company is notified and their lawyers sue him for destroying the program and not allowing the company to "exercise their God-given right to obtain as much information about their customers however possible in order to give them the highest customer service and offer the best products." I'm sure they can get some judge to agree with them, and them protecting your privacy will be officially illegal.

We should be given the choice as to whether we will let the companies have this information with our full permission (not hidden in some obscure long legal waiver, but a direct "yes or no" question that everyone will understand.

If a program is revealed to have "unwanted data gathering capabilities" we should be able to sue the company, as well as have the right to readjust any program we own when personal privacy/protection is proven to be at risk.

I have so many others to write about

• EToys & EToy - A company comes along and tries to sue a non-profit organization for copyright infringement, even though the non-profit was up and running first.
• Whois.com & wwwhois.com - One man fighting Network Solutions because it got to register a domain name for itself that he wanted
• Chase Manhattan Bank takes on Chase House & chase.co.uk - A huge company suing a small company into oblivion just because it's name and domain use a word that is found in the encyclopedia, but Chase Manhattan feels no one but them should be able to use.
• Pornography on the internet - Don't even get me started on the legal problems here.

However, I am out of time and so, I will rest my case, hoping that you will return a fair, common sense verdict, that everyone will help everyone.

So, jury. What is your verdict in this case?

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