Lita Rosario, Esq.

INTERNET & TECHNOLOGY LAW BASICS

There is intellectual property in general, including copyright, rules on fair use, and special rules on copy protection for digital media, and circumvention of such schemes. The area of software patents is controversial and still evolving in Europe and elsewhere.

In various countries, areas of the computing and communication industries are regulated - often strictly by government bodies. There are laws governing trade on the Internet, taxation, consumer protection and advertising.

There are laws on censorship versus freedom of expression, rules on public access to government information and individual access to information held on them by private bodies. There are laws on what data must be retained for law enforcement and what may not be gathered or retained, for privacy reasons.

With the internationalism of the Internet, jurisdiction is a much more tricky area than before, and courts in different countries have taken various views on whether they have jurisdiction over items published on the Internet, or business agreements entered into over the Internet. This can cover areas from contract law, trading standards and tax, through rules on unauthorized access, data privacy and spamming to more political areas such as freedom of speech, censorship, libel or sedition.

Certainly, the frontier idea that the law does not apply in "Cyberspace" is not true. In fact, conflicting laws from different jurisdictions may apply, simultaneously, to the same event. So a user in one of the United States conducting a transaction with another user in Britain through a server in Canada could theoretically be subject to the laws of all three countries as they relate to the transaction at hand.

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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. In addition, the DMCA heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet.