Using the internet just got a bit scarier as Texas police arrested a teenager for online harassment last week. The arrest was made possible due to a new Texas law that took effect September 1 that criminalizes online harrasment via email, text messaging, and social networking sites.

To me, this seems like a knee-jerk reaction to the MySpace suicide case. While harassment should be discouraged, enacting and enforcing a law that seems to single out online forms of harassment is not only unpractical, but as others have pointed out, is likely unconstitutional. Free speech is something we don’t take lightly, and restricting free speech online seems like something that should hopefully be overturned soon.
continue reading…

The FTC has just revised some guidelines regarding endorsements that will directly affect bloggers that participate in paid reviews. Basically, the FTC has put in place some fines for bloggers that don’t clearly disclose payments (or free products) they get from companies they review products for.

I, personally, welcome the new guidelines. While I don’t have anything against those that do paid reviews, I do think the process should be as transparent as possible. You may be able to post a fair review of a product you’ve been paid to review, but your audience should be aware of any potential conflicts of interest.

With that said, many people have already begun pointing out some potential problems with the enforceability of the new rules. So far, it looks like bloggers are the only groups singled out, which would leave loopholes for countless other Web-related mediums. What about paid Twitter Tweets, Amazon reviews, or Facebook messages? I’d like to think they would all be covered by the FTC’s new guidelines, but nobody seems to know right now.

In my opinion, Google has the right to deactivate Gmail accounts for whatever reasons they like. It’s a free country and with it being their service, Google can choose to alienate users by deactivating accounts if it so chooses. However, when a court orders Google to not only deactivate a user’s account but to also disclose that user’s information when the user has broken no laws whatsoever, well, then we’ve got a problem on our hands.

The user in question did nothing except receive an email that was accidentally sent to him. Sure, that email contained some highly sensitive financial documents, but it was the sender’s fault not the recipient.

There’s really not too much else to say about this. Anybody with any grasp of common sense should be able to see the huge problems with this court ruling. Basically, I could send some important documents to any Web account and get that account deactivated and the personal details revealed to me. That could include not only email accounts, but social networking accounts like Facebook and Myspace (they have their own messaging systems that can send and receive so-called “sensitive information”).

Let’s hope some sort of appeal will overturn this ugly ruling. Let’s also wish for District Court Judge James Ware to find himself quickly out of work due to his lack of sanity in his rulings.

A few weeks ago the FCC came out and declared that they would be supporting the idea of net neutrality. At the time, there weren’t any real specifics talked about so many were skeptical of any action being taken.

While no direct action has been taken, the FCC Chairman has published a prepared statement that contains a few details on the finer points of the FCC’s stance on net neutrality. It’s a rather long statement, but there are some pieces that should be welcomed by proponents of net neutrality.
continue reading…

Sadly, courts generally seem out of touch when it comes to how to apply the law to the internet. In a rare win for common sense, a Canadian court has declared that it’s not libelous to link to defamatory content. While it is disturbing that the decision was not unanimous, it’s still an important decision that should help protect websites from rediculous lawsuits in the future.

I completely agree that while free speech needs to remain a protected right, most forms of defamation should not be tolerated. With that said, a person who links to another site that is the source of the defamation, shouldn’t be held responsible for the words on the linked page. If the Canadian court ruled that such hyperlinking could be consider libel, it’d open some potentially dangerous floodgates. Imagine all the sites (such as this) that have contextual based advertising on it. Contextual ads are dynamically generated and can be linking to any number of websites at any given time. If a site owner could be held accountable for what those ads linked to, it could very well cripple that form of advertising – a form of advertising many websites survive on.

In the end common sense prevailed and we can all hope for continued rational thinking in the various courts of the world.