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.

Sure, the spirit of the law makes sense – prevent people from attacking others on the internet. With people hiding behind their computer screens and their hard-to-trace usernames, many people often do things they’d never do if they had to do it in person – dealing with the consequences of their actions. And while free speech is often touted as the end-all-be-all amendment that should never bend or break, we clearly have exceptions to the rule. For instance, libel and slander often circumvent the 1st amendment’s protection. Sexual harassment, too, is not only against the law, but companies spend both time and money training their employess on how to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. So why shouldn’t online harassment be yet another exception to the 1st amendment?

I guess my biggest problem with this Texas case is that I’m not exactly clear what constitutes harassment that’d be breaking the law and what harassment is really just arguing or childish namecalling. When I think about all the comments I read every day on various websites, I see too many potential cases of this law coming into play. If I see an article somewhere and I call the writer stupid is that harassment? If not, how many times do I have to call the writer stupid before it’s harassment? If the writer responds back to me saying that not only am I stupid, but my mom is too, does that mean he is now harassing me? Sure it sounds silly, but it seems like almost half the comments on the internet degrade into something similar.

The article about the case in Texas says the details of the harassment haven’t been revealed, except that it all started over a boy. I supposed the question to ask is would that girl have been arrested if she “harassed” the same way she did online but offline instead? I doubt she would have – and that’s my problem with the whole thing.

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.

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.

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.

The fifth principle is one of non-discrimination — stating that broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications.

Probably the main point behind net neutrality is that internet providers should not be able to manipulate traffic based on its source or content. Whether that means prohibiting the blocking ofcertain content or ensuring no priority is given to specific sources, it sounds like the FCC will take a firm stand against ISPs meddling with the traffic that’s going through their pipes. For those thinking this may open a hole for illegal use of the internet, such as filesharing copyrighted materials or warez related downloads – think again. The chairman specifically pointed out that the protections would be for “lawful” content.

The sixth principle is a transparency principle — stating that providers of broadband Internet access must be transparent about their network management practices.

The chairman was mostly talking about the need to have internet providers let their customers know what is being blocked and why. Specifically, a provider should have to “open its books” with regards to how it regulates traffic.

All in all I like most of what the chairman has said. While over regulation of the internet is a bad thing in my opinion, I think putting some safeguards in place to prevent ISPs from doing too much regulation of their own is a good thing. I don’t want an ISP to strike some back alley deal with Blockbuster to give their streaming videos a faster connection through the network while restricting rival NetFlix. That’s the kind of thing that could slowly start crippling innovation on the Web.

Still… we’ll have to wait and see if the FCC holds true to their word and make sure ISPs place nice.

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.