Online media and the law


Information on this page came from the "Cyberspace Law for Non-Lawyers" page created by Larry Lessig, David Post, and Eugene Volokh

 

Copyright

As soon as you create something, it is copyrighted. Because it is much easier to copy work that appears on the Internet, it is much easier to violate traditional copyright laws. Copyright law applies to text, photographs, graphics, video and sound. Copyright law does accommodate for "fair use" but is this enough? Or should copyright laws be rewritten?

 

Privacy

Increasingly, we provide information about ourselves in a public way that we do not necessarily want to be public. We may visit Web sites and read articles that we don't necessarily want others to track. We may order things online with a credit card that we don't necessarily want others to know about. The desire to keep this information private is informational privacy.

There are other sorts of information about us -- bank records, medical records, what we keep in our homes -- that have historically been kept private, primarily by property law. This doesn't work online.

The Anonymizer -- A site that allows you to send anonymous email

Electronic Privacy Information Center -- Good resources on privacy

Cookie Central -- How to use cookies to customize and track users

 

Libel

Matt Drudge Report

 

 

Pornography

The White House
.com

.org

.gov

Communications Decency Act of 1996

Child Online Protection Act

 

 

Threating Speech

Southern Poverty Law Center

Nuremberg Files