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How Do You Enforce Laws On The Borderless Web?
from the very-carefully dept
As ridiculous as the US case against Elcomsoft is (where the US is claiming that a Russian company has broken American laws), at the very same time the US is telling France that their laws don't apply to the US in the Yahoo-Nazi memorabilia case. This begins to highlight the difficulties countries are having enforcing their laws online. If someone posts something in the US that breaks a law somewhere else, who's responsible? It's certainly brought up some tough legal questions that many countries are trying to deal with. Of course, if we stopped trying to legislate everything, it might make life a bit easier. However, I would think that the location of the server would set the legal jurisdiction. Otherwise, you're just asking for trouble.
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How do you determine the location?
The location of the server may itself be hard to determine. A company like Yahoo will most probably have redundant servers in various locations. Like Akamai. If some of those locations happen to be across the border, you've got a problem. Less of an issue here in the geographically giant US, but a large company operating in several European nations would have such issues.
Using the corporate headquarters would be just as problematic, because of the way large companies are structured.
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Re: How do you determine the location?
Exactly. What if the US/France Nazi memorabilia problem's server is located in Canada? Or somewhere in Germany? Whose law do you follow then? It certainly will be interesting to see how this works itself out, if ever.
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Re: How do you determine the location?
Good points... and so I should probably admit my bias. I figure that if it's based on where the server is located, servers will naturally migrate to a place that has very few laws restricting them - which I believe is healthier for the internet in the long run.
But, that said, the questions you raise are certainly valid.
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Countries can lean on companies
Servers and their locations are plumbing issues. What's more likely is for a country to simply lean on whoever is responsible. France, for example, simply said that Yahoo can't make Nazi material available in France. How Yahoo does it is Yahoo's problem.
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