Copyright © 1999 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved
Consider
four recent news stories:
1.
A
man commits murder. The victim’s family wants to sue the company that hosted
his personal Internet pages, because he had detailed his plans there.
2.
A
number of employees are fired by a major corporation for spending up to eight
hours a day looking at pornographic Internet sites and shopping online. A civil
liberties group sues.
3.
A
growing number of municipalities call for taxes on Internet retail purchases.
4.
A
judge rules that links to some Internet sites may be violations of copyright
laws.
So,
what do they have in common? What (despite the judge in number four) links
them together? They all involve the Internet, they all involve legal solutions
to Internet problems, and they all—not so obviously—treat online experience
as if it is somehow different from the rest of human experience. They also
reflect the suspicion that we have gotten ourselves stuck in a messy web that we
don’t really understand.
Whenever
we are granted a brave new addition to our society, we are granted not only the
privilege but also the responsibility of working out the rules for that
addition. After all these decades, we still have not figured out how to deal
with our superhighways, so after just a few years online, we are hardly
beginning to work things out on the information superhighway.
The
first story sounds like something out of a made-for-tv movie. Unfortunately, it
is true. If a magazine publishes an article in which someone announces his
intentions of killing someone else, is the magazine responsible if he then
carries out that action? Are the magazine’s readers responsible? But, is
hosting a web page the same as publication?
There
are so many opportunities for people to develop their own web pages that no one
can keep up with all of them. Some companies such as
Geocities host free web pages, for thousands of people, in exchange for putting
advertising on those pages. Does Geocities publish those pages, in the sense
that Time magazine publishes fewer than 150 pages a week? Are those pages
even "published"? The company that hosted the murder’s pages (not
Geocities, by the way) claims that the number of times those pages were accessed
is in the single digits, that most likely, the murder was the only person who
ever saw them.
I
know teachers who require their students to keep journals, to write in them
daily, even though the teacher never reads the journal or at best scans it as
much for length as for content. If in such a journal a student should detail
plans to commit murder, is the teacher responsible? I’m asking a lot of
questions, but I don’t really have any answers.
Let’s
look at the former employees. How much time during the work day are you allowed
to be off task? If you spend an hour hanging out at the water cooler or surfing
online auction sites, an hour looking at online pornography or looking at a
pornographic magazine (or a religious magazine), an hour addressing Christmas
cards to your cousins or composing an e-mail to your niece, is there any
difference? Does the content matter? Does the mode of accessing that content
(online or off)?
The suit claims a violation of privacy. In every case that I’ve read about, however, the companies had announced that they were monitoring Internet access. I think most people agree that the boss has a right to know if you spend an hour hanging out at the water cooler.
Now, perhaps you ladies are discussing last
night’s big game, you guys are wondering what’s going to happen next on your
favorite soap operas, and you all are brainstorming some big company project
(the New Year’s Eve party). (Yeah, and none of us were looking for Marlene
Dietrich videotapes on those auction sites, just a scanner which we need to
complete a brochure for the company.) Does the boss have the right to know that,
perhaps to hide a microphone there? What if there is a sign pointing to the
microphone and explaining that your conversation is being monitored? How much
privacy can you expect in the work place?
When
we go to work, we always give up some rights. At many workplaces today, smokers
give up the right to smoke. We often give up the right to wear shorts or to sip
wine while we crunch the numbers. At least our physical presence in some places
(and not in some places) can be observed. So, how does all this relate to the
monitoring of Internet sites? Stay tuned.
The
business of the Internet is business. If indeed the nineties have become the
"dot-com" decade, then let’s remember that "dot-com" means
"commercial." About a quarter of the very expensive advertising time
for the Super Bowl has been purchased by e-commerce (online commerce) ventures.
Besides matters of personal ethics and liberty, there are countless online
business problems to be resolved.
The
United States is a crazy quilt of local option sales taxes collected locally. If
I walk into a bookstore and purchase Mike Mayo’s War Movies (the last
book I bought), I will pay the local sales tax, regardless of whether the store
is owned locally or is part of a national chain. If I order the same book from a
catalog from a company in another state, I will pay no sales tax. If I order the
book online from a company in another state, I will pay no sales tax. If I drive
to a neighboring state, where the sales tax is half what it is in my home state,
I will pay that sales tax. Is all of that fair?
Local
merchants say that it is not fair that I can buy my book ($19.95) online without
paying the local sales tax ($1.34)—in effect, cheaper. Local governments
complain that the online merchant and I have effectively cheated them out of
$1.34 that would go to maintaining my roads and parks, not to mention some local
official’s trip to— But, don’t the local merchants face similar unfair
competition and the local governments loss of tax revenue when I purchase from a
catalog?
The
last of these stories to me is the most threatening, because more than any talk
of censorship or taxation, it threatens the nature of the Internet itself. The
Internet is a net, and the World Wide Web (a part of the Internet) is a web
because of links, references from one "site" to another. Such links
can be expressed in two different ways. I can give you the URL (Universal
Resource Locator), such as www.peanut.org,
or I can refer you to the best site on the Web
(go
ahead, click on it) with an imbedded URL. These links take you from this article
to sites originating in Europe, Australia, or Antarctica, as the links in other
articles have done.
If
I tell you that there is a great article on Australian wild life in the current
issue of a magazine at the library, am I responsible if, unknown to me, that
article has violated copyright laws? If I tell you that the article is on page
27 of the magazine, have I cheated the companies that have bought advertising on
the first twenty-six pages?
In
my latest ravin’, if I suggest you rove to the online edition of that
magazine, am I responsible if there are problems with the copyright of that
article? I can refer you to the URL for a magazine, as in the case of this made
up URL--
www.nameofmagazine.com
Or,
I can refer you to the specific (made up) URL for the article, so that you can bypass the
opening pages of the site--
www.nameofmagazine.com/specificURLforthearticle.htm
If
so, am I (as claimed in some court cases) cheating the advertisers on the title
page?
It
is very easy to ask questions about these issues, but there are no easy answers.
I would suggest that we turn to the courts of common sense and common decency to
establish precedents for Internet use before we turn to the legal system. I am
very much a champion of the Internet, but I believe that it is not some
alternative reality (cyberspace) just an alternative way of communicating about
reality. It intrigues me that our millennial fears do not involve pestilence and
war so much as the threat of the Y2K bug in our computers.
To
give some idea of what we may lose if Internet links are regulated, I am
uncharacteristically including no links with this article. Characteristically, I
will bid you keep your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts, and in
whatever realities you may rove, your links and minds open for possibilities
that you might not even be able to imagine.