Law and the Interweb

I am writing this because, I regret to say, the stupidity of humanity. People nowadays define their own law on the Web and the Internet (don’t know the difference, you should), while disregarding real life. Maybe its a lack of understanding about technology or law, I don’t know. One things for sure, common sense can go a long way. Take for example this website on the Commitments, which prohibits linking from unauthorised sites! You see? I just broke the law right there, amazing dontcha think? The person who designed or put the statement up, is a total complete and utter idiot, and I don’t care if thats considered slander! Imagine if every site was to do this? Search engines would be just another litagation filled business, like so many other. With Lawyers reviewing every site to go into the database, Google would have a handful, maybe a 100 sites, instead of the usual billions it indexes.

This stupidity isn’t only defined to obscure bands from movies, it also happens at Reuters, the big multinational news site. In their conditions, it says you may not cache any part of the story on their website. For those not in the know, caching is storing a site temporarily (usually) for viewing later, or to increase load times on often visited webpages (eg. Googles Logo). Only one problem with this: every browser for more than a decade has done just this, are we all breaking the law? Also Google, Yahoo! and MSN have vast caches of sites, incase it is temporarily down while you visit.

My point is this: When people claim to know about Law and/or the interweb, please check facts first, and be very careful while doing so. Just because the internet “technically” has no law (standardised one anyway), doesn’t mean black is the new white, quote sources, state laws and reasearch wether your mumbo jumbo violates their rights, also state which country your site is hosted and where complaints can be made. This should be standard practice! /endrant