Project Business Ethics

Internet Law Overview Navigation:

Internet Law encompasses all cases, statutes, and constitutional provisions that impact persons and institutions when they go online. Issues include free speech, intellectual property, privacy, safety, equity, jurisdiction, and e-commerce.

The balance between First Amendment freedom of expression and copyright creates a problem which cannot be solved easily in the field of Internet Law. The Internet is a medium that promotes freedom of expression as an interactive service of communication and social interaction.

Perhaps one of the biggest issues in Internet Law is the ongoing disputes involving music piracy, or illegally downloading music files from the Internet. The music industry is involved in an intense effort to find ways to protect and license the use of music over the internet.

There are also numerous cases pending before courts around the country regarding the legality of linking. In a recent case between Ticketmaster & Microsoft, a federal court judge in California ruled that linking does not infringe upon the linked site's copyright.

Another of the larger issues confronting Internet Law is spam, or unsolicited commercial email. Spam, on average, takes up 40 percent of email volume in the United States. Although there are no federal laws yet enacted to confront the spam problem, several states have already passed such legislation. Current legislation floating around in Congress, such as RID-Spam, calls for commercial emails to state that it is advertising and include a return address.

Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act Navigation:

 A domain name is a unique string of characters or numbers that typically is used to designate and permit access to an Internet website. The widespread use of domain names in recent years has been accompanied by a phenomenon known as "cyber squatting," which involves the registration as domain names of well-known trademarks by non-trademark holders who then try to sell the names back to the trademark owners. Since domain name registrars do not check to see whether a domain name request is related to existing trademarks, it has been simple and inexpensive for any person to register as domain names the marks of established companies. This prevents use of the domain name by the mark owners, who not infrequently have been willing to pay "ransom" in order to get "their names" back. In order to combat such bad-faith registration or use of domain names, Congress has enacted the Ant cyber quitting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) as a supplement to the federal trademark statute. To succeed on a claim for cyber piracy under the Anticyber squatting Consumer Protection Act, an infringer must show that he or she has registered, with a bad faith intent to profit, a domain name that is identical or confusingly similar to a mark that is distinctive or famous at the time of defendant's registration of the domain name.