Resumo de Borders In Cyberspace

That the Internet is global is a truism, but it is one that
many ? and among them, unfortunately, most legislators ? still completely fail
to comprehend. Borders in Cyberspace is a study of some of the legal
and policy issues raised by a global information infrastructure (or GII, though
most of the contributors write simply about cyberspace or the Internet).

The opening chapter argues that cyberspace has clear boundaries and should
therefore constitute a jurisdiction of its own, albeit an unusual one where
genuine competition between alternative rule sets is possible. The second
chapter sets the Internet in the context of global communication more broadly,
stressing the continuities provided by traditional media organisations.
(There''s some excellent material in this chapter, particularly about Africa and
Eastern Europe, but there are also signs of
cluelessness: among other things it calls Yahoo a browser and claims that the
.com domain is for transnational corporations!) The next chapter
reinforces the first, arguing that networks should be recognized as
semi-sovereign entities, capable of regulating themselves. The other chapters
are a statistical analysis of correlations between democracy and email
connectivity (suggesting that the latter is a better predictor of democracy
than other indicators); a look at the consequences of anonymity and regulatory
arbitrage for attempts at censorship of the Internet; and a survey of the
jurisdictional issues which the Internet creates for existing courts and
arbitration systems (this is legally the most technical of the chapters and the
one most reliant on details of United States law).

Part two deals with particular issues in the context of the GII. A highly
theoretical chapter on digital piracy applies theories of public goods (from
Lösch, Samuelson, and Tiebout) to the Internet, considered as a marketplace for
competition between different intellectual property regimes. A chapter on Free
Speech and the GII calls for an international ius cogens based law to
regulate speech that advocates the following irrevocably reprehensible
behavior...: piracy, slavery, genocide, apartheid, aggressive warfare,
terrorism, and torture. You don''t have to be a free speech absolutist like me
to wonder if there might not be some disagreement about what belongs in this
list, given that the English-speaking nations are more concerned about
obscenity than anything else (it is worth noting that one of the authors of
this chapter is German). Other chapters address privacy (advocating cooperative
privacy codes, though a little pessimistic about their likely success),
cryptography (a comparison of the policies of the United
States, France,
Russia, China, and Japan), international information
policy (with the sharing of meteorological data as an example), and consumer
protection laws (from an Australian perspective!). One of the few features
common to all these issues is the discordance between the positions of the United States
and those of other countries within the developed world.

There is nothing radically new in Borders in Cyberspace, but it
wastes surprisingly little space rehashing common knowledge or providing basic
background information. One consequence is that it is not entirely suitable for
those without online experience (or at least previous involvement with network
policy issues). It is, nevertheless, the best introduction to the legal and
policy consequences of a global Internet that I have seen anywhere: it really
should be mandatory reading for anyone involved with developing law or policy
for the Internet.

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