Internet trends and the law.

• Author: Mireau, Shaunna
• Position: Online Law

Web 2.0, Web 3.0, social networking, Facebook, LinkdIn, Ning, Flickr, del.icio. us, Nexopia, blogs, wikis, mashups and RSS. It isn't 'just' the Internet anymore. Like the inception of the Internet for widespread public use in the 90's taught us, technology trends have an impact on the legal landscape.

Justice Canada has a nice summary of laws regarding e-commerce at http://www.justice.gc.ca/en/ps/ec/gol3.html which is titled Government On-line Checklist of Legal Issues. A quick scan of this page shows laws that relate to emerging, or emerged, technologies like electronic records, privacy, domain registration and electronic evidence. As technology modifies our lives, our laws are modified to help maintain civilized behaviour.

What new laws will we need for the latest round of new Internet trends?

Recent news about students being disciplined for Facebook entries (Figure 1) gives some hints.

Are our defamation laws appropriate for new media trends? Google News hits for the search defamation and blog posts yield interesting results (Figure 2).

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What about issues surrounding new collaborative technologies like wikis? Social Computing Magazine (http://www.socialcomputingmagazine.com/) had a very interesting article recently on risk management and collaborative technologies (Fig. 3).

The world changes rapidly, laws must keep up.

Figure 3 Litigation 2.0?--Real-Time Social Media Management for Enterprises Can Help Avoid It by Social Computing News Desk "As blogs and wikis spread throughout enterprises, organizations must deal with compliance and risk-management issues that are created from communications through these media," said Aaron Newman, president of Techrigy. "Are communications through...