Cyberlaw, or, waiting for the Jetsons.
There's something that's bothering me. Where is all the cyberlaw? It's been nearly fifteen years since the Eternal September threw open the gates of the old Internet to a massive influx of newbies, and yet the accumulates scholarship on substantive law on the Internet is extremely sparse. What treatment the Internet does receive in the legal academic world is still theoretical. The case reporters have not yet yielded much in the way of meaning for me, either.
As an 11-year-old kid with a 9600 baud modem and an AOL account (thanks Mom & Dad!), I was overjoyed when the walls of AOL's garden came tumbling down and I got to read USENET for the first time. I was terribly interested in poetry and writing at the time, and I cut my first literary teeth posting bad work on newsgroups with little traffic The 'net and I have grown up together, I suppose. We spend a lot of time with each other now. I conduct almost all of my life over the Internet: banking, commerce, academic research, communications (both serious and frivolous). I cannot be alone. And yet there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of settled law on Internet life.
Now, as a law student, that fact bugs me. Surely there are torts on the internet. There must be private wrongs that can be redressed. The volume and complexity of human interaction must generate the same sort of legal disputes and resolutions that real life generates. But fifteen years into the Eternal September, we're still looking at Internet law as an 'emerging' phenomenon.
Why?
As an 11-year-old kid with a 9600 baud modem and an AOL account (thanks Mom & Dad!), I was overjoyed when the walls of AOL's garden came tumbling down and I got to read USENET for the first time. I was terribly interested in poetry and writing at the time, and I cut my first literary teeth posting bad work on newsgroups with little traffic The 'net and I have grown up together, I suppose. We spend a lot of time with each other now. I conduct almost all of my life over the Internet: banking, commerce, academic research, communications (both serious and frivolous). I cannot be alone. And yet there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of settled law on Internet life.
Now, as a law student, that fact bugs me. Surely there are torts on the internet. There must be private wrongs that can be redressed. The volume and complexity of human interaction must generate the same sort of legal disputes and resolutions that real life generates. But fifteen years into the Eternal September, we're still looking at Internet law as an 'emerging' phenomenon.
Why?