In the recent past a well known and widely used internet utility known as Napster was ordered to discontinue all of their activities due to copyright violations. Napster was and still is an internet music sharing service and was one of the most popular such services. The company existed to allow people across the country and even around the world to share .mp3 files with each other. However as the company became more and more popular they came more and more into the eye of the record companies and artists whose music was being traded freely across their web service. This attention resulted in a court case and eventually the temporary shutdown of Napster. It also has lead to the future state of the music service, as they will reopen for business later in this year, however will now be charging for access. This entire dispute came about due to copyright infringement laws and the breaking of them over the net, however, as can be easily seen, Napster had existed for a long time before these charges were brought up, and even now many alternatives exist. The only difference is the relative size of the alternatives compared to Napster. Yet these other alternatives continue to exist without punishment. The question that I will an
. . .
It has been proposed that these digital age police would search for violators and then ticket them, however, how would they know that someone is a violator but to look at their personal actions on the web? How would they know that people have ripped software, or mp3s unless they searched that person’s own hard drive for that information? In my opinion, a person’s computer is the same in the realm of the digital as their home is in the realm of the real, and searching through a person’s computer would be as bad as rummaging like a thief through their belongings, which is something that is all ready illegal, and for good reason. Privacy has been a concern when enforcing the law for most of the history of our country. However, the introduction of an Internet policing bureau would effectively be the introduction of a group of people whose job it is to snoop around in the private information of citizens all over out country.
I have many reasons for the answer that I have provided to this very controversial question, however, I will only be able to address a few of those reasons here. As of yet, I have no good solution to either of these difficulties.
Of course, many people believe that it is a good idea to police the internet to an extent, however, they usually draw a line somewhere, expecting the enforcement of laws to extend only to a certain point, which the enforcers would then stop at, leaving all those who did not violate the certain laws before the line but did violate the laws after it free and without penalty.
It is clear that we need a way to enforce laws online, keeping people from breaking the many laws that can easily be, and are currently being broken on the Internet. The second difficulty is that, if we allow this bureau the power necessary to enforce these laws, how can we expect a government to be so hypocritical as to specifically enforce only certain laws while ignoring others when it is clear that they have the power to enforce those that are being ignored just as easily as those that are being enforced. swer here has a powerful bearing on the lives of these sites, as well as on the lives of most people in this country. While conversing with friends and brainstorming for this very essay I was faced with a person who believed strongly that the government should ban access by children to pornographic sites, or perhaps ban pornographic materials on the internet totally. First and foremost of these, however, is a very obvious reason, the issue of privacy. We can all agree, too, that this is a problem with the freedom offered by the World Wide Web.
Approximate Word count =
946
Approximate Pages =
4 (250 words per page double spaced)
Simply subscribe to view this paper, and 100,000 others.
| CREDIT CARD |
ONLINE CHECK |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
JOIN BY PHONE
|
|
|
