The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
At some point in history, the Wild West became the Less-Wild West Ñ with the rule of law taking over from the justice of the six-shooter. We may be seeing that kind of change beginning in the Wild West of the 21st century Ñ the World Wide Web. The signs are there, like the spread of barbed wire that ultimately fenced in the open range. Courts are considering lawsuits focusing on claims of copyright violations, with a potential for verdicts that may well rein in the galloping explosion of video material on social networks and sites like YouTube. Clips from movies and TV shows have flooded such sites in recent years. But a federal court in New York is hearing a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement Ñ and the judge has required the site to produce data on which videos are being watched by whom. On a related front, in 2006, a teenage girl committed suicide after being harassed in an Internet hoax Ñ a case that recently led prosecutors to charge a Missouri woman with using the Web to drive the teen to take her own life. In May, the Missouri Legislature passed a law that includes Web postings and computer messages under a legal definition of harassment. Recent news reports also document attempts by both government and private companies to fence in the open range of material on the Web. This year there have been congressional calls for laws to keep potential terrorists from using the Internet to communicate and propagandize. And though telecoms are not the heavy hand of government, Verizon Wireless tried to block a specific kind of e-mail campaign by an abortion-rights group, and AT&T decided to sanitize the lyrics of a rock band during a webcast because of two lines that were critical of President George W. Bush. Even those rugged frontiersmen (and women) of the Internet, bloggers, are now facing changes that compare to those that fenced in the once-free-riding cowpokes. Where bloggers for years largely rode freely outside existing law and set their own rules, the world is changing. Now there are libel suits and organizations created to set out standards for blogging. And news organizations are restricting what information bloggers can reproduce without fees or permission. Nostalgia and romantic notions didnÕt stop the fencing in of the Wild West. For good or bad, a combination of legislation, court decisions, self-imposed restrictions and private vendor rules are creating limits in and around the WebÕs wide-open speech country.
