[pp.int.general] Internet Jurisdictions (Julia Schramm spin-off)

[Will Tovey]

In the RojaDirecta case, as pointed out, the US weren't even following
US law, so changing how US law applies elsewhere wouldn't help, but...

At the moment, my impression is that jurists have no idea how to deal
with the Internet when it comes to jurisdiction. Given that it is pretty
hard to use the Internet without involving parties from other countries
(whether it is DNS providers, servers, payment providers, advertisers or
users) I'm not sure how we could go about minimising the impact of
third-country laws on our Internet use.

Jurisdiction is a fairly tricky concept normally (my understanding is
that most countries try to claim as broad a reach as they can get away
with, just in case they need it), but when you throw in a global
network, where one simple interaction can involve parties from a large
number of countries, it becomes a huge mess.

An extreme option might be to set up a "trusted" intra-EU only Internet,
which only involved EU parties, and therefore was only affected by EU
law. However, I imagine something like that would be hard to achieve,
and easily abused by those in power.

Another option would be to establish some sort International Framework
on Internet Jurisdiction*; a set of rules (or guidelines) laying out
which country would have jurisdiction over what sort of events over the
Internet (i.e. when a person A, in country B sends an email to C in
country D, using an email provider E in country F, which country has
jurisdiction over which person). Again, this could be warped to favour
those in power, but might clear up some issues, and make it clear who
operated within the limits of which laws.

As an aside, would it be possible to set up some sort of
program/application which monitored (at a very basic level) who a person
was communicating with (via IPs or something? Disclaimer: I know very
little about any of this sort of stuff), worked out the country, and
then displayed some sort of list or graphic indicating that; just to
give people an idea of how complicated trying to sort out this is?

-Will

*That should probably be a generic International Framework on
Jurisdiction; we have no idea how long the "Internet" will last as a
major thing, nor what will come next. Rules should be as generalised and
non-tech-specific as possible, while still making sense.

On 20/09/2012 16:32, Francisco George wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In Spain there was the "RojaDirecta case". RojaDirecta is a site
> offering links to other websites that broadcast "illegaly", according
> US copyrights, sports events like NBA, NFL, UEFA etc...
>
> RojaDirecta has been 2 times found NOT Guilty by Spanish Court Rooms
> according to spanish laws because they only provided the links and
> didn't hosted any of the events on their servers.
>
> Nonetheless FBI and ICE Department, 18 months ago seized both .com and
> .org domain from them, they remained in operation through their .es
> and .me domain. Losing of course lots of trafic as most of it came
> from the one seized.
>
> They started a complaint right after in the US against the seizing of
> their "under US Laws" Domains. After 18 months of litigations and
> dirty tricks from US prosecutors. ICE and FBI finally, 3 weeks ago,
> said that they abandoned the case and the judge ordered the US
> authorities to return the seized domains.
>
> see the article of Mike Masnick at
> TechDirt http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120829/12370820209/oops-after-seizing-censoring-rojadirecta-18-months-feds-give-up-drop-case.shtml
>
> There must be a way that Europe must fight such actions by US
> Authorities as they Acted against 2 spanish court orders that said
> that, under Spanish laws, RojaDirecta was perfectly LEGAL.
>
> Francisco George - PP ES
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