Digital State by Pont Simon

Author:Pont, Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Kogan Page

My first encounter with the thing-that-would-become-the-internet was in the mid-1980s. Snug in the wood-panelled library of an Oxford college, we gathered, curious, around the tiny screen, as the glowing words appeared. ‘What is it?’ I asked the super-bright mathematician who plugged at the keyboard. ‘I’m talking to a researcher at Cambridge.’ I sipped my mug of hot Vimto, and we looked on in wonder.

My next encounter was less awe-inspiring. At the dawn of the 1990s, I was funding my legal training by developing software for a big consultancy company. (My coding was at best indifferent, but I won acclaim for the lucid prose of my comment boxes.) We had for weeks been attending meetings in which the organizer complained that no one had received his agenda memos. Largely unconcerned (they were dull meetings), we vaguely blamed the post room. In fact, it turned out that the memos had been sent direct to our PCs via some new-fangled internal electronic memo system. We were bemused. Why would anyone send messages via a system that you had to separately log into every time you wanted to check it and that there was no point in checking anyway, because no one else used it? And that was at a company that specialized in IT.

More staid professions progressed more slowly still. Twenty-odd years back, officials at the Law Society, responding to a book that predicted that one day lawyers would routinely use e-mail, denounced the idea as ‘bringing the profession into disrepute’. A barrister friend tells how, until about five years ago, his e-mails were delivered to a communal inbox in the clerks’ room, printed out and borne to his office on a velveteen cushion. OK, I made up the cushion bit, but you get the picture. We lawyers were not exactly at the cutting edge of internet usage. No early adopters here. Now, however, we have pretty much embraced it.

In the early days of the brave new digital world, a few pioneers, some of them influential (or at least vocal), envisaged a democratic, stateless, anything-goes online universe. Their cyber-frontierland would not be sullied by such real-world considerations as the law. I don’t know how many of these people really believed that this was desirable, let alone possible. Give or take a few academic quibbles, it’s pretty clear that no significant society exists without some kind of law. There are some traditional societies that don’t have much in the way of law – no statute books, no courts, no lawyers – but closer observation reveals that they do have rules, and that departure from these rules results in sanctions, even if these sanctions may be collectively decided on and enforced.

So, if the most simple, non-hierarchical communities have law, why on earth would anyone think that the internet can function without law? And why would we want it to? After all, there’s a reason why the word ‘lawless’ is pejorative – and in fact there is a lot of law relevant to the internet. My own specialism, intellectual property (IP) law, is right there at the heart of it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.