Anomalies in Internet Law

Abstract

Modern information technology has brought a flood of new possibilities to communicate with other people anywhere in the world and to send each other music, videos, texts and pictures. Rather than just enjoying these new possibilities, many governments, companies and even individuals try to stop others from using these new technologies to their full potential. In response to these new technologies, national governments (as well as the EU) have introduced a confusing system of new rules. Not only are these new rules often ineffective and even contradictory, they in turn create problems. In order to protect intellectual property rights, e.g., they have accepted that the content providers could introduce new technologies that harm the property rights of consumers: the so-called Digital Rights Management systems. When it became apparent, however, that these technologies were not effective, more new rules were introduced, not to solve the problem of the legal protection of intellectual property rights, but to make it illegal to try to circumvent digital rights management techniques. In this paper, an attempt is made to identify the anomalies referred to here, to explain them and to suggest some new ways for governments, firms and individuals to deal with new technologies.