The Wall Street Journal reported Feb. 5 that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk will entertain complaints by Polish Web surfers on new legislation that would restrict online gambling in Poland. Just one law in a slew of anti-gambling legislation, the Polish government hopes to extend a ban on slot machines outside of casinos to the Internet world. The article reports that surfers are worried that the ban on online gambling may extend to other content, fears based on a government-drafted bill that would enable a filter that would weed out a full list of banned Internet content.
This reminds me of a French case detailed in the first chapter of “Who Controls the Internet?” A self-proclaimed Nazi watchdog based out of France found Nazi memorabilia up for auction on the search engine “Yahoo!”. Selling Nazi memorabilia is illegal in France, and the watchdog took Yahoo! to court, citing that the California-based company was violating French law. In the end, French courts decided that the ability for Yahoo! to filter out content for its French users was a feasibl option, and French users could be—and should be-- blocked from purchasing Nazi memorabilia on the Web site’s auction component.
The Wall Street Journal attached an unrelated note to the end of the article:
“Completely separately from the government’s attempts to regulate the Internet, the Polish judiciary has said this week an IP address is a piece of personal information that needs to be disclosed to individuals who want to sue a website in a libel lawsuit for comments left in a public forum.”
I believe this could turn into a very interesting case. In the world of anonymous comments, where anyone can say what they please under a pseudonym, having the legal ability to identify who wrote a particular comment can have substantial effect on a case and make lawsuits over Internet comments significantly easier. I’m looking forward to following developments on Polish libel law as they unfold.
--Sarah Morrison
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment