Harkening back to our semi-heated discussion of jailed Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer, I write this post aware of the following things:
- As Mushon said, Egypt is a dictatorship, so laws are “flexible” there.
- It’s both impossible and unwise to foist American concepts of free speech on countries other than America.
- Internet is inherently different from any form of tangible, printed media, and this holds true regardless of what country you live in.
Because of the whole Egypt being a dictatorship thing (sidenote: how stupid you feel when none of us knew that?), there’s no point in discussing Kareem in particular, it won’t get him out of jail. But the general, theoretical debate about the constraints of local law on internet activity is an important one.
The internet does not have a specific location. If you have unfettered internet access, the country from whence the posting you’re looking at came has no bearing on your ease of access. With no fixed location, it’s definitely debateable but certainly not entirely inaccurate to argue that there is no “local government” to persecute web journalists.
This isn’t to say that posting proof of tangible crime– murder, for example– won’t get you screwed. Posting that proof online would lead to the finding of hard evidence, a body (or body bits, maybe). But how can a local government reasonably punish someone for a “crime” committed in a place that is technically not within their territory of rule? How can any government, regardless of whether or not they’re into freedom of speech, jail someone for a crime that begins and ends at an intangible URL?
Possibly Relevant Posts:
- Using New Media to Cover Journalistic Events (1) | Jessica
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- Cyberbullying 101.2 (8) | NateGsays
6 Comments
I wonder what would happen if someone from “Egypt” would blog in that kind of direction and tone, from America. Did Mushon say that they would have taken Kareem’s passport away, the next time he would have gone to Egypt? Would he ever been able to go back there? Would he have gotten a different penalization? What if he would have dual citizenship? Shouldn’t there be some sort of additional laws and right in regard of the Internet?
Many questions with several optional answers. The last one I find particularly interesting. So who will make these Internet laws? So will enforce them? Let’s say Egypt breaks some Internet laws, would the UN condemn it? Use economic sanctions? Would the US and it’s allies invade it? The Internet fosters new cultures that cross borders, under these new cultures arresting a bloger seems wrong. There are inherent conflicts between these new global cultures and local cultures especially in the current national world we live in. I promise you there will be more of that further down the semester.
Why should there be internet laws other than those that dictate our day to day actions as well (like the murder example)?
I think your title about your post is quite interesting and would suggest parts of the internet are ownable. Just using articles for essays we have to cite them, thus giving them ownership of our quotes and some ideas, etc. Therefore, while I disagree with laws that put people in jail for expressing ideas, I do agree that things you post on the internet should be owned. Especially now, how most newspapers are going online or having online versions, it is impossible to claim that you dont own something on the internet.
I think the hardest challenge is how do we know that “he” actually is the person that matches the name and not someone who used the name. But I guess the same is true in a newspaper- we trust them.
@Nate G: There’s a distinct difference between owning content that you post on the internet (falls under already existing plagiarism laws) and owning/having the right to police the internet as though it’s a territory within your governmental control.
I was researching whether or not there are these “internet laws” that we keep struggling with and I found that the UN has a committee that deals with international internet laws. The Internet Governance Forum was developed in 2006 and is meeting later this month. It’s refreshing to think that even though this is the first time that I think about these issues, someone else has them under control.
Wikipedia has a pretty long article on this if anyone’s interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Governance_Forum