Judgements are out of hand on everything. So are governement fines. Ok for the big players that have the bucks. Just cost of doing business. For eveyone else it is a screw job.

Your a local TV station in Salina KS. Population whatever (small) network feeds something raw and you get a $325K fine. More than the budget for several months...

I don't see this as ruining the internet. This is an issue with frivolous lawsuits, not the Internet. It's just reached the Internet now.

I also don't see what you want stopped? Defamation online is rampant and if someone calls you a pedophile with no proof, you have every right to sue for damages. Would you like the internet to be a place where you can post whatever lies you want without reprucussions?

the us is just doing more policing of the net nowadays. i think that mainstream businesses will flourish but the not so mainstream places will not. just wait as more and more legislation gets put into place.

It is a full moon, but there isn't two of them.

Alex

Mmmm.... any "authority" which has control of the net will, in one way or other, screw it up - that can be the US government or the UN. It may be fine for the UN to have a democratic "net governance" committee for a while, but once they get their teeth into the net, hell knows what crazy shit may evolve.

Pressure is back on to remove the net from the control of ICANN and this will happen, prob sooner than later. Other nations are objecting to the lack of democratic "management" of the net and control over their own TLD's blah.

Who knows.. it may actually be good for some countries - as long as they stay on the admin/domain side of net governance, but with others, they will prob screw it to shit and back. That is likely to come for "industrialized" countries first - they have nothing better to do than make local laws about shit.

thats for the link, it was an interesting read...

I don't think the US will lose control over the net anytime soon. They are in a pretty good position and other countries have zero leverage.

Useless?? Errr....

damn, looks like internet scum can now be held responsible for lying about businesses. :1orglaugh

Hard to say on that. The Tunis conference last year just avoided a head on collision with fairly strong threats to pull the plug on some US net interests in other countries and this was getting fairly imminent.

There are a lot of countries on the list now wanting complete control over their own TLD's and the EU has started again with the pressuring and they won't be letting it last much longer.

Bottom line... the EU is no better than the US on this - they will end up probably leading the list of countries forward on their own TLD management, but prob go further with more net laws covering EU counties after they have "settled in" to managing their own shit.

There are other issues which may end up more positive - eg net gaming etc, tho too early to even begin to predict. In some countries it is doubtful the adult industry will be affected much - they already have fairly reasonable laws covering eg obscenity and not much need for extensions of these laws.

Who knows... but smell on the US side it may get worse yet before there is a chance of more positive stuff (tho this appears to be mainly the current US admin fetish and may change). But can see the US losing out on stuff like gaming now and a collision course with the WTO re this area - other countries are expanding their gaming operations.

and I thought this would be another poker thread :(

It was fuul yesterday and the day before yesterday....

Well the ban on poker is stupid as well. Why are we (The US) lowering everything to the lowest common denominator. They want to legislate change because 1% of gamblers loose their homes. What about the 99% of responsible gamblers. I guess personal responsibility doesn't mean shit.

If an award of $11 Million just came down then you better believe that there will be 1,000 law suits in 100 days. The problems is that the damage was probably a few hundred bucks but the jury was favorable to the plaintiff.

we CREATED it, we can DESTROY it! MUAHAHAHAH!!!!

the usa have ruined so much on this planet, so the internet is just a further step

I rather have the internet in the hands of USA than china or the U.N becuase UN is worthless!

Some of the shit that goes on is truly amazing.

shit... I'm glad Im not from that fucked up country

So i need to stop saying certain people fuck trannies?

I too pointed this out in a recent conversation and was called an idiot.
I worked for a guy (bidbay.com) who put so much pressure on auctionwatch.com in the court system, that they banned ever mentioning the site bidbay.com again on their message boards.