Despite all the worn analogies of the Internet as the new Wild West, the electronic frontier is not quite the lawless realm it's made out to be.
Sometimes forgotten in the gritty details of the latest attack by a hacker or flurry of lewd Web pages is that there are laws that apply to the Internet. People are being prosecuted based on these laws.
To help you stay out of trouble is the book Cyberspace and the Law: Your Rights and Duties in the On-Line World by Edward A. Cavazos and Gavino Morin. Written by lawyers for nonlawyers, this legal primer for cyberspace clarifies such sticky issues as free speech, privacy, and copyright. Basically, the laws governing this newest generation of communication technology are the same ones that apply to its predecessors-newspapers, telephones, radios, and TV-but with a few twists.
Here are a few highlights:
Privacy. The U.S. Constitution may not explicitly guarantee your right to privacy, but the authors say The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (PCA) does. Passed in 1968 to cover wiretapping of telephones, PCA was broadened in 1986 to protect all digital electronic communication against unauthorized interceptions, access, or disclosure. That means that under PCA, a hacker's tapping of a data line is illegal-so may be a company's monitoring of employees' keystrokes. Someone eavesdropping on your email also is committing a no-no unless you have joined an Internet service and signed away part of your rights to the systems administrator. That person can snoop, but no one else.
Business transactions. Before you buy or sell any gizmos over the Internet, the authors recommend a lesson in contract law. They guide you through its three fundamental concepts-offer, acceptance, and consideration- and how those pertain to cyberspace. For most of us, their advice can be summed up in one simple rule: Get it in writing, electronically or otherwise. Should you ever need to prove fraud, you will have to produce written and signed records of the transaction to substantiate your claim. Therefore, before you conduct commerce over the Internet, make sure you choose a technology that can electronically authenticate and sign documents.
Copyright. If you have ever duplicated software or digital images without the owner's permission, you have violated U.S. copyright law. If you downloaded a magazine article from an online service-without approval-and emailed copies to your friends, you committed the same crime. The authors remind us that almost everything posted on an electronic bulletin board, an online service, or network is protected-including email. Just because electronically duplicating material is easy does not make it legal. U.S. copyright law protects any form of original expression fixed in a tangible form, even if no other steps are taken to establish ownership. Fixing material in the electronic domain can be tricky, but we won't get into that.
First Amendment and free speech. In what is likely the most important chapter in the book, the authors explain where lies the thin line separating your Constitutional right to speak freely and its potential for harming others. In general, most of your activities in cyberspace are protected under the First Amendment. But there are limits. You cannot threaten the president, publish U.S. intelligence information, or pass on illegally obtained materials, such as stolen passwords or copyright infringements. Indecent photographs, chatter, or movie clips are protected, but obscene ones are not. (The authors devote an entire chapter to these distinctions.) Bet you didn't know this: the First Amendment applies only to actions by the government. Your systems operator can legally censor whatever is posted on his/her private forum, especially if it is pornographic.
Crimes. As a last word, the authors remind you that it is possible to get into serious trouble in the comfort of your home or office from computing. Though laws specifically addressing computer crimes are few, that does not mean other laws do not apply. Remember this rule of thumb: if doing something is illegal without a computer, it is probably illegal to do it with one.
The book's extensive 76-page appendix is loaded with useful information, including The Electronic Communications Privacy Act. (Published by The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, copyright 1994. List price $19.95.)
Holly Korab is a science writer in the Publications Group.
