International Law

Social media and the law

My QUT colleague Axel Bruns is live blogging a conference in Germany on the political dimensions of Web 2.0: "Das Internet zwischen egalitärer Teilhabe und ökonomischer Vermachtung".  The opening keynote by Karl-Heinz Ladeur on social media and the law sounded particularly fascinating, in large part to a couple of novel suggestions on how the law can adapt to regulate social media.  This is part of Axel's summary:

New rules for communication are emerging here, then, and the law needs to react to this. One approach is to build on existing media law, but Karl-Heinz says that this is unlikely to be particularly successful; on a meta-level, perhaps it would be better to inoculate, to irritate, the inherent self-organisation processes which already exist in social media in order to get these media forms themselves to evolve appropriate rules. This would be more similar to the voluntary codes of ethics in many media sectors - but it must be recognised that the networked organisation of social media still works differently from the more hierarchical structures of broadcast media, for example.

One key field to address here is privacy, where solutions could possibly draw on copyright protection mechanisms: rather than focussing on protecting the data of the individual, on a person-by-person basis, perhaps it would be possible to develop a collecting agency-style collective privacy enforcement agency - an information broker - fighting for privacy rights of user by bundling their individual rights and/or negotiating cases where the use of private data is permissible and in the interest of private individuals (in order to ensure transparency of financial transactions, for example).

Another suggestion relates to eBay and similar sites, where personal rating systems build on the wisdom of crowds to establish personal trustworthiness ratings. Such ratings are complicated today by the fact that making negative ratings could lead to court cases or other repercussions which are not worth the risk if the original transaction covered only small amounts of money in the first place. Karl-Heinz suggests the development of self-organised 'cybercourts' which could reduce such risks by acting as a middle layer in person-on-person buyer/seller ratings, and address exceptionally positive or negative ratings. (This is perhaps not unlike the way that travel advisory sites like IGoUGo act as a middle layer capturing and accumulating the wisdom of tourists without creating the risk that any individual rater may be sued by a hotel operator unhappy with having received a negative rating.)

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on October 25, 2008 (boomark / email).