A blog relating to Internet legal issues by Professor John Swinson, University of Queensland
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New Californian Privacy Law: CPRA to effectively replace CCPA
On U.S. Election Day, 3 November 2020, voters in the State of California overwhelmingly voted in favour of Proposition 24—a ballot measure t...

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The United Nations intellectual property agency (WIPO) is the latest front in the US-China trade war. http://www.theage.com.au/world/sad-am...
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Carly Long, an expert in domain name litigation, will teach the first half of the class this Tuesday evening. You may wish to have a look a...
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This website has some useful links and references: http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/article-index/rights-and-laws-of-the-internet/

3 comments:
Hi
I believe that anonymity is really important to practice freedom especially in the third world countries. During Arab spring (uprising in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya) thousands of social networks activists contribute to the revolution by posting their attitude about the revolution and encouraging people to continue protesting against the regime for their dignity and freedom. Many of those activists who were in Libya or Egypt use different names to share news on the social networks and that for their safety.
Mahmoud
In My opinion there really should not be an issue with regards to anonymity when using the internet as technically it does not exist.
In fact regardless of the name used, any online post can be traced back to the publishers IP address. Having said that, sometimes some individuals are able to hide or alter their IP address thus avoid being detected. This however has nothing to do with what name has actually been used online.
I personally feel that the beauty of the internet is that it gives you the choice of speaking anonymously. It empowers the user and allow him to speak freely without the fear of an immediate connection to his identify. Contradictory to the article, I believe that allowing pseudonyms on the internet attracts people to use it. If we are all to use our real identities online we might as well go to the park and shout out what we think and let everyone know this is me, and this is my opinion, even the really contradicting one.
If the motion of using our real identity online is to prevent the abuse of anonymously (eg: irresponsible harassment online), IP address and logs are sufficient in tracking down any individual on the internet. If the offender is hiding behind an IP mask then it will be the same as trying to track an anonymous phone call. The real focus here should be laws regarding harassment, not taking away the anonymously of the internet.
--Bilin Ong
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