Indian lawmakers caught in Web 2.0 [India Times]
“The virtual (internet) network of people has always been a problem for [Indian] lawmakers,” reports Ritwik Donde in Infotech, an online technology news source of the India Times.
“One of the problem with internet has been that it is impossible to control or censor it. Internet or the world wide web never remains the same.
Thousands of pages are added to it every second. Hundreds of new sites pop up every second. Now, web’s new version, Web 2.0, driven by users, is creating a completely new set of problems for the Indian law makers. The challenge is that content, music and video is being generated by millions of users and put on the world wide web.
Earlier, the government could regulate content by pulling up publishers like portals, ISPs and other service providers. These large corporations would bend to the government’s will as they did not want to get on the wrong side of a government.
But now, lawmakers are in deep see, wondering how to control copyright infringement of an hindi movie hosted for free downloads. How to prevent a defamatory posting on a blog. How to prevent downloads of a video clip that violates somebody’s privacy.
Recently the Mumbai Police started a dialogue with portals such as YouTube.com and orkut.com on how to handle these situations.”
