The Role of Law in an Electronic World Dominated by Web 2.0
Thomas Hoeren, Gottfried Vossen · 2008
Recently, almost everything seems to have become “2.0”, be it music, gadgets, health, entertainment, business, Silicon Valley, countries such as India, the family, and, most notably, the Web. 10GB of “user-generated content” is created in the World-Wide Web daily (see Ramakrishnan and Tomkins, 2007), that is, more than five times the amount of content created by professional Web editors. Web 2.0 has rapidly become a label that everybody using the Internet and doing business through it seems to be able to relate to; what it primarily stands for is the transition of the Web from a medium where people just read information to a medium where people both read and write; in other words, the Web meanwhile heavily benefits from user contributions and user-generated content (UGC) in a variety of media forms. This has been enabled by technological advances that nowadays make it possible for users to easily employ services offered on the Web and to embark on tasks that have previously been reserved for specialists. UGC can primarily be observed in the consumer area, but is also entering enterprises. Especially in the former, numerous legal issues arise, which is demonstrated by the large number of cases from this field that courts of laws have to deal with recently. This situation is due to a number of reasons, including the fact that legal restrictions are often ignored, or that users are unaware of the laws they may be or are violating. The goal of this manifest, which contains the findings of a Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop held at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany in September 2008, is to shed some light on the interplay between law and Web 2.0 and to discuss a number of questions and issues that urgently deserve clarification.