Riding the Web 2.0 Wave – Lecture No. 4: Legal Challenges in the Web 2.0 Environment

Topic: Legal Challenges in the Web 2.0 Environment

Speaker: Atty. Michael Vernon “Berne” Guerrero, Creative Commons Philippines and the E-Law and IT Centers of the Arellano University School of Law

Date and Time: July 1, 2008, 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM

Venue: DOLE Ople Hall, Intramuros, Manila

“Ignorance of the law excuses no one from compliance therewith,” said Atty. Michael Vernon “Berne” Guerrero by way of opening his lecture. This maxim, enshrined in Article 3 of the Civil Code of the Philippines, is applicable to the new legal challenges posed by the Web 2.0 environment. The major legal issues on the web may be grouped into four: security, libel, pornography and copyright.

Of the thousands of Philippine laws that were enacted in this country, only one affords some means of protection on the Internet: the E-commerce Law, which governs electronic documents and information. Atty. Guerrero discussed some of the provisions of this law which governed confidentiality and lawful access to information. According to him, everyone can only access certain information if they have a right to do so. There are two kinds of data access: authorized and unauthorized.

Unlawful access or interference to information provided in the facilities is called “cracking” or “hacking” in layman’s terms. “Cracking” refers to unlawful access to a site or account without being the owner, while “hacking” refers to unlawful access to a site or account without being the owner and making changes in it. “Denial of service attack”, which refers to the method of bombarding a website with information until it crashes, is a form of “hacking” according to Atty. Guerrero. However, there is a conflict between the technical and the common meaning of the term “hacking”, because technically, the term “hack” also means “to create a solution”. Some of the different ways of protecting electronic data are electronic signatures, technical mechanisms for Internet security, access policies, and precautions and contractual agreements in the handling of devices.

Atty. Guerrero also talked about libel, discussing the concept of absolute immunity as compared to qualified immunity. He said that like Batas Pambansa Blg. 22, the payment of a fine is now prioritized as a penalty for libel as against imprisonment.

Finally, Atty. Guerrero discussed the concept of copyright and copyright infringement. He identified who could be copyright owners: authors, co-authors, employees and employers, creators, producers, writers and assignees; and who could be made liable for copyright infringement. He also introduced to the audience the concept of Creative Commons and talked about the different Creative Commons licenses.

The audience asked varied questions concerning copyright infringement, ownership of commissioned works, posting of content on other sites without the owner’s permission, assigning of copyright as compared to licensing of copyright, the use of creative commons licenses, and the privacy of employee communications/workstation within the work premises.

Berne says: March 1, 2009 at 5:34 pm

Just saw this post, as a result of due diligence search over Google.

My position on “Denial of service attack” was misconstrued in this post, inasmuch as I was arguing that DOSA could be argued not to be within scope of Section 33(a) of the e-Commerce Law, as the provision presupposes unauthorized access. IDPLA.