The Internet is often portrayed as unregulated and anarchic, rife with pornography and salacious lies. User-generated content and interactive media platforms for sharing content such as Social Networking Sites and sites like YouTube or Flickr or Wikipedia may have exacerbated this.

Forms of censorship are applied in all states and include laws controlling the distribution of indecent content, content showing the sexual abuse of children, content glorifying or encouraging acts or terrorism or threatening public order, laws inciting racial hatred or laws protecting a person’s reputation and/or privacy. For cultural and historic reasons such laws differ significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as does the balance between freedom of expression and its restriction.

Internet technology, however, presents a number of challenges to what were previously settled legal issues. For example the internet crosses national borders and so does the content, which leads to a conflict between different laws and enforcement problems . Moreover when should an Internet Service Provider (ISP) be held liable for defamatory material- is the role of the ISP akin to that of a publisher or the distributor of a newspaper? This module will consider the problems raised by the technology, and explore how different jurisdictions - particularly the UK, the EU and the US - have responded to this challenge. Policy issues surrounding legal reform will form an integral part of the module.

Module 8

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