What It All Means

Historically when there is an issue in legislation and there is no uniform conclusion across the country for a particular issue, the Supreme Court or another legislative body of our government will step in and give an overarching decision. Freedom of speech was at stake when people continuously sued newspapers for libel and slander, often groundlessly, with mixed success depending on the particular state it was being tried in. The Supreme Court developed clear criteria for this matter based on the United States Constitution so that there would no longer be questionable verdicts. With the development of the internet and search engines that make is possible for anyone to develop international publications the appliance of this verdict became more complex and in many cases impossible to relate. In a meager effort to nullify some of these problems that the internet had created congress wrote the Digital Millennium Act that would make it easier to prosecute people on copyright infringement. However the law is vague and people have attempted to apply it in many different ways that it was not originally intended for. The internet also has the added issue of being an international body so much of its content does not fall under the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore much of the substance is not liable to the copyright infringement and slander standards of the US. The government as a whole has not seen a proper conclusion for this conundrum. However one subset of the government, the military have put definite regulations on their employees and troops even when they are over seas, not only when they are on military developed websites but on public forums as well. We have not seen the conclusion for the problems that the internet has created for the legal entitlements of United States citizens. Nevertheless based on our country’s previous record of created legislation to more uniformly hold people accountable across the board, it is not preposterous to expect that there will be new legislation for the media content of the internet in the next few years. We will see history in the making.