As strange and shocking as it may sound yes there are certain laws that are set out by the government designed to keep us safe…from the internet? Amongst the many laws about the internet that here is a look at the top 4 strangest internet laws. In no particular order here is the first one.
Upsetting the entertainment industry
It is made up mostly by penalties for people who upset the entertainment industry through actions such as downloading and sharing content illegally. The penalties also include the three strikes rule which allows for your family to be cut off completely from the internet if anyone single member of the household is accused of copyright infringement. The worst part about this is that this can happen without needing any sort of proof or evidence or even a trial. There is also a newer rating system for the gaming industry making more games easily rated not suitable for children or peoples under 16 or 18.
There is also a fine of up to £50,000 if someone is accused of file sharing in your household. A duty is placed on the Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) to spy on all their existing customers to look out for anything that would help the entertainment industry sue them. To make sure the ISP’s carry out this duty any who refuse can be fined up to £250,000.
Wiping out porn all together
The second worst internet law was made in the form of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) 1996. It was the American governments first attempt to regulate internet content. The purpose of the CDA was to keep children away from internet porn. The reason they did this was as a reaction to an article in 1995 called the Rimm Report and it claimed that the internet was full of porn. But after experts examined the article the found many errors to the conclusion meaning that the government’s overreaction was based on bad social science. Furthermore the government mistakenly believed that it would be easy to segregate non-porn content and so developed a tagging system that would allow browsers to block off porn websites from the browsers. The problem here was that such a tagging system did not exist and the browsers were not under any duty to honour this tagging system. The government even threatened with sever punishments such as jail time for breaking this law. They really wanted to get rid of porn from the internet permanently but chose a mean a ridiculous way of doing so.
Having internet access can get you imprisoned
In Burma just having a modem alone even if you were not going to go on the internet and you just had it lying around due to the fact that having the internet is illegal there you would get imprisoned for the possession of a modem alone.
Cyber fraud a bit too extreme?
The final strange law of the cyber world is on the cyber crime of fraud and its punishment compared to fraud in the real world.
In the real world the maximum sentence for the offence of fraud is 3 – 5 years imprisonment. This sounds very strict however for fraud as a cyber crime the maximum punishment is goes up to ten years and a minimum range of 4 – 6 years for altering information on another persons computer even if it is something like the date or some pointless data.
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