Jurisdiction In CyberspaceMahima Kaul THE ELECTRONIC SILK ROAD: HOW THE WEB BINDS THE WORLD TOGETHER IN COMMERCE By Anupam Chander Yale University Press, London, 2013, pp. 296, $30.00 VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 5 May 2015 The
argument for an electronic silk road, promoting free trade and by extension,
harmonious global values and laws, is an inherently appealing idea to all
digital natives used to an ‘open web’ experience. Anupam Chander himself a
product of parents who migrated from India to the US in search of a better
life, expertly lays bare the changes in global trade patterns— and the
resulting complications—in his book The
Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World Together in Commerce, released in 2014 in South Asia. Aside from the easy
narrative exploring complicated developments, Chander’s book is especially
pertinent for an Indian audience, looking to profit off this free trade, often
without reading the fine print.
The promise of Trade
2.0 is enormous, begins Chander, but he quickly delves into the real world
complications that arise out of these new exchanges. Unlike with goods trade,
where a well-defined port of entry and exit serves as points for regulation and
new jurisdictions, digital exchanges of services, prove to be far trickier. He
raises a metaphysical question: where does an event in cyberspace occur?
Simply put, whose jurisdiction extends to these digital transactions—the
region where the company providing the services is registered, or the region
where these services are consumed?
The real-life
examples of the ‘pirates of cyberspace’ are easier understood—the gambling
sites operating out of Antigua where it is legal were sorely contested in the
USA, where, for the most part, it is illegal. The case went to the WTO where
the gambling sites argued that they were simply providing entertainment
services while the US argued that this sort of activity would promote fraud,
money laundering and underage gambling. The WTO sided with the US. Another
case, familiar to most young people, is of the file-sharing site, The Pirate
Bay, that is under constant legal threat from copyright holders because of the
‘illegal’ downloading of materials that includes movies and music. The founders
have even been convicted of copyright infringement under Swedish law, and have
since moved their domain name from .org to the Swedish address .se to avoid the
risk of seizure of their domain name by the US authorities.
This move too, speaks
to the parallel jurisdictions that exist in cyberspace, complicating its
‘free flow.’ In fact, the domain name system ... Table of Contents >> |