Comment: The article below sets out criteria for the prosecutor in Scott Balson's upcoming court case (see extract highlighted). This is a quite extraordinary abuse of the media. But we should not be surprised as The Courier-Mail is a typically ethically-challenged Murdoch newspaper.
The comment: His site has also been criticised for anti-Semitic and anti-Asian comments, and several well-known people are preparing defamation actions against him.
brings in a number of new and interesting issues. First his web site has never been referred to as carrying anti-Asian comments before - neither are those who have "criticised" him ever been qualified. Furthermore, he has never had a defamation action taken against him. The statements when read in context and then linked to "ectreme-Right" at the tail of this section of the article reflects a slur against Balson who would have a case to prepare a weighty and costly action against The Courier-Mail. One can only speculate as to when he will launch this action.
Article begins:
"Privacy, breaching copyright laws and guarding PIN secrets are all part of an emerging problem of policing the Net, reports Deborah Cassrels
The Courier-Mail Saturday 26th February 2000
Shockwaves reverberated globally last year when a US fashion photographer auctioned the eggs of his top models on the Internet to wannabe mothers desperate to pass of their beauty genes to their offspring.
Internet auction giant eBay sparked an outcry when it auctioned a human kidney on its German site last week. Bidding had reached $158,000 when eBay had to stop the auction because German law does not allow the sale of human organs.
The anonymous seller said the kidney could be picked up in Zurich, but that "you only need to have one kidney because I need the other one to live". EBay has also been used to buy and sell Ku Klux Klan memorabilia.
Internet aficionados have resisted moves to regulate their medium, moves until recently usually backed by anti-pornography campaigners.
But in the era of convergence between the computer and the television and with the rise of electronic commerce, new concerns are emerging. How to ensure privacy, protect credit card numbers, guard copyright, enforce the laws of defamation and contempt, or even protect the oligarchical positions of our present free-to-air broadcasters if anyone can run an Internet publishing business or start an electronic commerce franchise?
The Howard government has imposed strict regulations on cross-media ownership, preventing newspaper publishers from owning television stations, and late last year blocked attempts by publishers to use the free available broadcast spectrum to send data over the television.
Many critics say this not only blocks the entry of new consumer-friendly technologies but also will prove impossible to police as our computer screens begin to take full video programming and movies from international sources, just as they already take full radio and music.
The general manager of auction site goFish, Menno Veeneklaas, says we can't prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from competing with television or the downloading of offshore movies.
"We can't unless the large owners of movie, sound and music content.. prevent any electronic distribution of that content. But if you look at where everything's heading, News Limited (the owner of goFish and an associate of The Courier-Mail) has a lot of work going into the distribution of active content through a wide distribution channel," Veeneklaas said.
He points to the $500 billion merger of Time Warner and America online that has sent world technology stocks skyrocketing during the past three months: "The America Online-Time Warner partnership is totally set up to distribute electronic movie content that Time Warner owns and controls."
He believes free-to-air television stations - already rating less than 60% of their peaks in the US in the wake of the introduction of cable and satellite television - will become less relevant in the future.
"But we'll still need the box because a box because a PC screen is too small for movie viewing. The mechanism for delivery will change," Veeneklaas says.
Will the video streaming require more regulation?
"The important thing that needs to be controlled is copyright so the artists and the companies that support or part-own the artists' productive output are protected. It's the same thing with software. China and various other countries produce vast volumes of fake software and as a result of that significant upfront research and development costs go to waste or can't be accounted for," Veeneklaas says.
"There have been a number of reports in recent months about people downloading whole tracts or CDs off web sites.
That should be regulated, he says.
"There is a definite need for some sort of policing body."
In an example of this, Online music retailer Sanity.com this week was embroiled in a dispute over its exclusive rights to the Internet sale of digital music from artists such as Kylie Minogue and Jimmy Barnes. Consumers wanting to download digital recordings of artists signed to the Festival Mushroom Group, owned by News Limited, can purchase them at only one site.
HMV Australia said it would refuse to stock and artist covered under the downloading deal and cautioned it may implement similar action in other world markets. The sale of digital music over the Internet, while now small, is expected to grow rapidly.
Sanity.com chairman Brett Bundy said consumers would pay about $4.95 a song for new releases.
Veeneklaas says the viewing of pornographic movies need not be problematic. Provided age constraints are met (18 or older), identification verified and the person is issued with a user name and password, "its no different to buying a magazine or going to a sex shop in a red light district".
And eBay's kidney auction? Veeneklaas says it was in breach of the regulations relating to the selling of organs. goFish has a software mechanism that scans for about 500 banned words and would reject such an auction.
In Australia it is illegal to sell human organs. "There are no specific rules or laws relating to online auctions because none has been designed, but there are laws relating to auctioning," Veeneklaas says.
"If we were to be the owner of what we sold we would need an auctioneer's licence. Because we don't own anything that we sell, because we're just an electronic facilitator of communications where we bring a buyer and seller together we don't need an auctioneer's licence (unlike physical auction houses).
"Because of medical restrictions relating to extraction and transplantation of organs in most developed countries, including Australia, and similarly relating to the sale of shipping of drugs or alcohol, weapons, sexually explicit material... there are very strict laws that prescribe that you need licences to do different things."
Greg Taylor, vice-chairman of Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc, a group representing users concerned about online freedom, says legislation is a waste of money.
"The ABA's (Australian Broadcasting Authority) attempt to impose censorship is having no effect at all - it's just forcing Australian sites offshore.
Taylor says if people seek particular information they can access it from alternative sources. And filters have always been available, he says, referring to V chips that can filter violence and pornography for parents worried what their children might see on the Net.
The global nature of the medium requires a much more hands-on approach.
"As a result of current censorship policy across all media we're now one of the most conservative countries in the world," Taylor says.
The Federal Government introduced Internet censorship legislation in January to restrict offensive material. ISPs must give users passwords or PIN numbers to gain access to sites with RC (refused classification), X-Rated or R-Rated material. The Literature and Film Classification Board will decide if material should be restricted.
But concern is much wider than just copyright or pornography. Is the information we are getting through the Internet accurate? A US study published late last year said 64% of web surfers found results from the large Alta Vista search engine contained no answer or were out of date, 27% found the right answer and 9% were directed to web sites with incorrect answers.
And as well as being sceptical about the quality of information, Australians are worried about revealing private information. A survey this month by Jupiter Communications found only 3% of Australians believed it was "very safe" to divulge their credit card numbers on the Web, while 60% considered it unsafe.
Last year a Brisbane teenager used the Net to access credit card numbers to obtain more than $37,000 in computer equipment from a web site in Poland. Another Brisbane teenager, a computer programmer, last year used a credit card number obtained from the Internet to pay for stays at luxury hotels.
And in a major US Net fraud it was revealed this month a computer hacker had stolen more than 250,000 credit card numbers from an online music retailer. He released them on a site after the company refused to pay him a $1.15 million ransom.
The Net even offers traps for experienced journalists moving into online publishing. A new site launched in Melbourne this month was linked to an extensive bomb-making site on its front page. Queensland web publisher Scott Balson is before the courts for illegally naming a prominent political figure on child sex charges during committal proceedings.
His site has also been criticised for anti-Semitic and anti-Asian comments, and several well-known people are preparing defamation actions against him.
State Attorney-General Matt Foley would not discuss Internet regulation this week but Opposition Spokesman Lawrence Springborg believes the Balson case is likely to be ground breaking.
"This is likely to be a first as far as Internet publication goes and it's very interesting to see where that goes. If it can be easily proven that the item was published in Queensland on a Queensland server (from the state whose law it is alleged to have contravened) then the case would obviously have been stronger. This case will probably be viewed as precedent one way or another," he says.
Springborg says it is an extremely hard task to build a case for defamation.
"If information has appeared from somewhere it's very difficult - unless you can prove that that information was published, or placed on the Internet by a person in a certain place where they have certain defamation laws and it probably occurred on a server in that place. It its on an international server - it might be in the Bahamas - then it becomes more difficult, and hard to track it back.
"In the US, they've moved to indemnify Internet companies from defamation action and that's probably a sensible move because you can't expect them to vet all the material that's on their service."
Regulation is a nightmare because of the world-wide nature of the Web and the varying laws in different countries, states or jurisdictions.
The Federal Government has made Australian Internet service providers accountable for obscene material under threat of sanction, but defamation is more difficult, Springborg says.
The Internet has also given the extreme Right a global forum for airing and inciting racial hatred. Groups that could not use traditional media can use the Net freely, erasing inflammatory material any time or moving sites through national boundaries.
Veeneklaas says the UN should play a role in setting basic rules about what type of information can and can't be distributed publicly and legally.
"But the reality is it's close to impossible to police. I could have a lap top computer, be based out of one city or country for a month there, and if I was a hard-core right-wing person I could take my website down for a day, hop on a plane, fly to another country and plug it in again - so I don't necessarily have to have it running on an ISP," Veeneklaas says.
He says ISPs should take on some policing responsibility.
Michael Ward, vice-president of corporate relations of UUNET, the company that owns OzEmail, says it has an agreement with Internet users that makes clear the onus of responsibility for content is theirs (sic). The burden is not on OzEmail to vet information. Under the new Government Internet censorship legislation, the Australian Broadcasting Authority has implemented a complaints system for people unhappy about Internet content. ISPs are also required to provide approved filters.
If providers breach the Restricted Access System they will be liable to fines of a maximum $27,000 for businesses and up to $5,500 for individuals.
"If there is a website hosted in Australia that has material on it which the Government deems inappropriate, that material can be removed," Ward says. "If they send us a fax which says 'remove these images from this site' we are legally obliged to do that. But I could immediately take that content and put it on to a web site in America, New Zealand, Vanuatu and the same content could be available within seconds.. it is impossible to censor communication."
If racism, violence and pornography can't be policed, how realistic are the new rules governing free-to-air datacasting?
Ward says, "The problem is that the Government is trying to protect geographical monopolies or oligopolies, like the free-to-air broadcasters in Australia, from international competition and from domestic competition and alternative technologies and it's stupid. It's not going to be possible to continue. They wouldn't give a licence to, say, OzEmail to set up a datacasting channel without OzEmail agreeing to restrict the nature of what was made available and our response was "forget it".
And why would they if anything goes on the Internet?
Noel Preston, professor in applied ethics at Queensland University of Technology, believes we need legal systems and social institutions that cross national boundaries.
"We have a globalised economy but we don't have a global ethic," he says. "We're edging towards this but the abuse stems partly from the fact that we don't have a shared value system, so that's the macro project behind this - the development of cross-cultural institutions and value systems that are supported by ethical practice and legal restraints."
Preston says we have to expect national governments to take seriously the misuse of information technology by establishing regulations and monitoring the Net as best possible.
"The evolution of human society is away from the nation state, away from government control towards community and individual control." He sees this as no bad thing. "Paradoxically, there's a profound challenge for the human community in terms of learning how to become ethical as autonomous human beings rather than because the law of the government requires us to do this or that."