When I was reading Barlow’s declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, I was struck by how naïve it happened to be. In the 15-odd years since Barlow made his declaration, we have seen that by no means is cyberspace fundamentally independent from the greater world as a whole, one example being the conflict between Wikipedia and two German murderers: a German law stating that one could not make reference to the criminal status of criminals after a certain time (their “debt to society” being served) conflicting with this information being present on Wikipedia, which is hosted in the US. This is definitely different than what Barlow is stating in his frankly somewhat overblown manifesto.

I was also struck by how prescient in some ways Tribe’s post was. Perhaps I am merely remembering incorrectly, but it seems to me that in 1991 one would have been somewhat hard-pressed to predict the degree to which the Internet, web business and other web ventures would have flourished. Tribe notes that a bookstore owner isn’t a “publisher” and isn’t liable for the material and notes that computer gateways and bulletin boards are analogous bookstore owners. It’s very similar to what happened with Craigslist, which denies responsibility for the actual content posted on its boards, a position which I believe has been generally supported.

I’d like to question, then, to what degree we should attempt to predict what will happen in the future when we create legislation having to do with cyberspace? Clearly, one of the problems that we’re facing now is that legislation written anywhere from 20 to 200 years ago seems not very applicable to current problems. But should we attempt to preemptively create legislation for digital frameworks that may not yet exist?