The internet has slowly crept up on us in the last 10 to 15 years, and there are now legal issues about intellectual property, and wether the internet should act as a common carrier or a publisher, let me explain.

A telephone company, for example, is a common carrier. If an obscene caller is bothering you, the phone company will co-operate with police, but nobody thinks it's the phone company's fault some creep keeps calling you. Magazines and newspapers act as a publisher. They are legally responsible for their content and can be sued. The internet, however, acts as both a common carrier and a publisher. When it acts as a common carrier, for example chat rooms, forums and bulletin boards, the rules of the common carrier would apply. When it acts as a publisher, like articles or information the website have written and edited themselves, it makes sense the rules of publishing would apply, but isn't that simple to classify the internet.

Right now, on the popular search engine 'Google", there are approximately 4,285,199,774 WebPages on the database, and Google searches less then a quarter of pages on the internet. And don't forget, every day thousands of websites launch. With all those WebPages on the internet, it would be impossible to classify the every single page, with humans OR with a computer application, since there's not enough CPU p...

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