EBay Decision Shows the Fragmented State of Internet Law

A judge in the U.S. ruled Monday that eBay isn’t responsible for identifying counterfeit goods sold on its Web site, a decision that came just two weeks after a judge in France ruled the opposite was true. It’s another reminder that the law hasn’t kept pace with the Internet.

The Internet is a global network. But it isn’t governed by one global law–it’s subject to many local and regional laws. The result is that in some countries it’s legal to do things online–like some forms of computer hacking–that are illegal in others.

On the surface, it seems impossible to force a business based in one country to accommodate dozens of country-specific laws when it comes to the Internet. Unlike, say, shipping a product between countries, which is the result of a strategic decision to manufacture or sell a product somewhere, business can’t control where people are visiting a Web site from. In many cases, a business won’t even have employees or an office in that country.

Read the rest of this post