Y4iT 2008

Prof. JJ Disini

College of Law, UP Diliman

A lot of people learn to post other people’s contents such as pictures and videos. They re-post articles of others’ sites without the proper citation and other legalities.

To introduce legal aspects of E-publishing, the E-commerce Act (ECA) was enacted. It covers all commercial and non-commercial contents on the internet. Hacking is one of the many important things covered by the ECA. Jurisdictional issues of hacking are place of commission, effects to doctrine; venue under the rules and penalties are imprisonment and fines.

Everybody makes a copyright of work. Copyright is under the intellectual  property law and anyone who infringes it is punishable by law. When copyrights are granted, the person has the right to reproduce copies of the contents, right to dramatize, adapt, or transform the work, etc., and a right to public display and perform. Excluded works from the copyright are works within the public domain such as the ideas behind contents.

Fair use discussed is the linking back to the page where an idea or a content was got. What is not fair use is when somebody ripped a music and posted it in his page without linking the page where he got the original post.

On-line Piracy under the ECA is defined as the unauthorized copyright, reproduction, dissemination, distribution, importation, use, etc. of contents through the use of telecommunication networks. Covered by the on-line piracy are the file sharing, all forms of infringement, domain name, cybersquatting and framing.

Professor Disini also talked about bloggers who usually deal with quoting and writing about anything, and who do not have authority to write. The problem with them is that they have no publisher to protect them from libel suits, thus the liabilities are direct.

Service providers like Youtube are exempted in the E-pubishing Act. The only duty of Youtube, for example, is to take down an illegal post if a someone complained it with copyright issues. Service providers are not liable for copyright law.