Thursday, November 20, 2008

Blaws & Blawyers

So my fun (or maybe not-so-fun) fact for the day is that the word Blog is a contraction of the term “web log”. Thank you, Wikipedia. And here I thought it was completely made up. I did keep a blog a few years back just to keep in-touch with a friend of mine on the other side of the world. Why we didn’t just use e-mail, I don’t know. So those entries are now floating in the dark recesses of cyberspace. Or maybe they’ve been sucked into the black hole of inactive accounts. Who knows where they go.
So anyway, are we responsible for everything we blabber on about on these things? Defamatory of subversive comments, anyone? Is it even possible to trace the author of a John Doe blog to hold him liable? Could someone dig up entries I wrote ages ago and use them against me? So now the question is: are present laws adequate to respond to these issues? Perhaps the world could use some blaws (web laws, get it?) and we could have blawyers of tomorrow. Feasible? Advisable? How does an International Convention on Internet Rights sound? Hmm..