In the paper press this week, The Lawyer reported in its "Web Week" a story on Mashable about lawyers bringing about the downfall of a number of high-profile and popular websites (under the delightful heading "death by lawyers"). Of these, I must admit that the one I miss the most is mp3.com, which was a great way of sharing music demos (and rather better than the clunky MySpace, I'm finding at the moment, albeit without much of the networking capacity). Stan Schroeder writes on Mashable:
"At the beginning, everyone thought everything on the Internet is going to be free, forever. Yeah, right .... people are slowly accepting the fact that some cool things are gone - and they’re not coming back, because someone somewhere needs to make more money."
This thought reminded me of a story in The Observer by John Naughton about German users of the Flickr photo-sharing website rebelling against its use of censorship based on the geographical location of its users and the laws that apply (also reported on The Register). This has caused a storm of protests by Flickr users. John Naughton wrote:
"The Flickr firestorm is just the latest refutation of the enduring myth that the internet is uncontrollable. While technologically adept users can usually find anything they're looking for, the vast majority of the internet's 1.1 billion users are at the mercy of local laws, ordinances and customs.
Flickr users in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong and Korea are finding themselves at the sharp end of this, because Yahoo needs to conform to local laws if it is to continue to trade in those jurisdictions. The same forces explain why Google provides only a restricted search service to its Chinese users. Libertarianism is all very well when you're a hacker. But business is business."
Business is business - and someone somewhere needs to make some money. Frustrated though the internet community may be by the intrusion of real life laws into their online world (see our previous post about Digg), Yahoo! (which owns Flickr) can probably be excused treading carefully around national laws. Headlines about disappointing results and management change at Yahoo! notwithstanding, Web 2.0 businesses are having to learn from the "death by lawyers" suffered by a number of Web 1.0 businesses.
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