Legal, Cultural, Social, and Political Issues in the Web 2.0

Legal Issue

The development and application of Web 2.0 emphasizes on users’ participation and sharing and aiming to collect distributed intelligence with low technical barriers and discussion (O’Reilly, 2005). Recent years, with the prevalence of Blogger, YouTube and et cetera, users’ information behaviors shift from downloading and reading to uploading and sharing. Everyone could easily be both a “consumer” and “producer.”

In such an open and free Web 2.0 era, users might take internet resources as public property, make use of them without due consideration, nor care about how others use their works or creations. These information behaviors can cause probability of the violation of cyber copyright law (Lin, 2006). As Chou, Chan and Wu (2007) concluded, students usually have three major misconceptions toward cyber copyright law: (1)The Internet content is all open for the public to use, (2) the Internet is always free and (3)all educational use is fair use. Among these three misconceptions, (1) and (3) are easily for students to encounter and violate the cyber copyright law unconsciously. For example, can I record “Lust, Caution” and upload it onto YouTube? Can I copy, transmit and broadcast others’ creation without permission in advance? If my creation is misappropriated by others, can I tolerate? For the conveniences and economic consideration, can I save a whole copyrighted journal volume?

In Web 2.0 era, students would assess richer Internet content and resources and they might produce or publish many works, widely used and cited by others. It’s very important and emergent to foster their cognition, attitudes and behaviors toward cyber copyright laws.

References

1.Chou, C., Chan, P. S., & Wu, H. C. (2007). Using a two-tier test to assess students’ understanding and alternative conceptions of cyber copyright laws. British Journal of Educational Technology, 38(6), 1072-1084.

2.Lin, K. H. (2006). Web 2.0 的資訊可互通性再想想DRM. Retrieved December 07, 2007, form http://mag.udn.com/mag/dc/printpage.jsp?f_ART_ID=50955. (in Chinese)

3.O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0?. Retrieved December 07, 2007, from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html