Recent studies by Pew Internet & American Life Project on low-income use of the Internet show that as of 2004, nearly half of low-income households had easy access to the Internet at home or work. (See: Digital Divide Quiz: Test your Knowledge of Client Use of Internet.) With more clients finding legal help online, legal aid programs have an opportunity to reach more people to promote its services or deliver information. Herein lies the threat.
Cyber piracy involves various deceptive practices that companies or individuals engage in to profit from online users. Within the legal aid community, these deceptive practices result in confusion for the public (particularly clients and potential clients) as well as take advantage of the good-will and reputation of legal aid organizations. Without a system to address cyber piracy, legal aid programs risk the chance that the public, especially unsophisticated online users, will not reach legitimate legal aid website and will be confused and possibly extorted on websites posing as legal aid.
Within the legal aid community, cyber piracy is a recent but growing problem. Today over fifty states and territories have launched statewide websites through LSC funding. In addition, hundreds of individual LSC and IOLTA funded programs maintain a program website that utilizes there organization’s name in the URL. These websites spend substantial time and effort providing content for and reaching out to low-income communities. As these websites grow in use and popularity, they become more and more likely target for these practices and the potential for harm to the client population and organizations increases.
There are a variety of practices within the term “cyber piracy” which may include cyber squatting, domain parking, and/or deceptive ad-word use. Each presents a unique challenge for a legal aid program that may lack the time, knowledge and resources to adequately pursue a resolution to these issues.
Legal Aid programs are vulnerable to predatory practices by companies because few programs have their names trademarked. In fact, many programs use generic, descriptive names to describe their program, which may be hard to trademark.
Legal aid programs need to know how cyber piracy is affecting their organization (see NTAP's Research to find out how your program fares online), know the practical steps you can take to protect your organization and clients, and know how to fight cyber piracy[1].
Source: [1] http://lsntap.org/CyberPiracy_Why_Care
1 comments:
There are many articles and documents about cyber piracy in the internet which it is useful to find the exact meaning of this crime. I find that we can define cyber piracy as using the Internet to copy a digital document without authorization and the problem comes from without authorization.
I find two main definition for it in cyber space:
1- The general definition of cyberpiracy is any instance where the Internet is used to copy a digital document without authorization like copying and distributing music or video without the copyright holder’s permissionor copying software onto a CD without paying for it.
2- trademark cyberpiracy. This is when somebody tries to make money by registering, selling, or using Internet domain names that belong to trademarks.
I am going through discuss about this subject and the legal cases which are related to cyberpiracy in next posts
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