a) It’s astonishing how quickly users create content (in casu: hoaxes) and how fast this gets noticed by large mainstream media (search for dragan dabic website on Google News). Karadzic was arrested no more than 40 hours ago.

b) Hoaxes can be uncovered very quickly by other users.

c) The use of the Whois Privacy Protection Service by the domain name registrant was useless: First, the whois entry still shows the date of the last update — July 22nd; second, the fact that the registrant used that service kind of reverses the burden of proof that the website isn’t a hoax.

d) It might have been profitable for the hoaxer to add Google ads to the website.

The Swiss Federal Supreme Court — at least its 2nd Social Security Law Division (II. Sozialversicherungsrechtliche Abteilung) — has started to quote Wikipedia in 2007:

• In a decision from May 3, 2007 (I 871/06) the Court relied on Wikipedia’s description of volleyball moves in order to assess whether the appellant who played volleyball was unable to work due to a disability in his arms.
• In a decision from January 18, 2008 (K 136/06, published as FCD 134 V 72, cons. 3.1) the Court took the German Wikipedia entry for “Autoscooter” (German-English pidgin for bumper car) as evidence that collisions in bumper cars are almost innocuous, which led it to the conclusion that losing a tooth in a bumper car is an accident under federal social security law.
• In a decision from January 7, 2008 (9C_286/2007) the Court referred to an expert opinion which stated that hyperthyreosis morbus Basedow causes depression, adding that a Wikipedia printout which had been submitted by the appellant stated the same.

These three judgments have been drafted by different clerks of the same department of the Federal Supreme Court that decides matters of social security. In this area of law, legal proceedings are not entirely driven by the parties, but the courts may to a certain extent collect evidence as well. Civil and criminal legal proceedings being totally different in this respect, the probative force of Wikipedia entries in these field still remains unclear.

This is extrordinary: Weddings (an occasion where our Italian immigrants love to do this) take place on Saturdays in Switzerland. There’s no soccer game involving Italy, Croatia, Serbia, or Turkey either. I was wondering until I remembered that Kosovo could declare its independence within the next days. So I checked the online news — and yes, a parliamentary meeting has been scheduled for 3 p.m. in Pristina to formally declare Kosovo’s independence.

What’s remarkable about this from an information point of view is that the 1-bit chorus of horns serves here as a token for a more complex message (”Kosovo is declaring its independence”), and that the internet helps outsiders like me decipher that message.

Like almost everything, this issue involves an interesting question of information law: Honking is of course only permitted as a warning signal in road traffic. When a Kosovar immigrant uses his horn to spread the message of independence, may he then invoke the freedom of speech if he is fined? I’m inclined to say yes, even if this doesn’t change anything in the result, namely that the restriction is certainly justified.

In 2007, among others, a new form (or genre?) of literature has emerged, namely satire in the guise of an online product review. Here’s a fine example (hat tip to James): reviews of the BIC ballpoint pen in black. Enjoy!

(They’ve been publishing content over their own website for a while now.)

Given the fact that Swiss TV viewers (including me) pay a mandatory fee of 400 dollars a year, I can only welcome this added service.

My first afterthought is a political one: The fact that one generation thinks and behaves different in a (more and more) prominent aspect of life, namely long-distance communication, adds a new dimension to the pluralism our society and the law have to cope with. So to speak, a cultural minority is emerging, and it will crowd today’s majority of digital immigrants out as the decades go by. In the very long run, policy issues might come up such as enabling older people to participate in societal and cultural life that will then be dominated by digital natives, and might be inaccessible to those who can’t learn to behave like a digital native.

However, for the time being the problem of this new dimension of pluralism is different: As we can already see – and John and Urs argue in extenso –, our one-size-fits-all laws (such as privacy laws, copyright legislation, what about electoral laws? etc.) are sometimes inadequate for both digital immigrants and digital natives. From a legal point of view the challenge is to reform the law in a way that it reflects the values of digital immigrants and digital natives likewise. One might call this a sociopolitical case for cyberspace-specific legislation (and, of course, case-law), which adds to the many other reasons for treating cyber-issues different from offline issues. (In contrast to a tendency among cyber-exceptionalists I don’t have an a priori preference for looser rules as far as cyber-issues are concerned, they just ought to be adequate to the values and behavior of digital natives.)

My second afterthought is about the historical perspective: There were similar developments in the past, in which a generation grew up in a societal environment that was radically different to the collective experience of the elder generations in at least one respect. Maybe the most prominent example is the baby boomers, who had no wartime experience (at least in Europe) and were the first generation to be able to conduct reasonable family planning. (The other examples that come to my mind also have to do with wartime or politics, such as the generation that had fought in WW I, the generation in China that didn’t experience the famines and the cultural revolution under Mao, and – more recently – the Eastern Europeans who are young enough not to have lived under communist rule.)

We all know what happened in the 1960s when a huge proportion of this generation felt that the societal institutions they grew up with didn’t match their values and lifestyle. I wonder to what extent the emergence of the generation of digital natives will parallel this development, and in particular whether this will only affect cyberspace, or whether it will also spill over into “real life”. Let’s wait and see.

Luckily, there’s Google’s cache, and all information still seems to be there: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.jcvp-sg.ch&btnG=Search Hence, I recommended that my friends settle with their provider for natural restitution, i.e. him clicking through Google’s cache and restoring the web content.

It’s nothing new that laws are information themselves, and that they are prone to all the problems that come under the heading of information quality. But the subject nevertheless raises interesting questions:

How did they find out that they don’t need a given provision any longer? Did they check the access statistics for the (excellent) corpus juris of the Confederation, the federal government’s most popular website as an official explained to me once? Did they e-mail the competent authorities and ask them to scan the laws relevant to their field of activity? And how do they make sure that no provision will be struck that is still needed?

How much did the whole ”deep scan” of the corpus cost, and how much money do they expect to save with this clean-up? If no-one uses a law any longer, its mere existence on paper and on servers does not seem to do much harm.

This might be worth some research, which I don’t have time to do, unfortunately. The regulatory problem being to find out whether a law is still “alive”, i.e. needed and complied with, reminds me of the difficulties doctors sometimes have when they have to decide whether a patient is deeply comatose or brain dead.

The Federal Supreme Court ruled that this decision is not unconstitutional. (Decision in German is here.)