India has been taken by the web 2.0 bug with the number of bloggers rising and everyone scrapping away to glory on orkut.

Also the top 100 sites visited by indians in India show that orkut, blogger, youtube and wikipedia all figure among the top 20 sites! Orkut being the 2nd most popular site (even more popular than its parent site google)

Now with so much of user generated content and user interaction through the online medium there is bound to be certain mishaps which are illegal. Instances of fake orkut profiles have become common and the cyber cops are being approached each time! Also the youtube gandhi fiasco along with the defaced hindi page on wikipedia all are pointing towards the negative power of web 2.0.

So the question im raising is do we need laws 2.0? Is web censorship becoming more of a necesity atleast when it comes to real harm being done to people reputation through sites like orkut? And why are these questions being raised now? Simply because the government could regulate content by pulling up publishers like portals, ISPs and other service providers. These large corporations would bend to the government’s will as they did not want to get on the wrong side of a government.

But now, lawmakers are in deep see, wondering how to control copyright infringement of an hindi movie hosted for free downloads. How to prevent a defamatory posting on a blog. How to prevent downloads of a video clip that violates somebody’s privacy.

Recently the Mumbai Police started a dialogue with portals such as YouTube.com and orkut.com on how to handle these situations. Portals own little responsibility for any user generated content on their websites. Due to the lack of legislation, the case history is being built through courts.

According to Pavan Duggal, advocate, Supreme Court, who specialises in cyber laws, "the battlelines have been drawn between the lawmakers and the internet companies, but there is very little that the authorities can do with the present state of cyber laws in the country.

Previously, under section 79 of the IT Act, the network service providers (NSP) were held liable for any third party data, but now, the responsibility of NSPs like orkut and YouTube has been considerably reduced towards any user-generated content that they host on their website.” The proposed amendments to the IT Act 2000 also does not address the issue of "offensive user generated" or what action should be taken against it, he adds.

So in short a new law 2.0 specifically addressed at handling issues generated by web 2.0 could be something that is inevitable! The question remains when and how.. Here’s hoping that the laws whenever in place do not stifle the essence of web 2.0 i.e freedom of expression.

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