08393 Manifest – The Role of Law in an Electronic World Dominated by Web 2.0

Abstract

Recently, almost everything seems to have become "2.0", be it music, gadgets,
health, entertainment, business, Silicon Valley, countries such as India, the family, and, most notably, the Web. 10GB of "user-generated content" is created in the World-Wide Web daily (see Ramakrishnan and Tomkins, 2007), that is, more than five times the amount of content created by professional Web editors. Web 2.0 has rapidly become a label that everybody using the Internet and doing business through it seems to be able to relate to; what it primarily stands for is the transition of the Web from a medium where people just read information to a medium where people both read and write; in other words, the Web meanwhile heavily benefits from user contributions and user-generated content (UGC) in a variety of media forms. This has been enabled by technological advances that nowadays make it possible for users to easily employ services offered on the Web and to embark on tasks that have previously been reserved for specialists.