The world has become a global village. With the emergence of the Word Wide Web and Internet, information has become an essential commodity for humans like food, water and shelter. People collaborate like never before making way to a digital revolution. Computers and communication devices are getting smaller and more powerful. General notion that a computer is a lager device which is to be stored in a large room has long been gone. Today's ubiquitous computers and mobile phones (now we call them smartphones) have become a part of human body. Communication between those devices themselves outsmarted human collaboration.
Computing power, development in communication technology and internet created a parallel word; a society withing the large human society. We call that "Cyberspace". Cyberspace is a virtual community consisting of people connected to the internet. Internet is noting but a set of computing devices connected together by communication media so it is not wrong to say that the Cyberspace is filled with people who operates the above devices. Note them as cyber-community just for the reference. There are collaborating places for the cyber community starting from internet chat rooms and forums. Cyberspace collaboration reached its pinnacle with the introduction of social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Google Plus and so on. Facebook in particular is the largest online community in the world. The fact that one in 7 persons in the word being its member shows how popular social networking is.
To live in the online world, a person needs a new online personality but it doesn't need to do an exact copy of his/her real life. Anonymity is guaranteed in cyberspace up to some extent so one can create a brand new personality just for being in the cyberspace. Most people have entirely different personalities ranging from using aliases for names to changing their behavior and even gender. For example a shy and fearful mama's child can become an internet hero. A person who can't even look at girls in the real life can acts as a playboy in the internet or a virgin in real life can even have cyber-sex.
We may sometimes face with question of what will happen to the alleged cyber personality when a person die for real. The person will be physically dead but his/her cyberspace personality may remain. Cyberspace personality is always linked with an online account for which only the owner has access to so no one can access to that account making the online personality freeze in time as a memory to the dead person. It is obvious that those cyber personalities of dead people always cause problems. Online bank accounts and other internet money related accounts may create legal problems. Intellectual property rights issues are common for online content because of the lack of legal framework for cyberspace content. Many social and ethical problems arise when dealing with a dead person's social networking accounts. A third party can hack into a dead person's account and control it. Imagine receiving a Facebook message from your brother who is already dead for couple of years. It may give an unimaginable trauma for you and your family members.
Some social networks hand over the control of a dead person's account to his/her relatives upon a court order but this varies from country to country. Law relating to cyberspace is still in its infancy. Although laws against cyber crimes are strong, the lack of legal framework covering the entire cyberspace and information sharing is a daunting problem. In developing countries this problem is severe but the irony is that those are the countries which has a rapid expansion of cyber community.
It is not easy to develop a universal law applying to all the aspects of cyber community ranging from internet monetary transactions to digital intellectual property rights and social networking conduct. Giving legal recognition to cyber personalities and linking them with their real persons may sound controversial but we have to take bold decisions and innovative strategies to keep our foothold in this vast and rapidly changing cyber front.
