Cyberlaw: legal frameworks and digital governance

¶ … jurisdiction and sovereignty have quickly come to the fore in the era of the Internet. With that said, Medical Miracle in this situation has jurisdiction. Why? Well, first of all it is clear that having jurisdiction has something to do with whether a court has authority over a specific case. In this situation, Medical Miracle would have what is called venue which is the legal idea that states the most suitable forum for a trial. In a lot of situations it is frequently two or more courts that will have proper jurisdiction, but in this case for Medical Miracle, it would be more fitting to hear the case in a particular forum which would be in Colorado. Really, a number of courts can have a play in the case which would be both Arizona and Colorado because of the contact in both regions. However, it would benefit Medical Miracle it the case was settled in Colorado. One case to support this argument would be Maritz, Inc. v. CyberGold, Inc., 947 F. Supp. 1328 (E.D. Mo. 1996) Sustaining exercise of jurisdiction over defendant where defendant's only contact with Missouri was a web site "published" on a computer in California that "provided information about CyberGold's new upcoming [Internet] service." Court noted that defendant's web site was accessible to any Internet user, including those in Missouri, and in fact had been accessed by people in Missouri.

As far as the customer, as mentioned earlier number of courts may have jurisdiction over the case, given the contacts which are just Colorado and Arizona. The customer does have jurisdiction because the site was retrieved in their home in the state of Arizona. One similar case is the . EDIAS Software Int'l, L.L.C. v. BASIS Int'l Ltd., 947 F. Supp. 413 (D. Ariz. 1996) In this suit, defendant's contacts with forum state Arizona included a contract with an Arizona company [the plaintiff EDIAS], phone, fax and e-mail communications with EDIAS in Arizona throughout the business association, sales to EDIAS and other Arizona clienteles, and visitations to Arizona. Furthermore, the defendant had a CompuServe web page on which it had posted the supposedly offensive statement about plaintiff. Since the statement recognized plaintiff by name, and Arizona was plaintiff's main place of commerce, the Court held that the web page messages "were both directed at Arizona and allegedly caused foreseeable harm to EDIAS" in Arizona. The Court implemented jurisdiction founded on all of these contacts with Arizona.