Legal And Regulatory Issues On Mobile Communication

In 3G era, mobile phone has turned into a new user-friendly mobile media, instead of a simple communication tool. As an interactive, personal, and private communication combined, mobile media has brought profound impact to the society, nonetheless, it has also caused no small a problem due to the lack of relevant laws and the absence of regulations, which affects the function of the society.In modern socity, the law concerns itself with social relations largely on two dimensions: namely, civil sociey and political state. And generally, the adjustment of civil society is achieved through private law rather than public administration, and the former stresses fairness and autonomy. And the administration of the political state largely falls on the duty of public law. In real life, everyone has dual identites or statuses: on the one hand, he is a member of the political state, namely, a citizen, participating all the necessary political or state activities, and regulated by the public law; on the other hand, he is also an element of civil society-a private person, taking part in the civil and business activities with people having equal legal status, and regulated by private law. Along with the acceleration of media development, the cell phone as a tool of communication involves more than the information giver and receiver, and neither is the legal relations it involves limited to the two parties with equal statuses. To some extent, the legal relations in mobile phone communication have developed into the relations between some uncertain social subjects or groups. Therefore, the legal issues involving the mobile communications must be approached through two dimensions: the private law and the public law. Some issues, like privacy, estate, and intellectual property right, sprung from the two parties with equal obligations and rights, could be resovled by the civil law. Other issues, if involved with unequal parties'obligations and rights, such as national security, social order, and cell phone information used as legal evidence, must be regulated by public laws, namely, criminal law, public administration law, and litigation law, etc.Right now there are many organizations involved in the regulating mobile media, and sometimes the management fuctions are overlapping. And the current laws are devoid of practicable details. So, we must heed the uniqueness of the mobile media development in our country, learn from foreign counterparts. In order to establish relevant regulations and legality concerning mobile media, we might pay particular attentions to the following five aspects:1.Respect the citizens' freedom of information communication, and improve the dynamics of regulation.2.Promote a regulation system with diversity, multi-dimentions, and all social participation.3. Speed up the process of perfecting the relevant laws, and guarantee the security and freedom of communication.4.Legislation should promote rather than limit the progress of the information communication5.Learn the advanced lessons and systems from the foreign countries, develop a system suitable to our own situations.