It has often been said that we can surf the country and the world in a matter of seconds on the Internet. In a certain sense, this is no doubt true. Indeed, the Internet is changing not only the way we spend our leisure time -- but also the way we do business as well. Of course, traditional business limitations still exist in some form; but these are more and more easily overcome as the sophistication of computer hardware and software allows for the exchange of more and more of what we do and what we buy through the Internet.

The technology unfortunately -- or perhaps fortunately -- may have left traditional notions of equity and justice behind. Hand in hand with these technological changes will come changes in the laws which govern us and the way that courts apply them.

One of the most basic questions of any court system is and always has been which court has the right to decide a dispute between two people. With the advances in technology and the use of cyberspace the question now sometimes comes down to "When two people who use the Internet have a dispute relating to their use of the Internet, and the only connection between them has been the Internet, what court decides the dispute?" The two of them can be hundreds or thousands of miles or even continents apart and the court nearest one of them may be very far away from and inconvenient for the other.

If you do business over the Internet, do you think that someone who disputes your rights can sue you where his or her (not your) Internet connection is located? If you run a one-person store in Hawaii or Australia, do you expect to be sued in Ohio by someone in Ohio who encountered you over the Internet? Probably you have never thought about this, and probably your initial answer will be no, but if so you may be in for a surprise.

At the end of July, 1996, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit determined that CompuServe could sue in Ohio an individual from Texas who conducted what seems to have been a small, part-time business only through the Internet and interacted with CompuServe via modem. CompuServe has it corporate headquarters in Ohio. In CompuServe v. Patterson, 89 F.3d 1257 (6th Cir. 1996), the Court dealt with the question of whether or not CompuServe could sue one of its subscribers in Ohio -- even though the subscriber was an individual (not a large business) from Texas and had never physically been to Ohio -- but had visited (so to speak) CompuServe in Ohio by using the Internet. The Court had to answer the question, did Ohio's courts have jurisdiction over the out-of-state subscriber?

How do courts in the U.S. obtain "jurisdiction" over parties who have a dispute, that is, which court has the right to decide a particular dispute between those particular parties? Most disputes occur between people located near one another in the same state or who at least interacted with one another face-to-face generally in a particular locale, so that it seems fair to say the court in that locale should decide their dispute. But localized interaction between people is not the norm of the Internet. In the U.S., the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution usually determines when and where an individual may be subject to a civil lawsuit in another state. The basic rule, announced by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1945 in International Shoe Co. v. Washington, 326 U.S. 310, requires examination of the facts of the case, to determine if the nonresident defendant has sufficient contacts with the state in which the suit was filed such that the exercise of jurisdiction by a court in that state would comport with "traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice." Courts have gone to great lengths to determine whether a person's activities in a state were enough so that it would not offend these traditional notions to allow an aggrieved party to haul that person into the courts of a state where he is not a resident. The determination was made based upon (i) whether the person purposefully availed himself of the privilege of acting in the foreign state, (ii) whether the subject of the suit arose from the person's actions in that foreign state, and (iii) whether the person's acts (or the consequences thereof) in the state are sufficient to make it "reasonable" to bring that person into the foreign court.

But, how then do "traditional notions" apply to something like the Internet? Let us return to the decision in CompuServe v. Patterson. CompuServe brought suit in its home state of Ohio against an individual who lived and worked in Texas and developed shareware apparently as a side business. The Texas software developer sold and marketed his shareware over the Internet via CompuServe's shareware service. He used the CompuServe service by modem from his home computer in Texas and he subscribed to CompuServe via that modem connection. The Texas shareware developer also sent several messages to CompuServe through e-mail, claiming that CompuServe software products infringed upon his rights. The e-mail messages originated from the shareware developer's desk in Texas and ended up at CompuServe's Ohio headquarters. Because the Texas developer used the CompuServe shareware service, Internet surfers who downloaded his software got it off a CompuServe server in Ohio.

CompuServe, in what might be viewed as a preemptive strike, sued in Ohio for a declaration by the Ohio court that CompuServe did not violate the Texas developer's rights. Obviously, for the Texas shareware developer to assert those rights (or whatever rights he may have), he must either prove his case in Ohio or convince the Ohio court that it lacks jurisdiction to decide the issue. Now that the Court has determined that suit in Ohio is proper, the Texas shareware developer must now find an Ohio lawyer and probably also travel to Ohio in order to protect the rights he claims to his software.

Incidentally, the Texas shareware developer told the Ohio trial court that he had never been to Ohio and that the only connection he had at all to Ohio was the fact that CompuServe happened to be there. Yet, the Court of Appeals found that his electronic visits to Ohio subjected him to the jurisdiction of the Ohio courts. In announcing its decision, the Court of Appeals stressed that the Texas shareware developer "consciously reached out from Texas to Ohio to subscribe to CompuServe, and to use its service to market his computer software on the Internet." Further, it found that he "originated and maintained contacts with Ohio" when he e-mailed CompuServe at its Ohio headquarters concerning his claims. Finally, the Court admitted that "it may be burdensome for [the Texas shareware developer] to defend a suit in Ohio, but he knew when he entered into [the agreement] with CompuServe that he was making a connection with Ohio . . . ."

Obviously, the practical effects of the CompuServe decision still must play themselves out. Courts no doubt will continue to grapple with similar jurisdictional questions as our cyber-"visits" from state to state and country to country continue to grow exponentially.

The CompuServe decision tells those who use the Internet for business (or for anything that could give rise to a legal claim) that they had better very carefully consider the transactions entered into over the Internet, because while the other side of the world may be only a mouse-click away, defending an action in a foreign court is an entirely different matter.