The posters for the current identity-swap movie, Being John Malkovich, ask: "Ever wanted to be someone else?" But this dream is now available - at the level of names - for anyone with a PC and a modem.
There is a dizzying moment when creating an email identity for yourself through one of the numerous free internet access CDs handed out these days, when you realise that you could become anyone you want. Tony Blair, Zoë Ball, JD Salinger: turn yourself into any of these people, send messages around the world as them and the technology will do nothing to stop you. The only limit is the credulity of your correspondents.
The ease of impersonation which email allows has always seemed to me a symbol of the moral irresponsibility inherent in the internet. But this week the hands-free stance has been challenged by some key legal cases. The award of damages and costs of around £500,000 against the internet service provider Demon - for failing to remove libellous remarks about a physicist posted on a website - coincided with a case in which a student was fined for accidentally emailing a pornographic picture to users other than the recipient he intended. In both cases, representations in cyberspace were treated to the same limitations as printed or spoken material.
The internet has often been sold as circumventing the usual rules. Beyond the mad, but already receding, period when the City seemed to believe that dot.com companies were exempted from the usual laws of economics, the worldwide web was seen as a liberating force. Artists would be freed from the tyranny of selection by professional corporations. Write a novel, record a song or shoot a film and - if the artistic establishment won't produce it - put it on the net. But electronic distribution was also seen as a challenge to the dictatorship of taste. Pornography no mainstream shop would stock is widely open to downloading.
A nd the laws of libel - which so tormented writers and speakers in the world of paper and airwaves - were somehow believed to be suspended. Some local councils, sick of cleaning off graffiti, designated walls where it was tolerated. Many advocates of cyberspace saw the web as such a wall. Service providers like Demon held to the view that they merely provided the bricks. They could not be responsible for what was written on them.
Some net-heads genuinely believed in freedom of speech and information. But there was also a practical aspect to this enthusiasm. Abuse someone in a newspaper and - even if the remark slips past the editors and in-house lawyers - the culprit's cutting will be on the victim's desk within hours. Launch a hostile comment into cyberspace and you could cynically assume it would never be traced. The internet was the perfect haystack in which to needle your enemies.
But this view that the web placed a parallel universe for anarchists alongside the familiar policed and lawyered world found no support in court this week. Media lawyers disagree on the implications of the libel judgment against Demon. If the company was being punished merely for failing to remove the material (the physicist had asked several times for remarks to be cut), then the result will merely be a tamer cyberspace in which powerful figures will be able to delete comments they dislike. But if Demon was censured for having allowed the libel to be displayed at all, then shares in internet service providers are about to become an even riskier investment.
One inevitable outcome, however, will be cyberspace ambulance-chasers: insult-trufflers who will surf the world's websites and bring hostile comments to the attention of those who may wish to sue and split the proceeds.
It was never clear to me, though, why anyone believed that writing words in elec tronic limbo would not constitute publication. After all, one of the most famous recent libel cases - Lord Aldington v Tolstoy - resulted from words printed in a pamphlet. And the internet is merely a very large and hi-tech leaflet.
You also don't need to be a luddite (I write and send thousands of words in cyberspace each week) to feel that the internet needs some controlling. This week, the novelist Jeanette Winterson revealed that she is taking legal action in a test case against a Cambridge academic, Mark Howarth, who has registered the web addresses of writers (including jeanette.winterson.com) and now tries to sell them back their electronic identities. As with the email registrations mentioned above, you don't need to have a name to use it on a computer site. Ever wanted to be someone else? Mark Howarth wished to be 130 noted authors.
While there is a practical problem of baptismal duplication - some unknown Jeanette Winterson in, say, New Zealand has as much right to start a website as the author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit - it cannot morally or legally be right for a man to rob people's identities in bulk for profit. A name is a basic human right: a point made by prisoners who refuse to answer to numbers. Jeanette Winterson should be cheered to the door of the court. A victory for her would - like this week's internet libel case - challenge the silly and dangerous fairytale that computers are beyond rules. Why should people lose their right to name and reputation when they step through a computer portal?
