Self-Business on the Web concerns mainly three types of activities:
1] Professional or individual services
2] Any kind of distribution business, which always starts tiny but may reach entrepreneurial sizes;
3] And auto-publishing or editing or exposing artistic works, which could be books, paintings, music, etc.
For the first and second groups, a service remains a service, a sale remain a sale whatever the tools or the media, which has been used to deliver them. In our classification, sales always concern object. Whatever the county, if the service has any materialized outputs, then the legal frame that applies to self-Business Models of service or distribution remains always valid,. When there is no material outputs in a service transaction, there's no visible frontier-crossing and unless both parties, the buyer and the seller, are acting legally according to their local regulations, it's a major issue to control all transactions.
For any self-Businessman, the Web is their preferred communication media for leveraging their activities. The frontier separating the World Wide Web and the Web Wild World is more than narrow: It's not physical, it's permeable and sometimes it depends on culture, religion and minds. But not alike any component of the Web, it must not remain virtual on a legal point of view! Business on the Web must comply with all local laws and regulations of countries where the buyers and sellers live!
Other issues appear with the third group of self-Business Models. They concern Rights Management and Authoring Rules. In classic physical publishing, the publisher usually controls and manages the copyrights. It's not the case with self-publishing. Moreover, the only existing or emerging laws have been elaborated for the "big business" of music and movie makers and not for the Web 2.0 "collaborartists"… Moreover, many countries have issued laws which are not ruling Web transactions but merely repressive decrees making confusions between the absolute necessity to fight hacking on one side and the need to protect the authors' rights on the other side. Although, the EU has proclaimed that access to the Internet is a fundamental individual right, many Western countries apply punitive access-ban to the Web for the trespassers.
But let's be optimistic with the communitarian “Creative Common” rights, which already become the most popular Rights Management Model! It works well on many sites, for example KNOL and Source Forge. Probably, once again, the general and extensive use will help states leaders to take the right decisions.
