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RALEIGH – Law professors tackled the issue of freedom of speech and the internet at a UNC School of Law symposium Friday while the N.C. General Assembly looked at a bill making online posts subject to N.C. libel law.

Harvard Law professor and expert in information law and policy John Palfrey said there is a legal need for online regulation.

“The general impulse to seek to regulate this kind of Internet speech is completely right,” Palfrey said. “We need a sense of accountability in what people say online just as we have in the offline sense.”

But Palfrey warned there could be difficulties in enforcing a state law across a global medium, and he said there’s not always a need to alter current laws.

“The law applies in cyberspace just as it does in real space. So if someone says something that’s harmful and it’s also recorded in this way, and it’s similarly harmful and incorrect, you can be held liable for it,” he said.

The current wording of the Senate bill would also make slanderous online posts a criminal offense.

Legal experts in cybercrime said arguments can be made in support of such a law.

“Suppose you put up a Web site and accuse a high school teacher of being a pedophile. That could cause a lot of damage, and that might be the kind of thing that might be prosecuted. So the difficulty is that when you write a criminal law, trying to figure out how to control it so it’s not abused is the tricky part,” University of Dayton law professor and cybercrime expert Susan Brenner said.