Information Technology and Traditional Legal Concepts

Information technology has served to revolutionise the use, exchange, and protection of information. The growth of the internet, the convergence of technologies as well as the development of user generated and social networking sites has meant that significant amounts of person data as well as copyrighted materials are now readily accessible. Within this changing cultural landscape the legal concepts of privacy, data protection, intellectual property and criminality have necessarily had to develop and adapt. In this volume a number of international scholars consider this process and whether it has merely been a question of the law adapting to technology or whether technology has been forced to adapt to law. Technologies have wrought a culture shift it is therefore apposite to ask whether legal concepts, as reflections of culture, should also change. It is in this volume where papers on privacy date protection, intellectual protection and cyber crime begin address this question.

This book was published as a special issue of International review of Law Computers and Technology.

Richard Jones, Associate Editor, International Review, Law Computers and Technology has taught in areas of intellectual property and information technology law. He was invited by the Council of Europe to work in this area and awarded a Research fellowship with IBM to investigate legal expert systems. He was Chair of the British and Irish Legal Educational Technology Association (BILETA) and a Council member of the Society for Computers and the Law.

Roksana Moore, Lecturer in Law and Intellectual Property, School of Law, University of Southampton is researching in vendor liability for software defects. Her research interests also include software patents, ICT standardisation and traditional knowledge and intellectual property.