IT Law in Context: A Critical Overview

Commentators variously infer or describe the nexus of modern Information Technology law (hereafter, IT law) as lying with computers, software or the Internet: what they have in common is that they identify this nexus as being technological, not legal. One can regard IT Law, therefore, as sitting on the shifting sands of technology, rather than on the traditional, firm regulatory bedrock, which, naturally, poses some difficulty when trying to define what constitutes IT law. This mutability, in the view of the authors, means that the academic, the practitioner and the law-maker should all be cautious about trying to define IT law by reference to specific technologies (e.g. personal computers, the Internet, etc.). This, we would argue, is inflexible, technologically-determinist and is reflective neither of the history of IT law nor its future development. Instead, the authors posit that two general technological developments (and the unfolding legal responses to how their application evolves) define the boundaries of modern IT law: digitisation and the networked computer. Indeed, it is the combination of digitisation with the mass communicative characteristic of the networked computer that, in our view, has both expanded and decentralised the capacity to reproduce, control, distribute and publish information and that gives rise to the fast-moving nature and the regulatory challenges at the heart of modern IT law.