Information & Communications Technology Law

The last decade has seen the introduction of computers and information technology at many levels of human transaction. Information technology (IT) is now used for data collation, in daily commercial transactions like transfer of funds, conclusion of contract, and complex diagnostic purposes in fields such as law, medicine and transport. The use of IT has expanded rapidly with the introduction of multimedia and the Internet. Any new technology inevitably raises a number of questions ranging from the legal to the ethical and the social.

Information & Communications Technology Law covers topics such as: the implications of IT for legal processes and legal decision-making and related ethical and social issues; the liability of programmers and expert system builders; computer misuse and related policing issues; intellectual property rights in algorithms, chips, databases, software etc; IT and competition law; data protection; freedom of information; the nature of privacy, legal controls in the dissemination of pornographic, racist and defamatory material on the Internet; network policing; regulation of the IT industry; problems of computer representation and the computational semantics of law; the role of visual or image-based legal ‘mental models’; general public policy and philosophical aspects of law and IT.