RESEARCH General Law

COMPUTERS & THE LAW
Law behind the curve on legal issues raised by burgeoning Internet

Mark Reutter, Business Editor
(217) 333-0568; mreutter@uiuc.edu

7/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The ability of the Internet to destroy time and space and national borders may look like utopia to computer engineers, but it all seems very nasty to lawyers.

From copyright infringement to privacy rights, the digital age is creating profound legal challenges, "but the law has been slow to catch up," two University of Illinois scholars point out. Untangling the rights of individual parties and harmonizing the rules for cross-border litigation between private parties will increasingly occupy the law profession and place strains on the courts and legislatures, Jay P. Kesan and Thomas S. Ulen, professors of law at the UI, argue.

"In our capitalist economy, property is at the base of our legal system, and with regard to the remarkable changes in society following in the train of the new technologies, it is intellectual property that will be the legal foundation of the new society."

Today’s science and technology are having effects on the law that are different from those of previous innovations. "Until recently, we could characterize the economy as being driven by physical assets and property that could be held or at least touched," Kesan and Ulen wrote in the University of Illinois Law Review. "Investment in physical capital was thought to be at the heart of the process of national economic growth.

"This is no longer the case. Now the fuel that powers the commercial engine is predominately intangible, comprised of concepts, applied principles and shared symbolism. Information about objects is quickly becoming more valuable than the objects themselves."

E-commerce is particularly vulnerable, and some companies have been forced to ban information over the Internet so as not to violate the laws of a particular country.

Protecting intellectual property and copyrights in countries with lax property protections is another serious issue. "Without effective enforcement, legal protections may not be worth the paper they are written on," Kesan and Ulen pointed out.

Still another problem is liability. Telecom firms and Internet-access providers are concerned that they would be liable under some country’s laws for content traveling over their networks. How to monitor and filter material over the Internet is a thorny problem with many different, if not conflicting, views.

On the other hand, easy access to multitudes of protected works in cyberspace has created an environment for infringement on a mammoth scale. "Literally billions of dollars are lost annually to electronic pirates,"
according to the UI scholars, especially to "cybersquatters" who register a particular domain name in order to extort a substantial cash settlement from the trademark owner to relinquish the URL.

Their law review paper was titled "Intellectual Property Challenges in the Next Century."