Issues 2005 (2&3)
Editorial

By Professor Abdul Paliwala

 

This combined Issue 2-3 for 2005 consists of two sections. The first section consists of 5 refereed articles and the second of 6 articles from the Workshop on Legal Aspects of E-Government in Vilnius Lithuania 2003.

The five refereed articles deal with a variety of current concerns in information technology and law. Two articles deal with important but different issues in intellectual property law. Galloway and Komaitis deal with the tension between EU competition law and intellectual property law in the case of conflict between rights of trademark owners and domain name registrants. May’s paper deals with more fundamental issues in terms of the relationship between the nature of information society and commodification. He explores the idea of ‘openness’ as a counterveiling dynamic to commodification of intellectual property rights and suggests this dynamic is transforming the relationship between property rights and ‘free’ information. Adler explores another aspect of ‘Free’ information in relation to access to legal information and implications for the rule of law in Cambodia. Spyware provides a converse perspective to the generally libertarian concept of ‘Free’ information in the potential invasion of privacy rights. Howard and Lim provide a technical introduction to spyware, examine the way it has fared in the jurisdictions of Australiaand the United Statesand consider strategies for national and global regulation. Apistola and Lodder deal with the different issue of knowledge management in law firms and suggest that their taxonomies of the core elements of knowledge management will help individual lawyers in law firms to clarify their needs regarding the use of IT.

We are particularly grateful to Fernando Galindo for facilitating the publishing of the revised papers from the Workshop on Legal Aspects of E-Government. The Workshop was co-organized by the Mykolas Romeris University of Lithuania, the University of Zaragoza(Spain) and the Association for the Promotion of New Information Technologies and e-Commerce (APTICE). The Workshop was an initiative of the Legal Framework for the Information Society (LEFIS) and was supported by the European Commission and the Socrates Erasmus Thematic Networks Projects Programme. E-Government or Governance have become an important part of the Information or Network Society and these articles are part of an emerging intellectual consideration of the issue by the LEFIS network (<www.lefis.org>).

We hope you enjoy this latest edition and we look forward to receiving your valuable contributions to the journal in due course. Our apologies for publication delays which were caused by technical circumstances. Please send your articles to Brent Hanks.

 

Professor Paliwala teaches in the Faculty of Law at the University of Warwick.
He can be reached at: <A.Paliwala@warwick.ac.uk>.

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This is an Editorial published on 8 February 2006.

Citation: Editorial 2005 (2-3). The Journal of Information, Law and Technology (JILT).
<http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/elj/jilt/2005_2-3/editorial/>.

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