I came to information technology law through intellectual property, and I came to intellectual property through an interest in logos, design and iconography. It was really my interest in the creativity involved in logos and the creative effort required in creating new brand names that initially drew me. That then led me to the very important question of how does one protect that new brand name or new business logo once created. The answer, of course, lies in trade mark law. But from there my interest was also kindled in the wonders of additional creative works, copyrights and copyright law. This would include particular interest in written creative works and software developments, and the licenses and other contracts which surround the commercial exploitation of software, etc. The variety and complexity of these licences and contracts continues to expand.
I suppose ultimately there are so many legal, commercial, and policy cross overs between information technology law and intellectual property law that it is difficult to look at one without also considering the other. Of course there are many areas of each which are distinct and do not cross over, but the significance of the crossovers that do exist cannot be ignored.
Some might also posit that information technology law and commercialisation as we know it would not exist without the law and protections of intellectual property law.
Perhaps until very recently many might answer this by referring to the many new individual advances in respective technologies, new software, new robots, new AI, new data collections of new forms of personal data, expanding aggregation of data and data profiling, and how these will affect data protection. Arguably the reality, or more important question, is more how data protection will influence each of the former advances.
There are many, many policy implications. One thing to consider will be the ability of individual new tech advances to arrive at applications which very, very quickly (and perhaps even instantaneously in some instances) gather data belonging to millions or billions of people. This greater than any corporate entity could have been capable of just years ago. There is more Big Bang than organic growth. In times past problem personal data use issues would often become known to users and to companies during the course of natural organic growth. In some of these new Big Bang advances, the opportunity to spot these problem issues will be absent. On one hand that exposes users and customer in a wholly new way. On the other hand, it places greater responsibility on companies developing these new Big Bang advances to carry out more data protection vetting than would be the case with past tech advances. This raises a number of implications.
However, while we may have been focused on future fiction issues arising from certain future tech advances, we must now have a much wider antenna due to recent advances creating data law frictions between the UK and EU; and separately due to the potential data law implications of Casey overturning Roe v Wade in the US. In an international world the effects of Brexit attacks on data protection are not fully limited to the UK, and US attacks on data protection and privacy are not fully limited to the US. Data laws and data protection compliance has just got a lot more complex, and future scoping a lot more uncertain.
