Stokes, Michael; Clark, Eugene --- "Editorial" [1996] JlLawInfoSci 11; (1996) 7(2) Journal of Law, Information and Science 135

• EDITORIAL

EDITORIAL

The first paper in this issue was given by the Hon Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG, President of the International Commission of Jurists, Justice of the High Court of Australia and Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Law and Information Science at the International Symposium on the Public Voice and the Development of International Cryptography Policy, Paris, France, Sept 1996. The paper considers the issues faced by the OECD in cryptography policy, including the need for controls in the interests of national security and law enforcement but concludes that for the OECD to remain true to its ideals, these interests must be attained within a context of constitutionalism, the rule of law and respect for fundamental human rights.

The next article, by Andrew Christie and Kenneth Fong, deals with the continuing attempts to apply the concepts of copyright to the non-code elements of computer software. The authors suggest a conceptual framework for categorising the non-code elements of software and argue that the approaches of the UK and US courts have been basically consistent with this framework. However, they are critical of the decision of the Federal Court of Australia decision in Data Access v Powerflex, which they argue adopted a different and indefensible approach, adopting a broad view of copyright protection which may prevent Australian manufacturers of software making their products compatible with or substitutable for other software products.

Katharine Reid, Eugene Clark and George Cho have contributed the first of a series of papers on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the law. The paper deals with legal risk management for the developers and suppliers of GIS, examining the legal risks involved, including the risk of liability for breach of contract, negligence, infringement of intellectual property rights, breach of the Trade Practices Act and the problems which arise when the government is the service provider and/or outsources the service. The authors discuss the various strategies available to GIS developers and suppliers to minimise the risk, stressing that legal risk minimisation has to be built into the operations of firms working in the area.

The Internet is posing major regulatory headaches for traditional forms of government which exercise jurisdiction over a defined territory because the Net ignores territorial boundaries in the way in which it is organised. In their articles, Assafa Endeshaw and Paul Nitschke and Lynden Griggs examine two aspects of the regulatory problems posed by the Net. Endeshaw considers the problems faced by Singapore in regulating its citizen's access to undesirable information on the Net. Singapore's policy aims to ensure that citizens and businesses embrace the Net while limiting access to undesirable material. Endeshaw analyses the existing law aimed at controlling other more conventional means of distributing information and concludes that they are ill-suited to regulating access to the Net. The article analyses the approach which Singapore is adopting, which is to impose a Code of Practice on service providers by means of licences administered by the Singapore Broadcasting Authority.

Nitschke and Griggs deal with the problem posed by banking on the Internet. They consider a number of different problems including the challenge to traditional contract notions such as offer and acceptance involved in transactions which are completed by eliciting responses from a computer without human intervention and the difficulty of applying territorial laws of contract to transactions on the Internet which are not obviously made in one place rather than another.

The issue concludes with a number of book reviews.

Michael Stokes and Gene Clark