Mackay, Erin --- "Cyberspace Law, by Yee Fen Lim" [2007] ALRCRefJl 20; (2007) 91 Australian Law Reform Commission Reform Journal 67

• Cyberspace Law: Commentaries and Materials

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Cyberspace Law: Commentaries and Materials

Cyberspace Law: Commentaries and Materials is a comprehensive introduction to laws relevant to cyberspace. It provides an overview of legal areas as diverse as copyright, patents, electronic contracting, data protection, encryption, content regulation and taxation.

A valuable teaching tool, the book incorporates several extracts of relevant legislation, case law and academic commentary accompanied by extensive explanatory notes and questions for consideration and further research. Extracted materials are primarily Australian but several sections refer to comparative examples from jurisdictions such as Singapore and the United States. Fittingly, international developments and the role of international institutions are noted in the discussion of most topics.

There are at least two ways to approach the law of the internet—by attempting to apply existing laws and processes to cyberspace—or by endeavouring to create a new field of ‘internet law’ based on international negotiations and institutions. Lim prefers the latter approach and the second edition of her book goes further than the first in demonstrating the difficulties of accommodating regulation of online behaviour within traditional legal structures. The new, nuanced chapter dealing with Online Role- Playing Games brings together an examination of trade mark protection, design registration and virtual property rights, and both spam and spyware are examined in the new chapter dealing with Uninvited Material.

As the title suggests, this is a book that provides an introduction to cyberspace law. Its intention is not to suggest detailed models of internet regulation. However, the short introductory and concluding chapters draw together some important themes that could usefully underpin such an examination— the inevitable delay between technical development and legal response; the need to consider both law and technical controls in a regulatory framework; the changing nature of the connection between the territory of a nation state and jurisdiction; the increasing importance of international cooperation and development of international institutions; and the domination of such international structures by representatives of highly developed regions such as Europe and North America.

For an edition published in 2007, one notable oversight is the absence of significant discussion about the dramatic increase in user- generated content on the internet. In recent years, developments in computer programming have facilitated new information sharing and information organising practices to such an extent that the term ‘Web 2.0’ was coined in 2004 to reflect the evolution of cyberspace. This is a phenomenon that has been observed since the publication of the first edition of this book in 2002. References to ‘listeners’ and ‘speakers’ in chat rooms such as ‘ICQ’ are perhaps out-of-date for a society with a mounting addiction to social and business networking sites and, increasingly, ‘RSS’ feeds, tagging and social bookmarking.

Despite this, Lim’s thesis is ultimately supported. The impact of user-generated internet content on legal areas such as copyright and privacy further challenges the relevance of applying existing legal structures to cyberspace. Indeed, Lim’s book successfully sketches an introductory landscape for scholars new to the area, and provides an excellent starting point for further consideration of methods of internet regulation.

Erin Mackay