This briefing provides advice and guidance on IT contracts for senior management within the British IT sector. It addresses issues of current concern relating to IT contracts where there are key commercial, financial or legal interests at stake, or where the risks are high. It also deals with overcoming identifiable pitfalls in IT contracts and provides technical tips and common sense advice.Contents include: * Features of IT contracts & the commercial environment* The legal environment affecting IT contracts* Contracts and standard terms* Contracts for software licensing and transfer* Contracts for system development* Contracts for service provision* Contracts made on-line* Security, data protection and confidentiality contract provisions* General IT contract provisions

This volume of Law in Context focuses on the legal issues raised by the digital revolution. It presents new perspectives on familiar questions about the effectiveness of intellectual property in promoting innovation and protecting privacy. The articles address such issues as: heritage and cultural property protection in an age of instant reproduction and voracious knowledge exploitation; the difficulties faced by developing nations and by China in dealing with intellectual property; cyberspace and the implications for privacy law; improving the patent system to promote innovation; and copyright and digitisation processes in New Zealand museums. This volume goes beyond conventional wisdom and disciplinary orthodoxy to re-evaluate innovation, communication and law in an era of rapid technological change. Intellectual Property and New Technologies is a special issue (Volume 29 No 1) of the journal Law in Context. You can purchase a single copy of this issue through this page, or subscribe to the journal from the journal page.

Inventions can be patented, knowledge can be protected through the law of trade secrets, but information itself? The form or medium of information can be protected by copyright but information itself is more difficult. It cannot be owned. So how can the law effectively protect it?Both the law - and hence the commercial realities - remain uncertain. Professional advisers must at least be fully up to speed with what the law currently says [and doesn't say] and what the implications are.This Special Report examines the current EU [and so EEA] law on the legal protection of databases, including the sui generis right established when the European Union adopted its Directive 96/9/EC in 1996.