Digital Law is concerned with new elements for all the areas of the legal thought: Civil Law, Commercial Law, Constitutional Law, Contractual Law, Economic Law, Financial Law, Authorial Law, International Law and others.
The acronyms, usually referred to as “soup of letters” by the professionals of technology, reinforce the necessity that the professionals of law have to study more deeply those areas so that they have the capacity of creating instruments to fulfill the needs of the market.
Since the changes in processors, in graphic interfaces and in technologies of data transmission, all of that has converged into other technologies that create a technological dependency not only for companies, but for all the consumers that send a message over the cell phone, surf on the Internet and communicate through e-mails. This dependency has reached all of us, no matter the race, color, belief or professional formation and, at no time, it limits itself only to the Internet. The digital world is broader than that.
Every technology has its benefits, however, it also offers its risks, and with digital law it is not different. The number of crimes or breaches that go against authorial law rises every day, the brands and patents, the consumer's right, the theft are many times covered by a numerical anonymity that is limited to an IP number. For the laymen it is as if there were no criminal to such an act, but that is not true, since it is possible to supervise, control and prove everything that happens in the digital world.
When the technology, old or new, becomes common there is the need for the law to address the conducts of that specific technology, as a way of maintaining security and preserving the legal ordering.
I do not believe in the creation of specific laws to regulate SPAM or to prevent defamation over the Internet, since the current laws include such activities and all the rest. What differentiate the digital universe are the matters of space, time and truthfulness of the proof. It is important to emphasize that technology evolves daily and that the legal process is not as fast as those needs.
The rules, the ways of behavior are imposed by the suppliers that need to create system to avoid chaos in the use of those technologies, and those rules, or devices, which act in these conducts, are created by those who have a higher knowledge of the technology in question, the so called experts.
The contracts that propagate over the Internet are common nowadays. The come in the form of an acceptance in order to avoid the allegation of ignorance of the rules or even the law itself. The digital law is a fusion of all areas of law which apply more efficient solutions to the digital matters, it regulates this universe, many times cyber universe, where we do not use pulse, but “air time”, where we do not use bugs, because there are no wires, where we do not have to deal with physical theft, but with the installation of the Trojan Horse Virus in our pc.
The idea that it is more difficult to constitute proof in the digital world is wrong, since all we do in computers, or even in the network itself, is accessible or traceable in some way or another. It is not difficult to locate an IP number from the other side of the world, for that there are softwares, logs and experts that make the materialization of digital proofs possible. Those who limit digital law to the Internet are mistaken, since there are countless connectivity devices available in the market for the users, all of which are part of the digital universe. For instance, the DVD, the MP3, the digital players, VoIP and an enormous universe of hardware and software which transform this world into an endless source of changes, where the new becomes obsolete in a very short period of time.
Digital Law has its own characteristics, it is dynamic, self-regularized, it has its on legal foundation, it constantly uses analogies and many of the solutions proposed are random, such as “may the best expert win”. Digital law covers the principles of each country and it is not new, it is only a dynamic area of law which has been evolving as new technologies are launched. Rigidity could not possibly reach justice in technological matters, since those matters require energy.
