To the contention that the advent of electronic commerce demands a near-complete jettisoning of existing laws affecting business transactions, the authors of the essays in this book answer: not so. Rather, the resolution to the challenge lies in the combination of existing legal elements from heretofore disparate disciplines, and the creation from these elements of a new field of legal principle and practice, a field that will nonetheless overlap with classical commercial law. Perhaps the most significant feature of this emerging body of law is that it is necessarily transnational, as e-commerce cannot be contained within national borders. Although there is a general consensus that "what holds off line, holds on line", there are circumstances that give rise to legal issues peculiar to the information technology environment.
These essays deal with some of these issues and other relevant matters, including the following: the country-of-origin principle in EU law; variations in national implementations of the European Directive on electronic signatures; civil liability of Internet service providers; negligence, damage, defective products, culpable wrongdoing and other tort issues in an on-line context; defining the moment of effectiveness of an e-mail notice; "good faith and fair dealing" on-line; the Internet as a zone of "socially responsible spontaneity"; protection of databases - how much is too much?; international private law issues in business-to-consumer disputes; and redefining the separate realms of litigation, legal advice and rule-making as e-commerce grows in the years to come. This book elaborates and updates a staff exchange that took place in 2001 among legal scholars from the Universities of Oxford and Leiden. Its insights represent some of the best-informed thinking on the legal aspects of this all-pervasive feature of contemporary society.