Both legislation and common law play a key role in monitoring and protecting the rights of the public with regards to the use of technological advances made in the digital age.
As technology progresses, the law needs to progress, in turn, in order to protect the public and their rights in today’s ever-changing society. The digital age has called for alterations to be made to legislation to accommodate these new facets of society as “the nature and sheer weight of the advances made in this century, and the efforts made to exploit them, have placed great pressure on the law to respond with appropriate protective regimes�. (McKeough & Stewart, 1991).
An important area of law that has been affected by the growing needs of technology is that of intellectual property and copyright. “Intellectual property is a generic term for the various rights or bundles of rights which the law accords for the protection of creative effort� (McKeough & Stewart, 1991). Copyright and Intellectual Property law has evolved in an effort to meet the growing needs of the digital age. This has been illustrated through The Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) and The Copyright Amendment Act 1989 (Cth), which are both pieces of Australian legislation that have incorporated the new forms of technology that are constantly being introduced and integrated into modern society. “Copyright governed by The Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), protects the expression in material form of ideas or information�. (McKeough & Stewart, 1991).
Examples of the different areas of technology that are incorporated into the legal system in Australia include:
In Australia, we rely on the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) and the Copyright Amendment (Digital) Act 2000 (Cth) (enacted in 2001) which protects more of the technological advances made in society.
It can be said that the digital age sweeping through the natural evolution of modern society has called for the implementation of further las to govern out technologically-based community.
In turn, the Copyright Amendement (Digital) Act 2000 (Cth) (enacted in 2001) was innitiated and passed through parliament in order to help bring order and further governance to today’s society with regards to an increased regulation of copyright and intellectual property rights associated with technological advances. An area of note that is becoming more widely used is the internet (which is covered by this act to gove the authors of initernet works the right to reseve copyright).
