E-Commerce Law

To the contention that the advent of electronic commerce demands a near-complete jettisoning of existing laws affecting business transactions, the authors of the penetrating 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 "e;what holds off line, holds online"e;, 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 online context;- defining the moment of effectiveness of an e-mail notice;- "e;good faith and fair dealing"e; online;- the Internet as a zone of "e;socially responsible spontaneity"e;;- 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 sometimes astonishing, sometimes unsettling insights represent today's clearest, best-informed thinking on the legal aspects of this all-pervasive feature of contemporary society.E-commerce Law is published in cooperation with the E.M. Meijers Institute of Legal Studies of Leiden University Faculty of Law.