Volume 6, Issue 1

New technologies often create novel social tensions that induce legal change. Two new information technologies: genetic testing and the Internet exert pressures on our normative conception of identity. Identity related tensions underlie a broad range of social and legal controversies. The article argues that the ubiquity of these tensions creates a need to elevate the legal interest of identity from the shadows of legal discourse to the center of the stage. Identity interests should be incorporated into our legal discourse in order to improve the social accommodation of the two information technologies through the resolution of these identity tensions. Part I of the article examines the conception of identity as a life narrative and its importance as a zone of normative concern. Part II of the article fleshes out the abstract identity argument by providing concrete legal examples involving the physician’s duty to warn in cases of genetic testing and gay anonymity on the Internet. Part III explains the failure to protect identity interests with traditional privacy tools and argues for the need to incorporate identity interests into the legal debate.

The emergence of the information society and the digital age have radically disturbed the balance contained in copyright law. Aware of the dangers for the exploitation of their rights created by new technical opportunities, right holders have constantly challenged the free zones within copyright. Especially the private copy exception seems to be particularlymenaced by the implementation of anti-copying measures (which are themselves protected by law) as well as by the three-step test, which seems to become a real judicial filter for the application of any exception in the digital environment. In reaction to this evolution, a real mobilization of the consumers wanting to enforce their “right of private copying” can be observed. This article analyzes whether there is such a right of the user and - if it is so - on which legal grounds. In a more general sense, it proposes a reflection on the future of the private copy exception in the digital world.

Absence of mandatory procedural rules in international arbitration gives the parties and arbitrators a large degree of freedom but also creates uncertainty. Coming fromdifferent legal backgrounds the participants’ different expectations as regards procedure can only be met by laying down ad hoc procedural rules which often compromise between common law and civil law evidentiary rules. The IBA Rules on the Taking of Evidence can be used as guidelines for that purpose.