ILAWS launch

I attended the launch for ILAWS, a new IT centre at the University of Southampton led by our very own PanGloss. The introductory lecture was given by Professor Chris Reed, who talked about making business online, where he concentrated on legal issues ranging from some of the traditional IT subjects to rather more interesting Web 2.0 issues.

As is usually the case with introductory lectures, the subject tends to be rather on the broad side, but there were some interesting points made. Particularly, flags of convenience for electronic commerce joints and risk management in an online environment. A point that I usually make is that a lot of activities online are probably a crime somewhere in the world, and assessing risk is usually a problem for users. Professor Reed made a point about the pitfalls of managing such activities online, and issued a word of warning.