The greatest irony of the “information age” is that its primary delivery vehicle, the Internet, was conceived by the U.S. Defense Department as a top secret Cold War communication device. Now it is the most open, ungoverned information exchange in history with purists proclaiming it anarchistic. How long can this perception of lawlessness prevail? Not long, if capitalism has its way. For amidst all the revved-up, reckless traffic on the information highway is an increasing number of individuals and companies trying to make a buck. They need to know that the laws that protect them from being defrauded, defamed, or robbed in the real world can protect them in the digital one. How secure they should feel, and how Canadians and Americans can envision the laws that may one day govern our high-tech frontier is examined in Cyberlaw: What You Need to Know About Doing Business Online by David Johnston, Sunny Handa, and Charles Morgan.

The authors of this introduction to Internet legal issues are all connected with the faculty of law at McGill University. The trio collaborated in 1995 on Getting Canada Online: Understanding the Information Highway, and the first quarter of Cyberlaw updates many of the business topics and Internet basics found in that book.

The legal meat of Cyberlaw lies beyond this introductory section in chapters four to eleven. Here Johnston, Handa, and Morgan explain how well, or how poorly, conventional common or civil laws address issues like governance and intellectual property in an unconventional medium. In major chapters on contracts, tort liability, and conflict of laws, Cyberlaw also provides fascinating historical context to its subject matter. Readers who have written neither the GMAT nor the LSAT come to appreciate how judgments developed to streamline merchant trade in the Middle Ages may also underpin statutes overseeing cybertrade in the next millennium.

Though Johnston, Handa, and Morgan do a fine job explaining what an individual or a business should consider when establishing a presence on the Internet, they have relatively few legal cases upon which to base their arguments. This leads to much speculating, anticipating, and analogizing existing legal theories to electronic commerce. And while the book is well annotated, and includes a glossary and a bibliography of 200 or so books, articles, and case studies, there is no mention of web sites devoted to legal and business issues online, such as UCLA’s Online Institute for Cyberspace Law and Policy.

These criticisms aside, Cyberlaw is an important and timely companion for lawyers, Internet service providers, web publishers, policy makers, and business people who need to know what to expect when navigating this integral, yet often intangible area of our modern age.