The first ten years of my practice saw a need to learn copyright law, while the second ten years required a working knowledge of patent and trademark law, and some privacy law, with a little international trade law thrown in for good measure (including U.S. export control laws and regulations). It was also the time when state and federal legislators were beginning to craft a specialized field of computer crime laws.

By the late 1980s there was a convergence of sorts between the computer and entertainment industries, primarily through videogames and CD-ROM titles. As a result, computer lawyers needed to learn about how the entertainment industry worked – again, primarily in the contracting area — but also with regard to trademarks, Hollywood guilds and unions (e.g., SAG, DGA) and right of publicity issues. It also required computer lawyers to learn a lot more about copyright and contract law in areas that had previously been limited to entertainment lawyers.

Since the 1990s we have seen the subject matter of computer law expand rapidly. We have had to learn telecommunications law, expand our knowledge of trademark law to deal with domain name issues, cope with the ever-expanding body of federal and state laws that deal with the financial laws and regulations underpinning e-commerce, privacy issues, cybercrimes, and a host of other fields that computer lawyers (now called IT lawyers) never thought they would need to deal with.

Now, cloud computing may require us to learn another body of law – admiralty law. Google has recently filed patent applications for ocean-going data centers that would be housed on large merchant ships and could be moored off-shore or sail blissfully in international waters – avoiding the problems arising from pesky local or national laws. These ships would generate their own power, provide their own cooling, have Internet connectivity (presumably from satellites or undersea cables) and generally be subject to no country’s laws. But underlying this concept is still the fact that we are dealing with ships. And ships are subject to both national and international laws – namely admiralty laws.

Dang. Just when I thought I was done learning new laws, I now find myself having to delve into the esoteric area of admiralty law. Ships containing data centers are no different than, and are subject to the same laws as, any other ship. Thus, they are subject to such things as piracy, salvage and seizure (arrest). Yet their cargoes may be infinitely more valuable than any previous ship that has ever plied international waters – the data of thousands or tens of thousands of corporations, millions of individuals, and numerous governments from around the world. How much would that cargo be worth if it fell into the hands of Somali pirates? And what if the assets of even one customer (or the ship owner itself) were subject to a seizure (arrest) order, and the entire ship was seized and the computers taken off the grid?

Far fetched? It was only a couple of months ago that the FBI, looking for assets of a company that had allegedly defraud the local telephone company, raided and seized all of the servers in several Dallas-based data centers – putting all of the data centers’ customers, not just the target of the seizure, out of business. Now multiply that by thousands of customers whose access to their data could be lost if the ship on which their servers and data are housed is arrested under existing admiralty law.

So to all of you IT lawyers representing clients that have or will be entering into cloud computing “solutions” to their data processing needs – start boning up on your admiralty law. It looks like you’re going to need it.

The four courses being offered and the instructors are:

Comparative Electronic Commerce Law and Regulations
Instructor: Dr. Julia Hornle, Queen Mary College of Law, University of London

Comparative Information Privacy Law and Regulations
Professor Ian Walden, Queen Mary College of Law, University of London

Drafting Information Technology Agreements
Professor Michael D. Scott, Southwestern Law School (me)

International Cybercrimes
Professor Susan Brenner, University of Dayton School of Law

The program will run June 21, 2009-July 24, 2009 and is open to any law student from an ABA-accredited law school in the United States, Canadian law students and other law students who can demonstrate English language proficiency. The brochure is available here.

If you are a law student, a law professor, or someone who knows a law student who might be interested in the program, please let them know about it. Due to limited classroom space, the program is limited to 48 students. Students will be admitted to the program on a rolling basis starting in January 2009, so early application is essential. The application is available here.

This is the first summer abroad program to focus exclusively on international IT law, and will provide students an opportunity to learn how IT law is developing in the United States, Europe and elsewhere in the world. The program, which will run from June 21, 2009, to July 25, 2009 (5 weeks), will offer students the opportunity to earn six units of credit by selecting among four courses taught by an exceptional faculty of UK and US law professors:

• International/Comparative E-Commerce Law
• International/Comparative Information Privacy Law
• Drafting Information Technology Agreements, and
• Current Developments in International Internet Law.

The program will take advantage of its location in London — a major business, commercial and legal center — through field trips to a variety of local institutions, as well as guest lectures and visits with some of the city’s leading IT law practitioners. Classes will meet four days a week, allowing students ample opportunity to explore London and other European cities. The program meets all ABA requirements for Foreign Summer Programs.

If you are a law professor who would like to get more information for his/her students or a law student interested in the program, please contact me at mdscott@swlaw.edu.

You can set up Twitter on your computer at work, or at home. I personally use an application called “Twhirl” which just sits on my desktop and receives “tweets” in real time, but there are other services as well.

More important for a lawyer, you can set up Twitter on your cellphone or PDA to receive “tweets” even when you are not in front of your computer. There are three legal microblogging services that have started on Twitter (and that I contribute to), which you may find of interest:

Internet Law microblog
Copyright Law microblog
Privacy Law microblog

Each of these microblogs sends short tweets on new developments in their area of law. Each tweet contains a short blurb and a link. There are generally no more than 3-5 tweets per day, so it shouldn’t overwhelm you with messages.

If you think one or more of these microblogs might be useful in your practice, just join Twitter.com and go to any or all of the links above and click on “follow”. It’s that simple.