Take a look at the size of salaries being offered for
Internet-literate legal eagles - if they're not for you, they're
liable to be against you...
At the beginning of this month, the long arm of the law got even
longer. It now stretches into the IT domain in ways that IT
managers shouldn't - but do - ignore.
On 2 October, the Human Rights Act was officially incorporated
in English law. At the same time, a survey by Cameron McKenna
showed that only 18% of FTSE 350 companies had amended their e-mail
policies in line with the Act, while a survey by Content
Technologies showed that 58% of companies didn't even have an
e-mail policy.
That kind of laxity is dangerous and the new Act makes it even
more so. Suppose you find pornographic material stored in e-mails
on an employee's hard drive. Clear grounds, you might suppose, for
the summary dismissal of the employee, aware as you are (aren't
you?) that anybody who saw and was offended by the material could
bring a case of sexual harassment against your company. But it may
not be quite as simple as that. In fact, the Obscene Publications
Act 1959, the Data Protection Act 1998, the Employment Relations
Act 1999 and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, let
alone the Human Rights Act 2000, could all have bearing on the
situation.
Let's then turn to law as it applies to e-commerce, an issue as
evident and multi-faceted as a rainbow and about as substantial,
with the crock of gold at the end of it beckoning flocks of legal
eagles. How much do you honestly know about the extent to which UK
publishing (digital rights management), financial and sale of goods
legislation might apply to an international transaction completed
over the Internet? If things go wrong, who does what to whom, where
and when, legally? And in what way, if at all, does the new Act
affect all that?
The last question is easy. All existing UK law must be
interpreted to be compatible with the Human Rights Act. That means
reconsidering potentially everything you previously knew - if you
thought you already knew anything pertinent, that is. It means, for
example, that a company may no longer have the automatic right to
review employees' e-mail, let alone dismiss them instantly or
summarily (there's a legal difference) because of it.
I'm not going to try to provide any definite answers, not least
because I'm not legally trained. If you based any incorrect
decisions on the assumption that my comments were legally qualified
advice (which they aren't), you could sue me.
My point is that the Human Rights Act is the latest legal bomb
in an internationally expanding minefield. And if you're not
actively taking good legal advice to guide you through it, your
organisation are in serious danger of suffering painful injury to
delicate parts of its financial anatomy. If you think I'm
exaggerating, take a look through the legal press at the size of
salaries being offered for Internet-literate legal eagles; if
they're not for you, they're liable to be against you.
For some time now I've found it amazing how many users fail to
put IT-related contracts routinely through legal scrutiny before
signing them: outsourcing contracts, software contracts, and so on.
The Human Rights Act should serve as a wake-up call to repair all
such omissions and get your act together, legally speaking. The
extent to which you ignore this warning will be a measure of your
risk exposure - and an indecent degree of exposure is in itself a
legal offence.