The Ever Growing Complexity of Regulating the Information Society

Richard's whole academic career has been devoted to the concepts of 'information' and 'informatics' in relation to the law. In my contribution I will concentrate on the first. My question will be: what is the information society and can we still regulate it by law? The size of this article forces me to give but a rough outline of the problems we have to face now and in the future. In so doing I have adopted, as a sort of Rawlsian 'original position', the following premise: in a civilized and mature information society, three basic principles apply to the correct legal handling of information. They are the principle of intellectual property, the principle of free flow of information and the principle that personal information is protected, also referred to as informational privacy. All three have been enshrined in fundamental rights, but these tend to compete. In this article I shall examine them selectively, confining myself to the question of whether European law still applies these principles in the correct fashion