To avert government regulation, industries sometimes adopt self-regulatory strategies. U.S. businesses have, for example, tended to argue against government regulation of what they can do with personal information about customers in their possession by adopting fair information practices guidelines. When governments do regulate information flows, they generally try to identify the purposes for which the regulation was adopted. This helps those attempting to implement or interpret the law to understand what it might mean as applied to particular circumstances. Often, governments can only provide general guidance about legal norms and some balancing principles with which to apply them.
Every state has laws to protect trade secret cases.
Yet it is not always clear what is and isn't a trade secret, as companies don't always label the information as such. In such cases, judges must balance the interests of employers in maintaining exclusive control over information that is critically important to operation of that business as well as the ability of skilled employees to reuse some of the knowledge they have acquired on one job when they move to their next job. We expect you will find some themes from the first half of the course that will resonate with themes developed in the second half of the course. The law and codes of ethics are very clear examples of social constructs that frame how information is viewed and what can be done with it. Some of the same challenges that information technologies pose for the structure of organizations and their practices also arise in the context of formation of law and information policy.