Summary

The book sums up the many years experience of the authors in the theory of Information Law.

The new information technologies raised questions about the nature of property, intellectual property, and information as an object of legal regulation.

The goal of the book is to analyze the interrelation between the existing concepts of information and property.

The codified conception of property as a bundle of sticks (possession, use and disposal) is still dominant in the Russian academic society.

However, this traditional view of property fails to describe many relationships involving information, first and foremost because it cannot express the full range of property rights.

The possible get-out, as suggested, requires the replacement of traditional concept with an alternative, which extends the old, fixed and inflexible limits of the notion 'property'.

Without taking into consideration the foreign legal practice and historical analysis, no one may give clear answers to the question, how information can be treated as somebody's property.

To come to the legal understanding of information it should be studied as a phenomenon of modern culture, inherent part of everyday life and topical matter of scientific and philosophical disputes.

The development of the Internet added a lot of material for interpretation and analysis.

Thus, the question on the information as a legal institute deals primarily with the legal regulation of subjects, which appeared and formed along with the Internet era.

So the logic of the book can be well explained: it explores the 'new and old' - new for the Russians, but old for the historians - concept of the property rights in the context of information society and refers for this purpose to the Internet as its most relevant environment.

The last chapter of the book presents the implications of these discoveries for the improvement of legal protection of information in the Russian Federation.

The array of foreign legal contexts explored in the book, authors believe, could be helpful to realize better all vices, lacks and failures of the Russian legal practice and to specify their advisable changes.