Welcome to Media and Technology Law, a Guardian venture in association with international law firm Taylor Wessing. We have teamed up with Taylor Wessing to bring you a series of features exploring the arena of new media, technology and its interface with the law.
This is a fast-moving, compelling world and developments within Web 2.0 often have a bearing on all of us. But is the law keeping up?
Over the next 12 months, we will be examining the most pressing new media and technology legal issues, from intellectual property law in the digital economy, to product placement in the wake of TV and internet convergence, through to freedom of speech on the web, privacy and gambling. We will take a look at net neutrality and analyse data harvesting techniques such as scraping and aggregation. We'd also like to hear from you, so post comments on anything that interests you.
We'll be uploading video interviews on hot topics in this sector throughout the year, but we kick off with features on two of the most fascinating, and legally fraught, areas. We explore the complexities of cloud computing and the phenomenon of "astroturfing".
In PR, astroturfing denotes the fake campaign, that of artifice, pure and simple. The term is borrowed from the name of plastic football pitches which were, after a brief spell of popularity among a few football clubs in the 1980s, eventually outlawed by the FA. Might the contemporary PR practice be banned one day? Read on, and let us know what you think.
