Undergraduate Lecture Series (H5): Cloud Computing Meets Real-World Law

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From Facebook to Flickr and from GMail to the UK government’s proposed G-Cloud, cloud computing has been attracting substantial attention. There is no shortage of hype but there are also signs that a paradigm shift may be taking place. That lawyers, regulators and courts are struggling to keep up should come as no surprise, as a tendency for those groups to lag behind technological developments seems to be endemic. The challenges are particularly acute in this case, however, as most laws are grounded in concepts of jurisdiction that depend on activities being mapped onto conventional geographical and political boundaries.

In this lecture we will look at what cloud computing is and why it is generating such excitement before considering some of the key legal and regulatory challenges that it has given rise to. Recurring themes will include whether you can control where and how your data are processed in cloud environments and whether, in practice, that is likely to matter anyway.