Introduction

The Internet is becoming increasingly significant as a commercial medium for businesses in almost every market sector. It is an exceptional medium for providing information to and communicating with customers and for extending market reach at minimal costs. Goods and services can be offered and sold worldwide. If the goods or services can be provided in digitised form, then they can be delivered directly over the internet. This facility for bypassing the "middle man" (or "disintermediation" as it is rather inelegantly called), thereby allowing suppliers to deal directly with their customers, offers enormous potential for cost savings and for a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between producer and consumer.

The Internet is essentially borderless. It provides no inherent barriers to trade in the form of on-line Customs posts or import tariffs that otherwise exist in the real world. This obviously has great prospects for benefit in terms of breaking down or circumventing obstacles to market entry, but it also gives rise to new forms of infringement of hard-won intellectual property rights, particularly of copyrights and trade mark rights. The nature of the technology itself also changes established conceptions of how and when intellectual property rights are actually "exploited".