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In the opinion of some commentators, crime has always been with us and computers are simply another tool criminals use to commit their offences. Accordingly, in one of the first books to place computers and law in the proper context, Colin Tapper asks the rhetorical question why there is “any more need for a book on the law of computers than there is for on the law of typewriters or tuning forks”(van der Merwe 2008, p. 61).

Tapper’s answer boils down to the fact that computers were playing an increasingly important role in the community, that they were qualitatively different from anything else that had come before, and that traditional legal principles were inadequate to deal with the legal problems caused by computers (Ibid). Well into the twenty–first century these arguments seem more valid than ever. Not only has “the computer” been expanded into a wide-ranging and dynamic new concept called “information …