IT LAW

History of Information Technology

THE AMITY UNIVERSITY, DUBAI

BATCH:2020-2025

COURSE CODE:
LAW541
SUBMITTED BY: ISRAA ZAIDI
PROGRAMME NAME: B.A L.L.B(H)
AUD14779
 INTRODUCTION AND THE BEGINNINGS OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Information Technology is used to create hardware and software that is used to store, transfer display
information. Any piece of electronic technology that exists in the 21st century is a product of information
technology. For example, if you are watching TV that displays images and information – that is a piece
of information technology. A large bulk of information that is stored in a specific piece of technology
is said to be information technology.
The history of information technology dates to the 1800s when certain devices were created back to
store large amounts of information and to make calculations solving large sums. The abacus is the first
piece of information technology. The abacus was invented in Babylonia and was a mechanical device
that was used to perform mathematical calculations. It was one of the first devices of information
technology and gave the basic idea that a device would help in performing calculations
In the, the jacquard loom was developed that would enable looms to produce fabrics with intricate
designs. This system used punched cards that were fed into the loom to control weaving patterns. It was
one of those first devices that could be called a ‘machine’ that developed patterns, when given
instructions, computers that were built into the 20th century used this looming system of automatically
issuing machine instructions, but electronic devices ultimately replaced this method.
Towards the 1820s English mechanical engineer Charles Babbage -- known as the father of the
computer -invented the Difference Engine to aid in navigational calculations. This was regarded as the
first mechanical computer device. Then in the 1830s Babbage’s pupil Ada Lovelace, expanded on these
plans She brought these plans beyond simple math calculations and designed a series of operational
instructions for the machine -- now known as a computer program. The Analytical Engine would have
been the world's first general-purpose computer. The Analytical Engine was to be a general-purpose,
fully program-controlled, automatic mechanical digital computer. That would be able to perform any
calculation set before it.
In the 1890s, Herman Hollerith, an American inventor and statistician, utilized punch cards to send data
to his census-tabulating machine. This was an important precursor of the current electronic computer.
Hollerith's machine generated statistics by reading and sorting numerically encoded cards based on
perforation position. In 1940, German engineer Konrad Zuse created Z2, one of the world's first
electromechanical relay computers. It had extremely slow operating speeds that are unimaginable today.

The process of encryption and decryption also began during this time period, when the Germans
possessed the enigma machine, a famous encryption system utilized by the Germans during WWII to
convey coded messages. These computers intercepted and decrypted encrypted messages from German
cipher devices, and Alan Turing built the Bombe. This machine deciphered signals sent by the German
Enigma machine. Turing proposed that programmable instructions may be stored in a machine's
memory and used to perform certain tasks. This principle is at the heart of modern computing
technology.

In 1951, J. Lyons and Co. launched the LEO I computer, which ran its first business program that year.
Whirlwind, introduced by MIT in 1951, was one of the earliest digital computers capable of working in
real time. It was also the first computer that allow users to enter commands via a keyboard in 1956.

These were the days when information technology and computers were still in their infancy and
developing, and as time went on, new approaches to memory and information storage were discovered.
 THE LAWS OF IT IN THE 1950S – 1970S
After some time, Universities, government agencies, and defence facilities dominated computing IT in
the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. However, with the creation of office software like word processing and
spreadsheets, it also entered the business sector. As a result, there was a need for experts in the design,
development, maintenance, and adaptation of the hardware and software needed to support business
processes.
A multitude of computer languages were developed, and specialists in those languages also emerged.
Programmers for Oracle, SAP, and C emerged to run databases and create and maintain networking
software. These were in great demand, and this tendency is still present today, particularly in the fields
of compliance, AI, and cybersecurity.
In the 1960s the development of the following devices set the stage for an IT revolution:

• screens
• text editors
• the mouse
• hard drives
• fiber optics
• integrated circuits
• programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL

People's worry of privacy and security concerns was growing in spite of these advancements in the IT
sector. In an effort to create a more united America, the administration of President Lyndon Johnson
unveiled a plan to combine hundreds of federal databases into a single, centralized National Data Bank.
The mid-1960s was also regarded as the peak of mainframe computers that ran on punch cards. Within
the two decades after their creation, digital devices have demonstrated an astounding capacity to handle
vast amounts of data. There were no legal restrictions on the kind of data that could be gathered or by
whom, and a large portion of the data were personal, including medical records, military records, and
the kind of cereal that families purchased at the grocery store.
People's concerns about privacy were intensifying, and the threat posed by computer databases became
an important topic for media attention as mistrust of the government's Vietnam policy grew. The
National Data Bank had been ruined by the uproar. In the ensuing years, more than a hundred pieces of
data privacy legislation were introduced. The Freedom of Information Act (1967), the Fair Credit
Reporting Act (1970), and the Privacy Act (1974) were among the few that were passed; these were all
landmark laws that addressed peoples' right to know what information these databases contained. The
issue of whether this data should have been collected in the first place was not addressed by any.
The movement in favour of data transparency over data restriction was consistent with political and
legal traditions in the United States that went back well before the invention of computers.
 THE LAWS OF IT IN THE 70S AND 80S

Email's development in the 1970s drastically changed communications and IT. Email started off as a
test to check if two computers could communicate, but it quickly developed into a simple and quick
method for people to communicate. Although the term "email" was not coined until later, many of its
early norms, such as the use of @, are still in use today.
The internet and the World Wide Web are responsible for the development of many IT technologies.
But the contemporary internet is thought to have originated with the U.S. government-funded
ARPANET, which MIT scientists first imagined as an interplanetary computer network in the 1960s. It
was referred to as JANET in the UK.
From just four computers, the ARPANET expanded into an interconnected network of networks.
Ultimately, it resulted in the creation of Internet Protocol (IP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
This made it possible for remote computers to virtually converse with one another. Machine-to-machine
communication was also made possible by packet switching, which is the transfer of data from one
computer to another.
There were long debates in the 1970s and 1980s about whether computer software should be protected
by a sui generis system, a copyright system, or the patent system. Following these debates, it became
widely acknowledged that computer programs should be covered by copyright, while devices that use
software or inventions related to software should be covered by patents.
Patent law and copyright law offer distinct forms of protection. While a patent is an exclusive right
granted for an invention—a product or a process that offers a new way of doing something or a new
technical solution to a problem—copyright protection only covers expressions and does not extend to
ideas, procedures, methods of operation, or mathematical concepts as such.
After the issues of copyright and patent on software programs, came the issue of crimes being
committed with the use of a computer. The first federal computer crime statute was included in the
comprehensive Crime Control Act in the United States. However, this new statute created three new
federal crimes when it was passed.

• Knowingly accessing a computer without authorization

• having accessed a computer with authorization
• using the opportunity such access provides for purposes to which such authorization does not
extend
The crimes also committed had conditions that limited the statue to three specific scenarios that were
mostly tailored towards the government's interests:

• computer misuse to obtain national security secrets

• computer misuse to obtain personal financial records
• hacking into government computers.
 THE LAWS OF THE 90S

After the success of communicating via email, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide
Web—a sort of "internet" that allowed anyone to access a vast network of information. The Nokia 9000
Communicator made history in 1996 by being the first mobile handset with internet capability. At this
point, the first laptop computer, the first search engine for domain names, and the world's first search
engine were all accessible. Google, a massive search engine, was founded in the late 1990s
An open-source web content management system called WordPress was created at the turn of the
century. People were able to transition from being passive users of the web to active contributors,
publishing their own content.
The 1990s saw the explosion of the Internet, which fuelled e-commerce growth and brought it to the
attention of international policymakers. Early in the history of e-commerce, several potential advantages
were noted, including improved transaction management efficiency concerning inventory, supply chain
management, and customer support.
With the growth of e-commerce, businesses and consumers engaged in transactions online, so legal
systems were needed to facilitate these electronic transactions. Governments and legal international
bodies began developing laws to address issues like consumer protection, electronic signatures and
taxation.
The federal government started to realize that regulations covering these kinds of transactions were
necessary around the turn of the millennium. The statutory law that oversees contracts for the sale,
lease, and/or leasing of products is known as the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC). When it became
clear in the 1990s that e-commerce was here to stay, the UCC made the decision to start enforcing
regulations that controlled online retail sales.
A new law known as the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act (UCITA) was created in July
of 1999. This legislation is especially relevant if the retailer you work for sells computer software since
it provides guidelines for the exclusive licensing of computer information.[2] Online commercial
transactions can also be carried out with the use of electronic signatures. With the passage of the
Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act by Congress in 2000, the Clinton
administration validated the use of electronic signatures for online sales and leases of goods and
services.
When selling retail products online, store managers also need to be aware of additional restrictions
related to foreign purchases. The United Nations has done a good job of trying to give nations that have
agreed upon their international sale of goods trade regulations a general framework.
 LAWS OF THE 2000S

The field of information technology has grown rapidly since the creation of the internet. These days, IT
includes voice-activated gadgets quantum computers, tablets, and smartphones, and many more.
Originally developed in the 1960s, cloud computing is today an essential component of the IT plans of
many businesses. The idea of time-sharing, or sharing computer resources with several users
simultaneously, was developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore, by 1994, virtual services and
devices that function as actual computer systems were defined by the cloud metaphor.
But cloud computing didn't really take off until 2006, when Amazon Web Services (AWS) was
established. Most of the cloud computing market is currently held by AWS and its main rivals, Alibaba
Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. In the first quarter of 2021, the top three cloud
providers, AWS, Google, and Azure, accounted for 58% of all cloud spending.
The 2000s was a decade of change as online advertising exploded, the online environment became
fertile ground for innovative ways to both communicate with consumers or, for the malicious, to take
advantage of unwary consumers. The low barriers to entry allowed disrupters to enter the digital space
and forced traditional marketers to compete in this space or be left behind.
During this decade, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) expanded on the Commission's policy
statements of the 1970s and 1980s by publishing important business guidance documents that explained
how general principles of advertising law apply to issues arising in digital advertising, as well as
industry-specific guidance on advertising claim substantiation.
Advertising on the Internet: The Rules of the Road, as well as Dot Com Disclosures: Information About
Online Advertising, were published by the FTC in 2000 and provided extensive guidance on how to
make effective disclosures in the online environment and were updated in 2013 to reflect new trends in
advertising and marketing on new platforms, particularly mobile devices. Dot Com Disclosures, in
contrast to formal industry guides provided after public notice and comment, was released as informal
business guidance that has shown to be an agile and vital tool laying down rules of the road.
Without specific laws addressing online advertising, the FTC and the National Advertising Division
(NAD) used the general principles of advertising law to protect consumers and provide a level playing
field for businesses. It was also during this time that privacy and advertising law began to intersect. The
online environment became fertile ground both for innovative ways to communicate with consumers
but also for the large-scale collection of vast amounts of data from consumers as they surfed the Internet.
In 2009, the FTC amended its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in
Advertising, which reflected basic truth-in-advertising principles that endorsements must be honest and
not misleading, and that a material connection between an endorser and a marketer that consumers
would not expect must be disclosed, and was updated to include examples of applying the principles to
social media marketing.

Over the past decade, other technological advancements have also influenced the world of IT. This
includes developments in:
 • social media
• internet of things
• artificial intelligence
• computer vision
• machine learning
• robotic process automation
• big data
• mobile computing -- in both devices and communications technologies such as 4G and 5G

Information technology has expanded so much over the years and as it keeps growing and increasing,
new laws and regulations are always being built every few months. The growth of artificial intelligence
and cybercrime keeps increasing and new legislations must be made to govern them almost universally
reaching from one part of the world to another.

Legislators must keep up with this shift in order for governments to build frameworks that take
advantage of emerging technology while protecting societies from vulnerabilities and ensuring trust in
new systems. This must be accomplished while sustaining cooperation, especially in a climate marked
by rising geopolitical tensions over the threat to national security presented by developing technology.
Against this backdrop, legislators' roles take on additional significance.

In confronting these critical concerns, international cooperation can assist legislators in doing far more
than they could alone. In this context, the Interparliamentary Forum on Emerging Technologies (IFET)
operates as a global non-profit organization that collaborates with lawmakers throughout the world to
facilitate international communication and cooperation on AI and emerging technologies policy. The
IFET, founded in 2019, is uniquely placed due to a developing network of legislators devoted to this
goal in over 25 nations throughout the world.