Information Rights in Practice: The Non‐Legal Professional's Guide

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2009), "Information Rights in Practice: The Non‐Legal Professional's Guide", Library Review, Vol. 58 No. 1, pp. 75-77. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530910928988

Knowing and interpreting the law are now centre‐ground in information work. Reasons are pretty obvious to find – a growing reliance on legalistic solutions, increasing emphasis on intellectual property rights and in consequence ways of protecting information and accessing it under licence, more legalism in society generally (including among users of libraries, and infused with sentiment about rights and human rights), and a growing need with information convergence and concentration to observe and establish and evade legal protocols internationally. Facet Publishing have been one of several publishers in recent years to pick up on this felt need in the professional marketplace for guides on the law, and in books by writers like Paul Pedley and Kelvin Smith, they have provided several helpful introductions to applicable law (Pedley on information‐related law generally and Smith on freedom of information (FOI) and records).

Such books are needed by information practitioners in a wide range of information‐related work, and not just people who call themselves or have titles with “librarian” in them. I am thinking of records managers, archivists, FOI officers, registrars and other administrators, copyright clearance people, specialists in digital rights and intranet and bulletin‐board management and many more. In the UK (and this book is UK‐centric, indeed England‐and‐Wales‐centric), the ways in which information has for so many organizations, public sector and private sector, alike moved to this centre‐ground (and knowledge management and competitive intelligence have accelerated this too) is clear, as even media coverage of issues raised by the Information Commissioner (responsible for both data protection (DP) and FOI) demonstrates.

Given that all these disparate folk want and need up‐to‐date and easy‐to‐find information on applicable law, and given too that there have already been numerous introductory guides to relevant law for such people, it makes sense to do two things: Facet do one here and have yet to do the other. The thing they do with Information Rights in Practice is offer a helpful digest and summary of two major areas of information‐related law (DP and FOI), provide some helpful interpretive comments on what key definitions entail, and (perhaps even more helpful still) offer some advice on how all this law fits together (e.g. practitioners often wonder how the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Freedom of Information Act 2000 work side‐by‐side, and where to use the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 instead of FOI). And then what about public bodies re‐using information (the Re‐Use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2005 and Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) guidance on that).

Alan Stead knows the field well and provides a book that “raises awareness and suggests solutions”. He could have provided a lot more practical cases to help, but nevertheless, the discussion does genuinely help to clarify definitions likely to crop up in daily practice. Typical of these, under DP, are third parties, sensitive data, adequacy under the principles, intelligible formats for personal data, disproportionate effort, access by health professionals and disclosure. In simply and clearly‐constructed and paragraphed chapters, Stead deals with these things well, and busy practitioners will be glad to have such a book on their desks just to check up on things. Such books are also very good for students coming to the field and wanting to see what the issues are.

Later on, he deals with FOI, explaining what the FOI and environmental regulations say and how they fit together, types of exemption/exception, prejudice, commercial confidentiality (a big issue this, and a widely‐used defence), the public interest test (rather anaemic this one, given widespread interest from users and journalists), and compliance with the Information Commissioner. He moves on to records management issues and covers code‐of‐practice and policy/management issues, and ends with a look at related law. EU law could be fuller although the list of law at the start of the book is competent. Re‐use of information is of current interest, as is law on interception and surveillance, the latter an area of law where specialist information managers such as those operating in ISP or network or telecoms environments will need far deeper discussion (they will go to law books pure). A final chapter describes how DP, FOI and environmental information regulations work in conjunction with each other – rather bitty but this is surely an area where more needs to be done, probably on training courses in the library and information field.

So far so good. Earlier I said that there was something else that publishers like Facet could and should do with and in such books. My case would start with what I said about Stead's use of examples or case‐studies. He does, by the way, cite actual legal cases (i.e. case law) from time‐to‐time, but no full legal interpretation is provided, perhaps rightly in the circumstances. Such examples simple appear, rather like anecdotes, and however realistic, they seem they only offer a tentative beginning to what the legal issues involved really are. On the ground, the practicalities of, say, arguing with a FOI enquirer about commercial confidentiality or in DP about an alleged breach of personal privacy take practitioners into issues where they need more advice than such books as these can provide. In fact, the best advice comes from within the organization, from the Information Commissioner, and from closed discussion groups.

What the field needs now is a lawyer as such to tease out the issues from a full‐strength legal point of view, just as we have studies of, say, decompilation and inter‐operability in software law or infringement in copyright and patent law or defamation and innocent dissemination in network/ISP law. In a word, then, Information Rights in Practice is great but up to a point: useful and nice to have, attractively priced, and, despite the fact that a lot of the actual law can be found elsewhere, useful for its helpful discussion and presentation. But, beyond that, that is when things and people get serious about the law, when conflict arises and allegations are made, when decisions have to be made (rather than legal definitions merely trotted out, as if inquirers and third parties cannot find and do not know them for themselves), then information practitioners will and should look elsewhere. The paradox is that by doing so they know they need formal legal help (which for many exists down the corridor), and that perhaps is why such books as these will continue to sell: they alert at their level and help readers formulate questions they can then raise with people who deal with the law everyday of their lives rather than just occasionally.