Vol 7 No 1 - Roger Williams University School of Law

and other laws of countries in which users and customers arelocated rather than assuming that only the familiar law of acompany’s own jurisdiction governs its transactions in theInternet environment.Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Dean of Southern CrossUniversity School of Law and Justice in Lismore, Australia,authored and presented the article titled Digital Property: TheUltimate Boundary? Dean Fitzgerald is a leading scholar andauthority on Australian intellectual property and Internet law,and often participates in international dialogue as a speaker andauthor of articles published in international journals. Hispresentation and article weigh the role and limits of law intransforming information and information products into economicvalue, wealth and industries in the digital environment. DeanFitzgerald seeks to harmonize public and private interests ininformation, and to address the challenge of regulating in such away as to promote and secure a return to new investment withoutsacrifice of access to and use of knowledge by private individuals,researchers and other businesses. He brought to the Symposiumand this issue of the Law Review the perspective of a scholar froma nation that is a very significant but not a dominant producerand exporter of digital works.Charles R. McManis, Professor of law at WashingtonUniversity School of Law in St. Louis, is a leading scholar andpublic voice on copyright, contract and protection of computersoftware and other digital information products. Although he haspublished important works on United States law, he also hastaught and studied intellectual property law in Asia and madeinternational and comparative aspects of intellectual property lawa particular focus of his scholarship. Professor McManis’spresentation and article, Database Protection in the DigitalInformation Age, brings to his topic a depth of study and a graspof policy and legal issues that has made his previous writing onnational and international intellectual property law issuesessential reading for contemporary scholars and policy makers.Professor McManis’s particular concern in his article is with thetwo principal, and competing, proposals for United Statesdatabase protection legislation. He informs his readers with apreliminary examination of the European Community’s creation ofsui generis database extraction and reutilization rights as anadjunct to the very limited database protection available under