Nancy Van House 
E-mail: vanhouse@sims.berkeley.edu 
Office: 307A South Hall 
Phone: 510-642-0855 
 

We have limited room for non-SIMS students and those spaces are all now taken.  It's possible but highly unlikely that due to cancellations we'll have room for 1 or 2 non-SIMS graduate students.  No undergrads will be admitted. 

Designing and managing effective information systems also requires having a larger understanding of law and policy issues arising from the uses of information. Sometimes, these laws, especially intellectual property laws, provide important sources of protection against unauthorized uses or appropriations of information. Sometimes, as with state privacy and federal encryption regulations, the law places limits on what uses can be made of information or what kinds of security systems can be used to protect information. Sometimes, codes of conduct within an industry also constrain the freedom of firms to do whatever they want with information. Because information law and policy is evolving at a fairly rapid pace in response to new technologies, it is important to have a sense of some of the larger information policy debates going on at national and international levels, such as those requiring libraries to filter content and those concerning privacy, because what is a policy debate now may turn out to be a regulation or a broader rule at a later time. As information becomes the principal commodity of the information economy, traditional "freedom of infomation" policies need to be adjusted. 

This course is required of all entering SIMS students and will serve as an introduction to other courses in the curriculum treating these issues in greater depth.