With its series on Research Handbooks in Information Law, Edward Elgar Publishing has established itself as a leading publisher in this burgeoning legal field. This Handbook is the latest edition in the series and, with its four parts and 17 chapters, sets out a commendably ambitious scope, spanning numerous jurisdictions. While the breadth is impressive, the true value of this book is found in the doctrinal chapters, authored by leading experts with clarity, depth and attention to detail. The chapters by Tanya Aplin (Chapter 10, “The Limits of Trade Secret Protection in the EU”), Christoph Rademacher (Chapter 8, “The Emergence of a Global Standard for Reasonable Efforts?”), Ulla-Maija Mylly (Chapter 11, “Freedom of the Media and Trade Secrets in Europe”) and Elizabeth A. Rowe and Guilia C. Farrior (Chapter 12, “The DTSA and Trade Secret Extraterritoriality”) are particularly useful for any trade secrecy scholar. These chapters justify the term Research Handbook in the title.

Still, while the book is certainly meritorious in its in-depth scholarship, reading the collection as a whole, questions regarding the selection and curation of the material emerge. The foremost of these concern the editors’ definition of information law as its subject matter. As much of the book is written from the perspective of intellectual property law and given that more than half the chapters are dedicated to trade secrets (notwithstanding the debate whether trade secrecy protection falls under the intellectual property law umbrella), it is not quite clear where, or even if, the editors draw a distinction between these two branches of law. I am not necessarily advocating that such a delineation should be drawn; rather comment that it would be interesting to read the editors’ view whether information law is an emerging distinct branch of law incorporating aspects of intellectual property law, or if information law is a sub-branch of intellectual property law.

This question takes me to Part I of the Handbook, consisting of three chapters dedicated to “general perspectives”, all offered by American scholars. In the first thought-provoking if not quite robust chapter (“Cyberlaw Will Die and We Will Kill It”), Ira Steven Nathenson argues for the formal recognition of cyberlaw as a distinct scholarly field. Nathenson's chapter is in part dedicated to his historical digest of three popular nonfiction works by Harvard University cyberlaw scholars: Lawrence Lessig's four modalities in Code: and Other Laws in Cyberspace (New York 1999); Jonathan Zittrain's concept of generativity in The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It (London 2008); and Yochai Benkler's idea of power in The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven 2006). Nathenson then attempts to construct a theoretical base for his version of a unified cyberlaw by marrying these three US scholars to selected works by three European philosophers: David Hume (1711–76), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Its lack of intellectual rigour unfortunately sells this thought experiment short. While Nathenson has intuitively matched some of the veneration for the individual in European history of philosophy with its dogmatic dominance in US political and popular discourse, he does not offer further explanation for how his two selected sets of thinkers align, or why the promotion of the individual as supreme should lay the foundation for an entire branch of law.

The second chapter authored by David S. Levine (“Confidentiality Creep and Opportunistic Privacy”) sets the tone for a recurring theme in the Handbook, namely the tension between rights to keep information secret and rival interests in disclosure held by the public. Levine's chapter illustrates how stretching intellectual property concepts to emerging issues of information law can have unforeseen consequences. For example, he argues that Facebook invokes privacy to trump societal calls for access to information as a form of “Confidentiality creep and opportunistic privacy”.

Calls for greater access to information become a leitmotif in the rest of the book. For example, in Chapter 3, “Disclosure”, Sharon K. Sandeen charts the shortcomings in this regard in the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, the Defend Trade Secrets Act, US Patent Act and the US Copyright Act, and presents a possible typology as a tool for litigants to argue for greater protection of disclosure in US courts. Issues related to access to information are pursued by several other authors in the volume, notably Tanya Aplin in her excellent chapter and Ulla-Maija Mylly in her similarly informative chapter.

Following the red thread of freedom of information versus the rights of secrecy and proprietary exclusion throughout the volume invariably raises the second main question regarding the editors' aims. On the one hand, the Handbook's editors could intend to highlight a gap in the academic literature; on the other, their intention could be to influence legislators and courts to redress what is perceived by several of the volume's authors as an imbalance where proprietary and secrecy rights have been afforded too much protection in law. While the robustness and enjoyment of this book does not rest on the answer to this question, the normative motivations underpinning this volume can hardly be ignored.

Part II of the Handbook is dedicated to exclusive rights in data and commences with an explication of the different legal frameworks in the EU that govern data by Herbert Zech, before his lamentation of the possibility of yet another proprietary data right (a “data producer's right”) as mooted by the European Commission (Chapter 4, “Exclusivity in Data”). Any reader already familiar with the debates regarding “data ownership” that have intensified on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean since the adoption by the EU of the controversial Database Directive in 1996 will recognise how such a proprietary right would be highly problematic and would fly in the face of the foundational doctrinal principle of intellectual property law.

This takes me to the third lingering question that runs throughout this volume: the difficult concept of property, particularly in relation to information, data and trade secrets. As the editors have chosen to label this a Handbook on Information Law and not Intellectual Property Law, classic intellectual property law doctrine does not necessarily apply. The result is an inevitable hodgepodge of usage, where terms such as “commodity”, “ownership” and “owner” of data are scattered throughout the chapters. The difficulty in pinning down the terminology also illustrates the uncertainty that exists regarding information law's relationship to traditional property doctrine, misappropriation and competition law.

Part III of the Handbook is dedicated to trade secrecy, and Part IV to data protection, privacy and cybersecurity. While focusing most of the book on the US, UK and EU, two of the chapters are dedicated to a non-Western jurisdiction: a chapter by Tatsuhiro Ueno on recent legislative reform in Japan regarding copyright and trade secrets (Chapter 6, “Big Data in Japan”), and a chapter by Henrike Weiden and Kensaku Takase on the reception of European data protection law in Japan (Chapter 14, “Data Privacy in Europe and Its Reception Under Japanese Law”). The discussions of legal issues and emerging technologies are dispersed throughout the volume, with a few dedicated chapters at the end, such as Margot E. Kaminski's chapter on the right to explainability in EU data protection law (Chapter 15, “The Right to Explanation, Explained”), and Faye Fangfei Wang's chapter on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity (Chapter 17, “Legislative Developments on Cybersecurity in the EU in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”), engaging with the frontiers of the academic debates in these areas of law.

This Handbook is undoubtedly a good resource for anyone interested in the foundational tenets of many areas of information law. However, the heavy focus on established intellectual property scholarship begs the question whether its authors are ready to embrace this field as a new branch of law, as argued for in Nathenson's first chapter, or simply stretch the intellectual property umbrella even wider. Cognisant that any volume can only represent a small fraction of a field, the omission of many of the new areas of information law suggests that there is room for the publisher's Information Law Series to continue to make salient contributions to this growing literature for quite some time.