It is a pleasure to be with you this afternoon and to have an opportunity to discuss one of the major challenges facing the courts—adaptation of law and the legal system to the special problems and opportunities created by the stunning advances in information technology that we all have seen and presumably will continue to see for the foreseeable future. Some of these problems have drawn a vast amount of attention, notably the intersection of copyright law and the Internet, as evidenced by the Napster, DVD and MP3.com cases. But there is another problem of at least equal importance that has drawn considerably less attention - the increasing clash between the privacy interests of litigants, both individual and corporate, and the vast explosion in the availability of information in our society. It is a conflict, moreover, that in many ways is just beginning and that will command more and more of our attention as time goes by.
