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UNIT X – MODULE INTRODUCTION

Hello and welcome to the Internet of Things module. My name is Simon George. I am
an associate professor here at the University of Law and I will be teaching you for
this module. I have been at the University for a while now and I have spent the last
three years here researching legal technology. Together we will learn about the
Internet of Things and how it relates to the legal and the commercial world. As we
learn about IOT technologies, we will also look at how they affect particular areas of
businesses, the economic realities of the Internet of Things. We will also examine
how the IOT impacts the legal world and how it interacts with law firms.

We will start though by looking at base technologies and how the IOT functions. The
IOT simply was not around thirty years ago and that is because it relies on things like
Bluetooth, lithium ion batteries and micro processes. So the first two weeks, we will
look at what are the component parts of IOT devices, how they function and the
technologies they rely on. We will then move on to communication, in particular how
5G and the cloud both facilitate the prevalence of the IOT, and it is very likely that the
rise of the IOT will go hand in hand with the rise of smart contracts, so we will
examine how these interact with each other.

The IOT has amazing potential for good. But it can also fall prey to malicious actors.
With that in mind, we will study the unique security issues and threats that the IOT
brings in to the cyber world. The IOT generates a huge amount of data, larger than
most people can comprehend. With all this data, we need to make sense of it all.
Therefore, we will study data analytics and how to make the data useful, as well as
how the use of data is regulated. The IOT is a complex web of devices, with software
and hardware interacting with each other in many different ways. This raises
interesting legal questions when things go wrong, and the usual principles of tort and
contract are tested to their limits. With this in mind, we will examine liability, causation
and remoteness of damage in the Internet of Things.

Finally, we will put all we have learned in to practice and look in detail at a particular
sector. We will look at how the IOT impacts the healthcare sector and the ways in
which it is used.

So, at the end of the course, you will have a good understanding of how the IOT
functions, how it operates on a commercial level, and throughout it all we will have a
legal focus as well as a technical one.

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