Legal issues in Virtual Professional Communities

Virtual Professional Communities (“VPC”) represent a new organisational model, emerging from the adoption of Information Society Technologies and relevant to borderless ways of working via the Internet between Professionals. Virtual communities bring together individuals with the same professional background and interests in order to communicate, exchange and share information and to develop business and knowledge collectively. Virtual communities are now enabled by internet technologies such as e.g. bulletin boards, list servers, newsgroups, chat rooms, work spaces, document repositories, etc. Since the full adoption and deployment of VPCs is however still hampered by a number of legal issues, the present paper is aimed to address the legal framework needed to set up and operate successfully a VPC, given the current state-of-the-art of legal research in IST-related topics as well as current regulatory context in the European Union. Legal tools and recommendations, to be used by VPC coordinator/administrator as a reference management framework, are presented.