Tag: internet

Artificial intelligence and PSI Directive (EU) – open data and the re-use of public sector information before new digital demands

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 by Joana Abreu, Editor and Jean Monnet Module eUjust Coordinator

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In Ursula von der Leyen’s speech entitled “A Union that strives for more”, one of nowadays President of the European Commission’s priorities was to establish “a Europe fit for digital age”. In this sense, von der Leyen’s aspirations were to grasp the opportunities from the digital age within safe and ethical boundaries, particularly those deriving from artificial intelligence as “[d]igital technologies […] are transforming the world at an unprecedented speed”. Therefore, the President of the European Commission established that “[i]n my first 100 days in office, I will put forward legislation for a coordinated European approach on the human and ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence”. Last 1st December 2019, the European Commission took office, led by President Ursula von der Leyen. As that time lapse is passing by, there is a need to understand how a Europe fit for the digital age is taking shape. There is to say, has the European Union already made efforts to meet that digital age?

In fact, recalling Digital4EU Stakeholder Forum, held in Brussels, on the 25th February 2016, Digital Single Market was thought by inception in order to materialise it as a primary public interest in action. Concerning digital public services, it was highlighted that some of them were not as transparent as they should and that “Governments need[ed] to look at how to re-use the information already available […] and open up the data they h[ad], while adapting to current trends and making use of public services easy and simple”. In order to do so, this forum established that “Member States should implement the once only principle: once only obligation, re-use of data, making the best use of key enablers and thinking cross-border services from inception”.
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Blockchain and art market

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Gallery exhibition opening

 by Geo Magri, Professor at the University of Torino

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In recent times, blockchain technology has begun to be used to ensure certainty in the circulation of works of art.  Through the blockchain it is possible to record the existence of any author’s rights concerning the work, or the transfer of ownership of an art object, in order to make its circulation safer. These are aspects that, for a global market like this one, are of central importance and that allow us to understand why the first projects were launched to create chains aimed at meeting the specific needs of this sector, overcoming the critical issues that the art market traditionally brings.

Already in the seventies an attempt was made to achieve a result like that which today guarantees the blockchain. At the time it was decided to use the analogic recording of works of art, through the deposit of a picture and the recording of data that allowed the reconstruction of transactions related to the work. The project was proposed by Bolaffi of Turin and was aimed at ensuring the origin and traceability of the works sold. The idea of the analogical register was not successful in the practice of the art market and this was not difficult to predict since it was an excessively large market for an efficient analogical register.
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Online Legal Platforms – The beginning of the 4.0 Law Practice?

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Innovation Concept

 by Pedro Petiz, Master's student in Law and Informatics at UMinho

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The 4.0 revolution has reached the legal services sector. New online platforms are emerging to connect clients and lawyers, while also providing new and innovative legal services. Nonetheless, several questions arise regarding these new businesses: Are they allowed under Portuguese law? And how are Bar Associations dealing with this new reality?

There are mainly two types of online legal platforms:

– Two-sided Platforms, where an intermediary selects the lawyers who appear on the website, defining the order in which they appear, or referring them to potential clients.[i]

– And websites providing legal services, which are provided directly or indirectly, not necessarily by lawyers.[ii] This category includes question and answer websites (https://answers.justia.com), legal chatbots (www.donotpay.com) and sites where legal documents are automatically drafted (https://lawhelpinteractive.org,[iii] http://www.a2jauthor.org[iv] or the Brazilian http://www.yousolveonline.com ).

Regarding the first type of platform, the Portuguese Bar Association has imposed a total prohibition on its use, on the grounds that they constitute “client solicitation”.[v] In my opinion, this prohibition is disproportionate and constitutes a breach of Article 101 of the TFEU.[vi]

As stated by the European Commission, professional rules “must be objectively necessary to attain a clearly articulated and legitimate public interest objective and they must be the mechanism least restrictive of competition to achieve that objective”.[vii]
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Cyber-regulatory theories: between retrospection and ideologies

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by Luana Lund, specialist in telecommunications regulation (ANATEL, Brazil)
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This article presents a brief history of some of the main theories about internet regulation to identify ideological and historical relationships among them.

In the 1980s, the open-source movement advocated the development and common use of communication networks, which strengthened the belief of the technical community in an inclusive and democratic global network [1]. This context led to the defense of full freedom on the internet and generated debates about the regulation of cyberspace in the 1990s. In the juridical area, Cyberlaw movement represents the beginning of such discussions [2]. Some of these theorists believed in the configuration of cyberspace as an independent environment, not attainable by the sovereignty of the States. At that time, John Perry Barlow was the first to use the term “cyberspace” for the “global electronic social space.” In 1996, he published the “Internet Declaration of Independence“, claiming cyberspace as a place where “Governments of the Industrial World […] have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear […] Cyberspace does not lie within your borders” [3].
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Editorial of May 2019

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 by Célia Zolynski, Professor of Law at Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne
 and Alexandre Veronese, Professor of Law at University of Brasília

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Blockchain and security: an important debate for the legal community (especially from the civil law tradition)*

When we read and listen about the Blockchain technology, its main revolutionary character is the praised new manner by which the users would extract a new kind of trust from the operations endorsed. At some point, some writers even detail its technical design as being trustless. This technology – as some of their enthusiasts say – would therefore make it possible to replace, rather than displace, the trusted third party – an important technical feature that exists in most of the modern designs of private or public relationships – in various kinds of transactions and operations. The Blockchain enables this feature because it makes possible to guarantee the keeping of an unforgeable and updated register of digital records in real time. The technical functions of the Blockchain promise to secure many possible applications. An example is the use of the technology to ensure the integrity of a document or a digital archive over the time by anchoring it in the Blockchain. In addition, it is possible to create Blockchain systems to control or trace the circulation of digital archives and packages and even their usage. The Blockchain technology could therefore be able to guarantee the security of the storage files in the blocks using asymmetric encryption protocols in a peer-to-peer model. However, ten years after the launch of Bitcoin, in 2009, we are still largely in an exploratory phase of that technology. The blockchain and its applications remain immature: technically immature and, we should say, legally immature too. Several difficulties hinder the transition from the small-scale operations to bigger ones. One of the main concerns of the Blockchain technology is the safety of the designed applications. Such issue – the safety of the Blockchain – needs to be more debated than praised in order to avoid some misjudgments and overstatements. Just to begin, we are going to provide a provocative statement: Blockchain does not grant actual and complete security; from itself, the technology – and its prophets – indulge us with the illusion of safe and security. Why? We will divide the text in three parts, in order to pose problems to the Blockchain. First, we are going to describe that some technical issues that are entrenched in the design can be vulnerable to attacks and difficulties. Second, we are going to mention that – in legal terms – the Blockchain registers still will need a third party to be feasible as evidence in the courts. Lastly, we will remark that the so-called “smart contracts” are not contracts after all.
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e-Justice paradigm under the new Council’s 2019-2023 Action Plan and Strategy – some notes on effective judicial protection and judicial integration

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by Joana Covelo de Abreu, Editor

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Information and Communication technology (ICT) and digital tools are shaping the way new solutions are being implemented in EU Procedure and justice, in all European Union. In fact, through the Digital Single Market (DSM) political goal, new technological and digital approaches have been adopted and are now being widespread.

Under DSM’s strategy, e-Justice appeared as a paradigm to be settled using a method: the one of interoperability. But this method was also acknowledged by the 2016 e-Government Action Plan as a general principle of EU law: in fact, alongside elder ones such as transparency or efficiency others were settled, truly built on this new digital approach it is being aimed to be accomplished: the one of interoperability by default, the one of digital by default and the once-only principle. In fact, first approaches to stakeholders revealed the importance of the latter since, in an EU settled and developed around fundamental freedoms, economic agents were able to raise awareness among stakeholders of the need to overcome administrative barriers to similar proceedings in different Member States or before the European institutions. In fact, they were able to devise that they had to provide, for as many times as they initiated a proceeding, the same information and documents, when, in fact, the proceeding was similar, the petition was the same… That determined the emergence of the once-only principle, based on the need of reusing data across the EU. However, to do so stakeholders also understood those public services had to work through interconnected databases and operative systems – otherwise, the reuse of data would come difficult and the once-only principle would never get out of the table of intended measures. That was the perfect setting to bet on digital components, considering the first services to start this digitalisation update were public services.
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Trends shaping AI in business and main changes in the legal landscape

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by Ana Landeta, Director of the R+D+i Inst. at UDIMA
and Felipe Debasa, Director of the ONSSTKT21stC at URJC

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Without a doubt and under the European Union policy context, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an area of strategic importance and a key driver of economic development. It can bring solutions to many societal challenges from treating diseases to minimising the environmental impact of farming. However, socio-economic, legal and ethical impacts have to be carefully addressed”[i].

Accordingly, organizations are starting to make moves that act as building blocks for imminent change and transformation. With that in mind, Traci Gusher-Thomas[ii] has identified four trends that demonstrate how machine-learning is starting to bring real value to the workplace. It is stated that each of following four areas provides value to an organisation seeking to move forward with machine-learning and adds incremental value that can scale-up to be truly transformational.
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Internet, e-evidences and international cooperation: the challenge of different paradigms

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by Bruno Calabrich, Federal circuit prosecutor (Brazil)

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There is a crisis in the world today concerning e-evidences. Law enforcement authorities deeply need to access and analyze various kinds of electronic data for efficient investigations and criminal prosecutions. They need it not specifically for investigating and prosecuting so-called internet crimes: virtually any crime today can be committed via the internet; and even those which aren’t executed using the web, possibly can be elucidated by information stored on one or another node of the internet. The problem is that enforcement authorities not always, nor easily, can access these data[i], as the servers where they are stored are frequently located in a different country. Thus, international cooperation is frequently a barrier to overcome so that the e-evidence can be obtained in a valid and useful way. And, today, the differences around the world in the legal structures available for this task may not be helping a lot.

The most commonly known instruments for obtaining electronic data stored abroad are the MLATs – Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties –, agreements firmed between two countries for cooperating in exchanging information and evidences (not restricted to internet evidences) that will be used by authorities in investigations and formal accusations. The cooperation occurs from authority to authority, according to a bureaucratic procedure specified in each treaty, one requesting (where it’s needed) and the other (where it’s located) providing the data. But, in a fast-changing world, where crime and information are moving even faster, the MLATs are not showing to be the fastest and efficient way.  In Brazil, for instance, the percentage of success in the cooperation with the United States through its MLAT roughly reaches 20% of the cases. Brazil, US and other countries do not seem to be satisfied with that.
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European Ethical Charter on the use of artificial intelligence in judicial systems and their environment: what are the implications of this measure?

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 by Amanda Espiñeira, Master Student at University of Brasília

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Artificial intelligence has become a topic of great interest for the advancement of the information society and automation. Through various themes, from art, gastronomy, the world of games, the various mechanisms that involve AI allow the expansion of human creativity and capabilities, and are very important, especially when it comes to judicial systems. A field that for a long time has remained closed to innovations and digital transformations, today it opens and allows that there is more celerity and transparency to the decisions of the legal world. In other words, AI promises to fill a gap in the area, which still has plastered processes, such as the registry offices, which are almost synonymous with bureaucracy.

However, the importance of the theme and its efficiency, debating ethical aspects in this area is extremely relevant because AI can extract insights, we could never come up using traditional data mining techniques. And is even more important in the context of recent data protection regulation, especially GDPR- General Data Protection Regulation.

Thus, the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) of the Council of Europe has adopted the first European text setting out ethical principles relating to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in judicial systems, published on December 4, 2018[1].
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Editorial of January 2019

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Property Intellectual Copyright Symbol Protection

 by Alexandre Veronese, Professor at University of Brasília

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Article 13 and the vigilance dilemma

The first US battles about filtering

In light of the worldwide ongoing debate surrounding legal regimes over internet, in special the recent controversies on amendments proposals to applicable EU rules, such as Directive 96/9, Directive 2001/29 or Directive 2012/28, but most notably Article 13 of the (soon-to-be) Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, it is of utmost importance to seek some perspective. The topic is relevant as much as complex with a range of aspects to consider. For instance, one of the approaches the EU is giving to the matter involves the use of internet (or digital tools in general) for new cultural purposes following the celebration in 2018 of the European Year of Cultural Heritage. In that regard, I had the opportunity to reflect upon this debate alongside Professor Alessandra Silveira, editor of the Blog of UNIO, and other colleagues in an excellent Portuguese podcast. In this post, I intend to shed some light in the global depth of the matter by analysing the American inaugural experience.

At the beginning of the widespread usage of the Internet, the United States society was immersed in a debate about how to deal with offensive content. In the 1990s, Internet had no boundaries and no firewalls to prevent the incoming waves of pornographic and unusual materials. Quickly, a political movement made a strong statement in order to protect American families from that threat. In 1996, the US Congress passed a bill named Communications Decency Act, also known as the CDA. The Bill was signed into Law by the former President Bill Clinton. The CDA was intended to provide an effective system to take down offensive content. Some of the founders of the Internet launched a campaign against the CDA. The now widely famous Electronic Frontier Foundation was the spearhead of the resistance. Until today, we remember the Declaration of Freedom in the Internet, which was written by John Perry Barlow. The major weapon of the resistance was the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Some lawsuits were filled and in a brief timespan the US Supreme Court took down the CDA for it was ruled as unconstitutional. The Supreme Court maintained the long-aged interpretation that the State must be out of any action to perform any possible kind of censorship (Reno v. ACLU, 1997).
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