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Legal norms and social behaviours are some of the human aspects surrounding the effectiveness and future of DRM security. Further exploration of these aspects would help unravel the complexities of the interaction between rights protection security and law. Most importantly, understanding the perspectives behind the circumvention of content security may have a significant impact on DRM effectiveness and acceptance at the same time. While there has been valuable research on consumer acceptability, (The INDICARE project, Bohle 2008, Akester 2009) there is hardly any work on the human perspective of content creators. Taking video games as a case study, this paper employs qualitative socio-legal analysis and an interdisciplinary approach to explore this particular aspect of content protection.

The nascent but increasing interest in incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into tools for the computer-generation of inventions is expected to enable innovations that would otherwise be impossible through human ingenuity alone. The potential societal benefits of accelerating the pace of innovation through AI will force a re-examination of the basic tenets of intellectual property law. The patent system must adjust to ensure it continues to appropriately protect intellectual investment while encouraging the development of computer-generated inventing systems; however, this must be balanced against the risk that the quantity and qualities of computer-generated inventions will stretch the patent system to its breaking points, both conceptually and practically. The patent system must recognise the implications of and be prepared to respond to a technological reality where leaps of human ingenuity are supplanted by AI, and the ratio of human-to-machine contribution to inventive processes progressively shifts in favour of the machine. This article assesses the implications on patent law and policy of a spectrum of contemporary and conceptual AI invention-generation technologies, from the generation of textual descriptions of inventions, to human inventors employing AI-based tools in the invention process, to computers inventing autonomously without human intervention.

This script is a work of pure fiction intended to serve an educational purpose. Though it substitutes for a law review article in terms of format, it attempts to highlight the key arguments on the topic with appropriate references, where applicable. Much like an original piece of scholarship, it also advances some novel arguments in the form of tentative theses.

The increasing collective use of distributed application software platforms, programming languages and crypto-currencies around the blockchain concept for general transactions may have radical implications for the way in which society conceptualises and applies trust and trust-based social systems such as law. By exploring one iteration of such generalised blockchain systems – Ethereum – and the historical lineage of such systems, it will be argued that indeed their ideological basis is largely one of distrust, decentralisation and, ultimately, via increasing disassociation of identity, a fear of the body itself. This ideological basis can be reframed as a crypto-legal approach to the problems of human interaction, one whereby the purely technological solutions outlined above are considered adequate for reconciling many of the problems of our collective existence. The article concludes, however, by re-iterating a perspective of law more so as an entirely embodied and trust dependent notion. These aspects go some way to explaining the necessarily centralised role it takes on within societies. They also explain why the crypto-legal approaches advanced by systems like Ethereum – or even the co-opting of blockchain technology by law firms themselves – will only ever be at best efficiency exercises concerned with the processing of data relating to legal affairs, and not the more radical, ambiguous and difficult process of actual legal thought or, indeed, engagement with trust.

Identifying and fixing problems with the security of computers and networks is essential to protect the data they contain and the privacy of their users. However, these incident response activities require additional processing of personal data, so may themselves create a privacy risk. Current laws have created diverse interpretations of this processing – from encouragement to prohibition – creating barriers to incident response and challenges for collaboration between incident responders. The EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation explicitly recognises the need for processing to protect the security of networks and information. It also, through rules on processing for “legitimate interests”, suggests a way to identify an appropriate balance between risks. Consistent use of these provisions could provide a common legal approach for incident response teams, enabling them to work more effectively. This article builds on analysis by the Article 29 Working Party to develop a framework for assessing the benefit and impact of incident response activities. This is applied to a range of practical detection, notification and information sharing techniques commonly used in incident response, showing how these do, indeed, protect, rather than threaten, the privacy and data protection rights of computer and network users.

In October 2015, AlphaGo became the first Computer program to beat a professional human Go player, the reigning European champion Fan Hui. Five month later, watched by an audience of over 60 million people worldwide, it was going to beat

The present article analyses the current situation of child pornography law at the international level and in three jurisdictions with different legal traditions, as well different developments in criminal law and criminal policy. It shows the problems associated with protecting children’s sexual integrity from the perils represented by the use of new technology by sexual predators, while ensuring the free flow of information and ideas guaranteed by an array of rights such as freedom of expression and protection of privacy. It focuses on the legislative activity at the international level through the enactment of different conventions, the application of them by national authorities, the development of domestic legislation in the selected jurisdictions, and the response that courts have given to those developments. The article concludes with an in-depth analysis of the situation in Argentina and proposes a modification to the Criminal Code of Argentina.

El presente artículo analiza la situación actual del derecho referido a la pornografía infantil a nivel internacional y en tres jurisdicciones con diferentes tradiciones legales y también diferentes avances en el derecho penal y política criminal. Muestra los problemas asociados con la protección de la integridad sexual de los niños de los peligros representados por el uso de las nuevas tecnologías por los depredadores sexuales, al tiempo que asegurar garantiza el libre flujo de información e ideas garantizados por una serie de derechos como la libertad de expresión y la protección de la privacidad. Se centra en la actividad legislativa a nivel internacional a través de diferentes tratados, su implementación por las autoridades nacionales, el desarrollo legal en general en las jurisdicciones. Se termina el análisis en profundidad de la situación de Argentina y proponer una modificación del Código Penal argentino.

There exists a wide variety of location-based services (LBSs) that simplify our daily life. While engaging with LBSs, we disseminate accurate location data to remote machines and thus lose control over our data. It is well known that this raises significant privacy concerns as access to accurate location data may reveal sensitive information about an individual. In this work, we investigate the privacy implications of LBSs from a joint perspective of engineering, legal and ethical disciplines. We first outline from a technical perspective how user location data is potentially being dissiminated. Second, we employ the Contextual Integrity (CI) heuristic, an ethical approach developed by Helen Nissenbaum, to establish whether and if so, how, the dissemination of location data breaches the users’ privacy. Third, we show how the concept of purpose limitation (PL) helps to clarify the restrictions on the dissemination of location data from a legal perspective. Our interdisciplinary approach allows us to highlight the privacy issues of LBSs in a more comprehensive manner than singular disciplinary exercises afford, and it enables us to contribute towards a better understanding among the relevant disciplines. Additionally, our case study allows us to provide two further contributions that are of separate interest. We address the problem of competing prevailing contexts without suggesting that the ensuing incompatability of informational norms can be resolved theoretically, even though it must be resolved in practice. This ties in with the difference between a legal approach that has to align justice with legal certainty and an ethics approach that aims to align prevailing social norms with moral reasoning. In the end, our interdisciplinary research shows how CI and PL are in many ways complementary.

The issue of regulation for mandated network neutrality is currently live in both the United States and the European Union. Traditionally, the models applied have been of the command and control or market regulation variety. Both approaches have been extensively criticised and both have suffered setbacks in recent years. This paper suggests it is time to abandon our experiments with traditional business regulation models and move to a principled approach for network neutrality. This principled approach, based upon the rights to privacy, expression and freedom to carry on a business, identifies the Internet as a public good which requires to be protected from interference if we are to fully realise its democratic potential. The proposed principled, or rights-based, approach to net neutrality would see regulations for network neutrality based in principles of fundamental rights and not business or market regulation principles. We believe this would be a radical new model for network neutrality regulation.

This article critically examines the relatively few examples of regulatory implementation of network neutrality enforcement at national level. It draws on co-regulatory and self-regulatory theories of implementation and capture, and interdisciplinary studies into the real-world effect of regulatory threats to traffic management practices (TMP). Most academic and policy literature on net neutrality regulation has focussed on legislative proposals and economic or technological principles, rather than specific examples of comparative national implementation. This is in part due to the relatively few case studies of effective implementation of legislation. The article presents the results of fieldwork in South America, North America and Europe over an extended period (2003-2015). The countries studied are: Brazil, India, Chile, Norway, Netherlands, Slovenia, Canada, United States, and those within the European Union. Empirical interviews were conducted in-field with regulators, government officials, ISPs, content providers, academic experts, NGOs and other stakeholders from Chile, Brazil, United States, India, Canada, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Slovenia, Norway. It also explores the opaque practices of co-regulatory forums where governments or regulators have decided on partial private rather than public diplomacy with ISPs, notably in the US, Norway and UK. The article notes the limited political and administrative commitment to effective regulation thus far, and draws on that critical analysis to propose reasons for failure to implement effective regulation. Finally, it compares results of implementations and proposes a framework for a regulatory toolkit. The specific issue considered are the tolerance of zero rating practices, notably as deployed by mobile ISPs.