The advent of sophisticated artificial neural networks has opened new artistic opportunities, but also a variety of new legal challenges. Computer programs such as Google’s Deep Dream can take an image and process it in manners that resemble biological networks, producing artwork that is both unique and unpredictable. The law is not unfamiliar with the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI), in the past academics and policymakers have had to deal with the legal implications of autonomous agents in contract formation, to name just one area of interest. However, for the most part the implementation of smart systems has been limited in its reach and scope, and in many instances autonomous agents required quite a lot of direction from the programmer, following a very stringent set of rules. This meant that for the most part all rights, responsibilities, and liabilities arising from artificial agents fell squarely on the program creator. Neural networks are different, these systems have the potential to generate works in which human interaction is minimal. Modern copyright law has been drafted to consider originality as an embodiment of the author’s personality, and originality is one of the main requirements for the subsistence of copyright. So, what happens when you remove personality from the equation? Are machine-created works devoid of copyright? Do we need to change copyright law to accommodate autonomous artists? This chapter will explore this and other questions.

This article tackles various questions regarding non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and copyright, including whether an author can use an NFT to transfer copyright, several applications of tokens as digital rights management, and the issue of potential copyright infringement in NFTs. These questions are analysed from a UK perspective, specifically looking at cases from England and Wales and Scotland, while also covering a few relevant CJEU decisions. This is a relatively recent technology, which will require a lengthier technical explanation to analyse the legal issues that are raised. In some instances, the public perception will be dealt with as well, as it has become evident that there is considerable misunderstanding not only about what an NFT really is, but about the ownership and copyright issues that surround the technology. The article analyses the use of NFTs for digital rights purposes, particularly the transfer of rights, and while assignment by electronic means is possible, it is yet not clear whether an NFT can lawfully transfer rights. With regards to copyright infringement, it is the main thesis of this article that the unauthorised minting of a work may not infringe copyright, although there may be a communication to the public.

Smart contracts are coded parameters written into an immutable distributed ledger called a blockchain. There has been increasing legal interest in the application of these self-executing programs to conduct transactions. Most of the scholarly and practical analysis so far has been taken the claims of this technology being akin to a contract at face value, with legal analysis of contract formation, performance, and enforcement at the forefront of the debate. This article discusses that while smart contracts may pose some interesting legal questions, most of these are irrelevant, and smart contracts should be understood almost strictly from a technical perspective, and that any legal response is entirely dependent on the technical capabilities of the smart contract. The article proposes that smart contracts are not contracts for all practical purposes.

This article looks at transformative uses in copyright law, these are the re-uses and re-mix of a work to create an entirely new piece, in other words, a work protected by copyright is changed and transformed. Is the resulting work an infringement, or worthy of its own protection?

Various legal questions arise from such cases, such as whether there is copyright infringement in the transformative use of a protected work, and if so, where is the line crossed. If there is infringement, is there some sort of defence in copyright law?

The present chapter will look at the possible application of smart contracts in the intellectual property arena in general, but it will specifically discuss mostly copyright solutions, although a few uses apply to different areas of protection. This presents a few challenges, at the time of writing many of the proposals that will be discussed have not yet been implemented, or are in a prototype level, and as such we may have to assume their viability based on nothing other than a few examples that have not been fully tested. Similarly, legal discussions about the blockchain and smart contracts tend to be surrounded by considerable hype, often fuelled by commercial interests, and it is often difficult to separate facts from sales pitches. This is why this work will try to take a more sceptical approach to the phenomenon.

How can we regulate the Internet? This seemingly innocent question has been the subject of countless books and articles for just over the past twenty years. Part of the reason why it continues to be a vibrant and relevant topic is the difference of opinions on what is going on. On the one hand we have those who believe that the Internet is a free and open space that requires no regulation, and/or is incapable of being regulated. On the other hand we have those who think that regulation is not only desirable, but that the Internet as it exists now is completely regulated because of the prevalence of state surveillance, and that all semblance of freedom is a mere illusion.

Open licensing has become a very important legal subject in the last decade, with topics such as open data, open access, and open source software gaining mainstream recognition outside intellectual property circles. Most of these topics have one thing in common, they protect only copyright works, which leaves open the question of what licences (if any) are available to protect registrable rights such as patents and trade marks. This chapter explores the recent history of open licensing schemes from the perspective of registered and unregistered rights, concluding that in the future the basis for allowing re-use and re-share of works will be less of an issue of licensing, and more about business models.

For many years, various authors have postulated the possible existence of a right to be forgotten. A limited version of the right was enacted in the landmark ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union in Google Spain v Costeja González (C 131/12). Now the General Data Protection Rules will include a "right to erasure". This article will look at the evolution of the right, paying special attention to its future.

The advent of sophisticated artificial neural networks has opened new artistic opportunities, but also a variety of new legal challenges. Computer programs such as Google's Deep Dream can take an image and process it in manners that resemble biological networks, producing artwork that is both unique and unpredictable.

The law is not unfamiliar with the challenges of artificial intelligence, in the past academics and policymakers have had to deal with the legal implications of autonomous agents in contract formation, just to name one are of interest. However, for the most part the implementation of smart systems has been limited in their reach and scope, and in many instances autonomous agents required quite a lot of direction from the programmer, following a very stringent set of rules. This meant that for the most part all rights, responsibilities and liabilities arising from artificial agents fell squarely on the program creator. Neural networks are different, these systems have the potential to generate works in which human interaction is minimal.

Modern copyright law has been drafted to consider originality as an embodiment of the author’s personality, and originality is one of the main requirements for the subsistence of copyright. So, what happens when you remove personality from the equation? Are machine-created works devoid of copyright? Do we need to change copyright law to accommodate autonomous artists? This session will explore this and other questions.

Legal texts represent a fundamental building block in all democratic states. As such, legal information must be accessible to all members of society to the widest possible extent, to aid inclusiveness and to enable participation in public decision-making. In recognition of this, the EU and its Member States work to make laws, court decisions, etc. publicly available online. The sheer mass of legal norms, instruments, and interpretations in court decisions, commentaries and other sources, makes it increasingly difficult for citizens, civil society, businesses, and all involved stakeholders in legal practices to locate the relevant law. The challenge is to interlink local legal information and to have structures in place to enrich this information through aggregation and mass customization. The technological possibilities to achieve this goal do exist. The European project openlaws.eu aims for initiating a platform and to develop a vision for Big Open Legal Data (BOLD): an open framework for legislation, case law, and legal literature from across Europe.

This article studies the possible impact of the “right to be forgotten” (RTBF) on the preservation of native digital heritage. It analyses whether archival practices are likely to be affected by the new right, and if resources may become impossible to preserve for future generations, falling under the risk to disappear from memories and history since no version would be available in public or private archives. The article concludes that at the moment there is no room for concern for archives given the restricted application of RTBF.

In 2011, a macaque monkey used a camera belonging to British photographer David Slater in Indonesia to take a self-portrait. The selfie picture became famous worldwide after it was published in the British media. In 2014 Slater sent a removal request to Wikimedia Commons, which indicated that the picture was in the public domain because it had been taken by the monkey and animals cannot own copyright works. While most of the legal analysis so far has been centred around US law, this article takes a completely different approach. Re-assessing jurisdictional issues, I examine the case from a UK and European perspective. The monkey selfie is of importance to internet policy: it has a lot to teach us about online jurisdiction. Under current originality rules, David Slater has a good copyright claim for ownership of the picture.

This paper examines Bitcoin from a legal and regulatory perspective, answering several important questions.

We begin by explaining what Bitcoin is, and why it matters. We describe problems with Bitcoin as a method of implementing a cryptocurrency. This introduction to cryptocurrencies allows us eventually to ask the inevitable question: is it legal? What are the regulatory responses to the currency? Can it be regulated?

We make clear why virtual currencies are of interest, how self-regulation has failed, and what useful lessons can be learned. Finally, we produce useful and semi-permanent findings into the usefulness of virtual currencies in general, blockchains as a means of mining currency, and the profundity of Bitcoin as compared with the development of block chain technologies. We conclude that though Bitcoin may be the equivalent of Second Life a decade later, so blockchains may be the equivalent of Web 2.0 social networks, a truly transformative social technology.

This paper is a study into some of the regulatory implications of cryptocurrencies using the CAMPO research framework (Context, Actors, Methods, Methods, Practice, Outcomes). We explain in CAMPO format why virtual currencies are of interest, how self-regulation has failed, and what useful lessons can be learned. We are hopeful that the full paper will produce useful and semi-permanent findings into the usefulness of virtual currencies in general, block chains as a means of mining currency, and the profundity of current ‘media darling’ currency Bitcoin as compared with the development of block chain generator Ethereum.

While virtual currencies can play a role in creating better trading conditions in virtual communities, despite the risks of non-sovereign issuance and therefore only regulation by code (Brown/Marsden 2013), the methodology used poses significant challenges to researching this ‘community’, if BitCoin can even be said to have created a single community, as opposed to enabling an alternate method of exchange for potentially all virtual community transactions. First, BitCoin users have transparency of ownership but anonymity in many transactions, necessary for libertarians or outright criminals in such illicit markets as #SilkRoad. Studying community dynamics is therefore made much more difficult than even such pseudonymous or avatar based communities as Habbo Hotel, World of Warcraft or SecondLife. The ethical implications of studying such communities raise similar problems as those of Tor, Anonymous, Lulzsec and other anonymous hacker communities. Second, the journalistic accounts of BitCoin markets are subject to sensationalism, hype and inaccuracy, even more so than in the earlier hype cycle for SecondLife, exacerbated by the first issue of anonymity. Third, the virtual currency area is subject to slowly emerging regulation by financial authorities and police forces, which appears to be driving much of the early adopter community ‘underground’. Thus, the community in 2016 may not bear much resemblance to that in 2012. Fourth, there has been relatively little academic empirical study of the community, or indeed of virtual currencies in general, until relatively recently. Fifth, the dynamism of the virtual currency environment in the face of the deepening mistrust of the financial system after the 2008 crisis is such that any research conclusions must by their nature be provisional and transient.

All these challenges, particularly the final three, also raise the motivation for research – an alternative financial system which is separated from the real-world sovereign and which can use code regulation with limited enforcement from offline policing, both returns the study to the libertarian self-regulated environment of early 1990s MUDs, and offers a tantalising prospect of a tool to evade the perils of ‘private profit, socialized risk’ which existing large financial institutions created in the 2008-12 disaster. The need for further research into virtual currencies based on blockchain mining, and for their usage by virtual communities, is thus pressing and should motivate researchers to solve the many problems in methodology for exploring such an environment.

This article looks at the more recent efforts to erode the principles of limitation of liability that have served as the cornerstone of Internet regulation for some years. We will briefly study existing legislation and then we will chart the latest efforts to see the attacks on these limits, particularly by the introduction of graduated response, and the case law that seeks other solutions, such as filtering and blocking.

(This is an unedited version of the final book chapter)

The report considers first the question of how copyright is justified, as this may have some bearing on whether a country will allow an author to make a voluntary statement leading to the expiration of his/her rights. Copyright can variously be described as a natural right, as a reward for creators, as a stimulus for creativity, as a property right, as an economic reward and as part of the public interest. Two justifications are explored, the moral and the utilitarian. The moral justification places the existence of intellectual property as a natural result of the right of the creator to anything he or she produces. The moral element of copyright has given way to the economic one, but the existence of moral rights, particularly important in civil law jurisdictions, continues to strongly represent the elements of copyright as a personality right.

This article explores some of the issues surrounding data mining in the UK's higher education institutions (HEIs). Data mining is understood as the computational analysis of data contained in a text or data set in order to extract new knowledge from it. There are two main ways in which HEIs are involved with data mining: in the process of conducting research, and as producers of data. As consumers, HEIs may have restrictions on the manner in which they can conduct research given the fact that it is likely that content will be protected by intellectual property rights. As producers, HEIs are faced with increasing pressure to make publicly-funded research available to the public through institutional repositories and other similar open access schemes, but some of these do not set out reuse policies for data. The article concludes that if more research was made available with adequate licensing strategies, then the question of whether data mining research is legal would be moot.

Legal context. This article has practical application for those working in the patent field, particularly with regards to the filing of software patent applications.

Key points. The article provides a detailed explanation of the state of the art with regards to the legal protection of software, and describes the latest legal developments in the area, including the failed Directive on Computer Implemented Inventions and some recent cases that may shed more light on some of the technical issues involved in the area of software. The paper also explores some of the arguments put forward by those in favour and opposed to software patents, in order to ascertain their validity.

Practical significance. Existing case law may provide help to solve the problem of patentability, but it might also be a good idea to resurrect the idea that there should be a sui-generis software right.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the area of open source software (“OSS”) as an alternative economic model. However, the success of the OSS mindshare and collaborative online experience has wider implications to many other fields of human endeavor than the mere licensing of computer programmes. There are a growing number of institutions interested in using OSS licensing schemes to distribute creative works and scientific research, and even to publish online journals through open access (“OA”) licenses. There appears to be growing concern in the scientific community about the trend to fence and protect scientific research through intellectual property, particularly by the abuse of patent applications for biotechnology research. The OSS experience represents a successful model which demonstrates that IP licenses could eventually be used to protect against the misuse and misappropriation of basic scientific research. This would be
done by translating existing OSS licenses to protect scientific research. Some efforts are already paying dividends in areas such as scientific publishing, evidenced by the growing number of OA journals. However, the process of translating software licenses to areas other than publishing has been more difficult. OSS and OA licenses work best with works subject to copyright protection because copyright subsists in an original work as soon as it is
created. However, it has been more difficult to generate a license that covers patented works because patents are only awarded through a lengthy application and registration process. If the open science experiment is to work, it needs the intervention of the legal community to draft new licenses that may apply to scientific research. This article will look at the issue of such OA licenses, paying special care as to how the system can best be exported to scientific research based on OSS and OA ideals.

This article discusses formal requirements in open source software contributor copyright assignment and licensing agreements. Contributor agreements are contracts by which software developers transfer or license their work on behalf of an open source project. This is done for convenience and enforcement purposes, and usually takes the form of a formal contract. This work conducts a comparative analysis of how several jurisdicitons regard those agreements. We specifically look at the formal requirements across those countries to ascertain whether formalities are constitutive or probative. We then look at the consequences of the lack of formalities for the validity of those contributor agreements.

The paper looks at the legal nature of so-called open licenses –
agreements designed to provide permissions to users and publishers
through “some rights reserved” clauses. The article starts with the
assertion that copyright licenses are contracts in Civil Law
jurisdictions, and looks at the opposing views and practice in Common
Law jurisdictions. The article particularly looks at recent case law in
the United States which deals specifically with the issue, and concludes
that there is now a clear jurisdictional split between both traditions on
whether these licenses are contracts.