Search

Considering copyright licensing issues involving non-fungible tokens to manage creative works.

I want to start with a bit of a disclaimer: I have actually minted, bought, and sold a few NFTs. But I’ve managed only to lose money. I think I am not alone. There is a report in Nature says that that some 75% of all NFT sales have been for under fifteen dollars. I could spend hours talking about the common pitfalls and issues faced by EU and UK participants in the NFT market. There are many different topics up for discussion, but I have selected just a few that I find might be different from an international perspective when compared with the experience in the United States. You may have noticed that I’m separating the UK and European perspectives. (Thank you, Brexit.) There has already been much talk about what you are getting when you purchase an NFT: The data is a smart contract. It is code. In other words, the NFT is not the artwork, it is just the token that represents the work. But we have not really explored how copyright law impacts the NFT market. So, the first question I want to explore is the rights question.

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.

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.

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.

For many years, various authors have postulated the possible existence of a right to be forgotten. The Court of Justice of the European Union in the landmark ruling in Google Spain v Costeja Gonzalez (C 131/12) enacted a limited version of the right. Now the General Data Protection Rules includes a “right to erasure”. This article looks at the evolution of the right, paying special attention to its future.

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.

International audience; This article studies the possible impact of the “right to be forgotten” (RTBF) on the preservation of native digital heritage. It analyses the extent to which archival practices may be affected by the new right, and whether the web may become impossible to preserve for future generations, risking to disappear from memories and history since no version would be available in public or private archives. Collective rights to remember and to memory, free access to information and freedom of expression, seem to clash with private individuals’ right to privacy. After a presentation of core legal concepts of privacy, data protection and freedom of expression, we analyse the case of the European Union Court of Justice vs. Google concerning the right to be forgotten, and look deeper into the controversies generated by the decision. We conclude that there is no room for concern for archives and for the right to remember given the restricted application of RTBF.; Cet article étudie l’impact possible du « droit à l’oubli » (RTBF) sur la préservation du patrimoine numérique natif. Il analyse si les pratiques d'archivage sont susceptibles d’être affectées par le nouveau droit et s’il pourrait devenir impossible de préserver le Web pour les générations futures, avec le risque pour certains contenus de disparaître de la mémoire et de l’histoire si aucune version n’était disponible dans les archives publiques ou privées. Le droit collectif au souvenir et à la mémoire, l’accès libre à l'information et la liberté d'expression semblent entrer en conflit avec les droits individuels à la vie privée. Après une présentation des concepts juridiques fondamentaux de la vie privée, de la protection des données personnelles et de la liberté d'expression, nous analysons l’arrêt Google de la Cour de Justice de l’Union Européenne et le droit à l’oubli, et examinons les controverses qui ont été générées par la décision. On conclut que les archives et le droit au souvenir ne seront pas affectés par le droit à l’oubli, étant donné son application restreinte.

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 offers a first-look legal analysis of the draft version 3 of the GNU General Public License, and will also look at the debate that it has generated in the Free and Open Source community. The paper will answer the following vital questions: Is the GPL v3 different in any fundamental way from GPL v2? What are the main differences? What will be the impact of the new GPL to the problem of software patents? Is there an incompatibility problem with previous versions of the licence? How does it compare with other existing licences?

The history of International Law has been a struggle to develop a set of legal institutions that transcend national borders. The need for strong supranational legal protection has never been as evident as it is in the present. It is undeniable that our world is going through a process of globalisation, in which culture and consumption patterns are shared throughout the Four Corners of the world. Part of this process has been sped up by multinational corporations, a group of enterprises whose great influence is felt around the globe.

It is practically unnecessary to point out that non-proprietary software licences have been generating a tremendous amount of interest in recent years. Both the Free Software and Open Source Software (henceforth FOSS) definitions provide a general framework for what non-proprietary licences should cover and the minimal rights that should be granted to users of products licensed through with these methods.1

This paper looks at the field of information technology (IT) law and its reliance on the buzzwords, jargon and acronyms that tend to alienate serious discussion about some of the deeper socio‐legal issues involved. It is often easy to become confused by the terminology and the technology, which has led to some non‐issues receiving too much interest (the year 2000 bug for example) and some valuable and worthy topics being almost ignored. Some writers and researchers may be tempted to neglect the field because of a lack of understanding of the technology, which may eventually lead to the end of IT law as a serious field of research. This paper will attempt to re‐ignite the jurisprudential debate about the future of IT law research, teaching and practice by looking at the possible trends emerging from the literature.

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 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 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.

International audience; The field of biodiversity research gathers and crosses collections of environmental data, scientific data, geospatial data and cultural data. All of the available datasets have created a global information pool which can be used to develop further research and downstream bioeconomy innovations. Intellectual Property governance rules vary between proprietary assets and research commons. The largest datasets are collected, curated, mined, and shared at the national and international level by natural history museums and research institutions which are members of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), an international organization that aims to make available all known information on biodiversity, provide digitization, facilitate interoperability and retrieval of this data. This paper intends to explore the various legal regimes that apply to biodiversity data. Depending on the data format and the contribution structure, they can be considered as works, public sector information, data, databases, metadata, all submitted to different national and international legal regimes. Besides, contributors apply more or less restrictive terms of use between all rights reserved and open access options. In order to study the impact of governance choices and practices, the authors have conducted interviews with key stakeholders in several GBIF partner institutions in Europe and Latin America in order to better understand the policy challenges faced by biodiversity researchers who intend to share their information, such as biopiracy, commercial exploitation and scientific attribution for data reuse. One section of the paper will be dedicated to the study of the legal environment, while the other will focus on contractual practices.

Data or text mining (hereafter called “content mining”) is a process that uses software that looks for interesting or important patterns in data that might otherwise not be observed. An example might be combining a database of journal articles about ground water pollution with one of hospital admissions to detect a pollution-related pattern of disease breakout.It is also a useful tool in commerce. A credit card company might detect a correlation between purchases of tickets from particular airline with purchases of certain types of automobiles and develop a marketing program uniting appropriate vendors. One McKinsey report states that the utilization of ‘big data’ in the sphere of public data alone could create €250 billion annual value to Europe’s economy.Content mining is increasingly accomplished by machine. Databases, particularly those produced by scientific research, are far too large to be scanned by human eyeball. However, the right to mine data is not assured by the law in most jurisdictions and even where it is, the terms of access to the majority of research publication databases deny permission to do so. One recent study indicated that obtaining permission to mine the thousands of articles appearing on a single subject from the myriad of different publishers would require 62% of a researcher’s time. Many content owners, including research institutions, have yet to develop any policy on content mining.This report will identify the main legal barriers to data mining and data reuse and make policy suggestions to guide governments, funding agencies, and research institutions. As the title suggests, the emphasis of the study is about legal issues that are specific to higher education institutions (HEIs).The first challenge for this report is to attempt to delimit the subject matter, as various types of content that are subject to automated analysis. HEIs can hold and share content of various formats, here are just a few examples:Text: published articles, book chapters, preparatory notes, working papers, reports, teaching materials, conference papers, presentations, theses.Datasets: statistical data, geolocation data, survey results, maps, figures, time series, genetic information, health records, computer logs.Multimedia: pictures, sound recordings, interviews, presentations, video.Each of the above may have separate legal regimes applying to them. In the interest of convenience and simplicity, whenever the report talks about database contents, there will be no distinction as to whether we are dealing with text, data or multimedia, unless clearly specified in the text.

This report considers the Dominican Republic - Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) and its impact on Information Technology (IT) based businesses. The report summarises the factual background to, and contents of, the agreement, and then reviews those parts of the agreement (or omissions from the agreement) that are relevant to the IT field. IT is of interest both because of its potential importance as a contributor to business (and social) growth, but also because of the lesser international roles accorded to it in comparison with its sister, intellectual property (IP). The IT-related provisions of DR-CAFTA reflect international IT (and IP) controversies. But DR-CAFTA also raises questions of the place of agreements between states, their legal validity and their impact upon international relationships and global development. The primary objective of this project was to explore the extent to which DR-CAFTA impacts upon IT based businesses; the implications of this; to assess how much these issues, and associated economic and legal questions, had been addressed; and to lay the foundations for further legal and interdisciplinary work. We have not, at this stage, explored all the issues covered and not covered in DR-CAFTA, and arising in respect of other agreements of this nature. Rather, we have sought to introduce the issues, provide preliminary comment, and provide a list of resources for further study. We hope that this will be helpful to those coming to the project from a variety of backgrounds, including different legal specialities. We have concluded that there are important issues to be developed regarding all free trade agreements and IT. These issues are highlighted in the following sections. In terms of immediate further work, we propose investigating the present and future impact of UDRP provisions in DR-CAFTA countries, and liability of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). We believe that these can raise important questions combining IT, e-commerce, IP, trade, human rights and competition issues; both for DR-CAFTA countries and those contemplating their own agreements. We also consider that there is a need for international and interdisciplinary collaboration for this work to be done, including through empirical research with ISPs and domain name owners. We propose holding an international meeting of experts. As a preliminary step, we are also publishing this report in Spanish. Progress has been shared on the project blog, throughout, and we have been delighted with the interest expressed from a variety of corners. We anticipate this report being transformed into a wiki and for further contributions to be developed via web-based. We hope to maintain the project's momentum through the wiki, and details of this will be posted on the blog. This project was one of the final activities of Phase 1 of the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh (AHRC Research Centre). We are grateful to the AHRC for their support, and look forward to pursuing parts of this work in Phase 2.

The use of non-proprietary software licenses - such as the Free Software (FS) and Open Source Software (OSS) license models - is definitely on the increase, showing that the open development models are viable and sometime even commercially successful systems. Amongst these models, one of the most interesting licenses is that offered by so-called copyleft licenses, which are licenses that allow software to be transferred with the insurance that the source code will remain open, with the caveat that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. However, software development is not the only area in which this licensing model could apply. The viral nature of copyleft licenses has generated a considerable amount of interest in circles that transcend software development. The idea of sharing materials is not new, and has been made more evident by the chaotic and sometimes anarchic nature of the internet. However, shared materials tend to suffer from the possibility of third parties that use the freely acquired information to turn them into proprietary works. That is why many different organisations are turning to the copyleft model to protect works that are being freely shared online. One such project is the OpenContent License (OPL), a collaborative effort that sets a similar license to the GPL, ensuring that shared works will continue to remain free to subsequent users. A more ambitious project is the Creative Commons, which offers a wide range of licenses applicable to all sorts of creative material. In the area of biotechnology, there have been some suggestions that the copyleft model could be used to protect the public results of the human genome race being placed in the public domain by several researchers, something that has been suggested by a leading member of the Human Genome Consortium, although the idea has never been implemented. This paper will explore the application of copyleft licenses to other areas of research and development, and will try to explore if these can be successfully adapted to various different areas where creators want to share their works to the public but want to make sure that there will not be any further commercialisation of their creations.

The Internet is a new medium that allows every person who is connected to it to become a publisher and to be able to share ideas and information. This is a phenomenon that I call the “New Sharing Ethic”. This new sharing ethic is the subject of the present paper, in which the implications of the free flow of information in Cyberspace will be discussed.