SCRIPTed Journal

Article: Data Localization Laws and Policy: The EU Data Protection International Transfers Restriction Through a Cloud Computing Lens: One quality of a good scholarly work, I believe, is the ability to engage the reader with effective dialogues raising interests around the main research question, and then guiding the reader to the conclusion that they would have naturally come

Book review: Data Localization Laws and Policy: The EU Data Protection International Transfers Restriction Through a Cloud Computing Lens By Jiahong Chen

Article: No man is an island: A critical analysis of the UK’s implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty: The Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled was signed on behalf of the European Union on 30 April 2014. On 13 September 2017, the European Union created a Directive (2017/1564) implementing its obligations under the Marrakesh Treaty. This Directive and corresponding Regulations came into force on 12 October 2018, which was the deadline provided to member states in implementing the Directive. On the 11th of September 2018, the United Kingdom made the Copyright and Related Rights (Marrakesh Treaty etc.) (Amendment) Regulations 2018. The UK’s Marrakesh Regulations came into force the day before the EU deadline, and the lack of in-depth critical debate around this piece of legislation as well as the EU having initiated legal proceedings against the UK underscores the necessity of this paper. This paper seeks to assess the UK’s Marrakesh Regulations in light of both the EU legislation as well as non-EU international obligations to which the UK will remain bound beyond Brexit. This paper will ask: Can it be said that the UK in implementing the Marrakesh Treaty is fulfilling its obligations owed both to the EU as well as its own citizens?

No man is an island: A critical analysis of the UK’s implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty By Jade Kouletakis. The Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled was signed on behalf of the European Union on 30 April 2014. On 13 September 2017, the European Union created a Directive (2017/1564) implementin...

Article: Computational Normative Decision Support Structures of Forensic Interpretation in the Legal Process: A broad range of questions at various instances in the legal process can be stated and analysed in terms of formal decision theoretic models, with results conveyed in graphical terms, such as decision trees. However, the real-world decision problems encountered by the participants of a legal process, including judges, prosecutors and attorneys, present challenging features, such as multiple competing propositions, variable costs and uncertain process outcomes. This complicates decision theoretic computations and the use of diagrammatic devices such as decision trees which mainly provide static views of selected features of a given problem. Yet, the issues are inherently dynamic, and the complexity of strategic planning and assessing legal tactics – given a party’s standpoint – increases even further when considerations are extended to information provided by forensic science services. This is because introducing results of forensic examinations may impact on the probability of various trial outcomes and hence crucially impact on a party’s interests. In this paper, we analyse and discuss examples of decision problems at the interface of the law and forensic science using influence diagrams (i.e., Bayesian decision networks). Such models, hereafter called normative decision support structures, can be operationally implemented through commercially and academically available software systems. These normative decision support structures represent core computational models that can be integrated as part of decision and litigation support systems, to help the participants of a legal process answer a variety of questions regarding complex strategic decisions.

Computational Normative Decision Support Structures of Forensic Interpretation in the Legal Process By Alex Biedermann, Silvia Bozza, Franco Taroni, and Joëlle Vuille. A broad range of questions at various instances in the legal process can be stated and analysed in terms of formal decision theoretic models, with results conveyed in graphical terms, such as decision trees. However, the real-world...

Article: The Allocation of Patent Ownership in R&D Partnerships: Default Rules v. Contractual Practices: Due to the increased complexity of new technologies and rapid technological developments, organisations often cannot independently keep up with the technological progress and engage in open innovation activities by setting up R&D partnerships. The allocation of patent ownership of jointly developed inventions is a difficult issue during the negotiations of such partnerships and can be extremely problematic due to the lack of regulation and harmonisation of patent legislation. This entails the need to consult a considerable number of legal systems that may be involved in large-scale international partnerships. The difficulties in allocating ownership can also arise due to non-legal reasons, such as diverging business interests. While many patent systems suggest co-ownership as a default regime, in practice organisations often avoid it due to the complexity related to further joint exploitation. The principle of freedom of contract allows organisations to establish their own applicable rules governing the allocation of ownership and exploitation of jointly developed inventions. Those rules provide more flexibility, but also imply some transaction costs in designing contracts. In this paper I examine why certain default rules are not “sticky” and whether it would be possible to establish a default rule accepted by the majority of the negotiating parties.

The Allocation of Patent Ownership in R&D Partnerships: Default Rules v. Contractual Practices By Arina Gorbatyuk. Due to the increased complexity of new technologies and rapid technological developments, organisations often cannot independently keep up with the technological progress and engage in open innovation activities by setting up R&D partnerships. The allocation of patent ownership o...

Article: IT Contracts and Dispute Management: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Project Lifecycle: There is often a perceived gap between the principles of contract law as stated in textbooks and the business realities of how contracts are entered into and projects managed and delivered. The authors of IT Contracts and Dispute Management: a

Book review: IT Contracts and Dispute Management: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Project Lifecycle By Cliona Kelly

Article: Research Handbook on Global Health Law: Global health law is an emerging subdiscipline within law that is concerned with the study of how law, broadly defined, can impact negatively or positively the health of populations across the globe. As is the case with the term “global

Book review: Research Handbook on Global Health Law By Edward S. Dove

Issue 17:1 (1-193)

SCRIPTed Issue 17:1 (1-193) January 2020

Volume 17:

Volume 17

Article: The collective management of performers’ rights in the UK: a story of competing interests: In this article I examine the experience of UK performers using collective management organisation PPL, a UK CMO established by record companies that also manages the rights of performers. I consider the effect of the regulatory framework on the provision of transparency to PPL’s performer members by drawing on primary sources including interviews with performers, PPL’s regulation and its public-facing material. I demonstrate that PPL marshals social, financial, legal and technological resources to prioritise the interests of record companies over those of performers. Considering that the current legal framework supports PPL’s actions, I discuss two alternatives: i) tightening regulation of individual CMOs whilst respecting their monopoly status, and ii) opening up the sector to competition. Despite difficulties faced by performers vis-à-vis PPL, I ultimately side with a large body of literature suggesting that performers are best off in an environment that supports CMO’s monopoly status. However, in an environment where regulators resist tightening regulation, performers are forced to support a competitive market for CMOs.

The collective management of performers’ rights in the UK: a story of competing interests By Ananay Aguilar. In this article I examine the experience of UK performers using collective management organisation PPL, a UK CMO established by record companies that also manages the rights of performers. I consider the effect of the regulatory framework on the provision of transparency to PPL’...

Article: Remedies for Breach of Privacy: The law of privacy has developed rapidly over the course of the last two decades as a result not only of technological developments, but also rapid social change. Simultaneously the courts have been asked with increasing frequency to determine the

Book review: Remedies for Breach of Privacy By Róisín A. Costello

Article: Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code: Blockchains, distributed ledger technologies, bitcoins and peer-to-peer networks have reignited old debates and arguments about the implications of decentralisation for social, economic and political ordering. Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code sets out to map the landscape of

Book review: Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code By Joseph Savirimuthu