changes in law - legal aspects of new technologies

The world pins high hopes on the development of artificial intelligence systems. AI is expected to generate huge economic and social benefits across various aspects of life and sectors of the economy, including the environment, agriculture, healthcare, finances, taxes, mobility, and public administration.

The progressing development of AI systems is forcing the creation of appropriate legal frameworks, which on one hand should facilitate further growth of AI technologies but on the other hand should ensure adequate protection of persons using such systems and raise societal confidence in the operation of AI systems.

On 30 November 2021, the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on the final wording of a draft Data Governance Act (DGA) (COM/2020/767 final).

The aim of the proposal is to promote the availability of data and to build a trustworthy environment facilitating the use of data (both person and non-personal) for research and creation of innovative new products and services. It is also intended to create a legal framework for easier sharing of data and mechanisms facilitating re-use of certain data held by the public sector, including data involving health, agriculture and the environment.

The Polish regulations directly
referring to blockchain will be joined on 19 September 2020 by the Regulation of the Council of Ministers of
9 March 2020 on Documents Connected with Banking Activities on IT Data
Carriers. It expressly permits banks to store documents connected with
banking activities on blockchain.

Under §5(2) of the new regulation, “A document may be stored in the form of a distributed and decentralised database. The bank shall operate the database in a manner ensuring the security and integrity of the documents contained in the database.” The phrase “distributed and decentralised database” used in this provision refers to blockchain, as is expressly stated in the justification to the draft of the regulation. Moreover, the identical phrase is used in other legal acts to refer to blockchain technology (e.g. in the provisions of the Commercial Companies Code devoted to the ledger of stockholders).

The Regulation of the Council of Ministers of
9 March 2020 on Documents Connected with Banking Activities on IT Data
Carriers enters into force on 19 September 2020. This is a good occasion
to discuss the expanded legal significance of the electronic seal.

The new regulation supersedes the prior executive
regulation under Art. 7 of the Polish Banking Law. The noteworthy features
of the new regulation include the systemic consolidation of the terminology
through introduction of concepts consistent with the EU’s eIDAS Regulation (910/2014)
and a direct reference to distributed ledger technology. (I will address the
treatment of this technology in a separate article.)

It appears that inclusion in the new Polish regulation of terminology consistent with the eIDAS Regulation is more than a mere technicality. A closer analysis of the provisions raises the question of whether the regulation in fact expands the legal significance of the electronic seal.

Does a company or limited partnership have to
have its own website? Does it have to operate the site itself? What information
must be posted there? Practical pointers under the amended Commercial Companies
Code

An amendment to the Commercial Companies Code entered into force at the start of 2020, imposing on joint-stock companies and joint-stock limited partnerships an obligation to operate a website and to post certain information there for stockholders (as we previously reported here).

Although
the new regulation applies to all joint-stock companies, in practice it changes
little for public companies, which were already subject to much more extensive
requirements, and thus we do not discuss public companies further in this
article.

The new regulation should be examined more closely, as it has generated (probably unintentionally) certain doubts as to what the new obligation entails.

Across all fields of life we witness groundbreaking changes brought by new technologies. Progressive digitalisation is not sparing the financial markets, which are indeed perceived as an area that will be shifted almost entirely into the digital world. The goods traded on financial markets rarely take material form, but are typically some type of abstract right.

The basic and most obvious challenge for digitalisation of financial markets is to eliminate paper where entries in IT systems prove to work better. Traditionally and historically, securities have taken paper form, but that clearly does not meet the requirements of contemporary trading on financial markets studded with state-of-the-art technologies.