newtech.law - legal aspects of new technologies

On 15 December 2017, judges of the Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court of Poland ruled on the crucial issue of the choice of court for a plaintiff alleging injury from a publication posted online.

Under Art. 35 of the Civil Procedure Code, a tort claim can be filed with the court in whose jurisdiction the event causing the damage occurred. This provision does not make it clear however whether for this purpose the place where the event causing the damage occurred can also be the area of the court’s jurisdiction where the plaintiff could have seen the online publication.

We have written about initial coin offerings several times, both here on the blog and in our 2016 report on blockchain, smart contracts and DAO. ICOs continue to grow at an impressive rate, with projects raising funding of several billion dollars through ICOs in 2017.

As anonymisation of data appears to the main method for escaping the restrictive regime of the General Data Protection Regulation, it’s worthwhile for data processers to be aware of the risks they may be exposed to if this is not done properly or the data can be traced back to specific people. Should firms applying artificial intelligence to anonymised data expect to be held liable when it turns out that the data they are using have not been permanently anonymised but only been given a pseudonym—a reversible operation?

Recent unofficial reports that Estonia is working on a possible initial coin offering for participants in the country’s e-Residency programme have sparked a debate on whether EU law permits a country in the eurozone to offer a cryptocurrency.

Smart contracts are no longer just a theoretical concept and are becoming a real tool used by lawyers (with some help from developers…).

For many people today, a life lived offline can hardly be imagined, but the internet still has many limitations. Access to information and easy communications have become the standard and basis for functioning of the society and the economy—and, it follows, a subject of interest to the law. Nonetheless, we more and more often sense the shortcomings of the current version of the digital world. These include digital exchange of value and universal electronic identification.