4th Newsletter - Christmas 2009 & Happy New Year 2010

Dear Colleagues!

IRI proudly presents its 4th newsletter edition. This issue contains:

 

• (1) new publications from IRI staff members,
• (2) forthcoming events,
• (3) new projects and cooperations; and
• (4) reports about past events.

 

To subscribe to the newsletter or see previous issues please click here.

1. New publications from the IRI

From "Warranties against third party claims under Article 41, 42 CISG" across "Intellectual Property Rights in e-Health: balancing out the interest at stake - a Herculean task?" to "WIPO", "legal sources of European Private Law", Open Source licenses in insolvency, Grid Computing and more... [see the entire list of new publications].

2. Forthcoming Events

From 17th-18th March 2009 the international conference "Commons, Users, Service Providers - Internet (Self-)Regulation and Copyright", hosted by Prof. Dreier (Karlsruhe), Prof. Spindler (Goettingen) and Prof. Metzger will take place in Hannover. The conference deals with ... [read more].

 

Summer School IN SITU 2010: After the success of IN SITU 2009, IRI will once again be holding its Summer School 'IT will be fun' in 2010. The Summer School in IT law will take place in Hannover from 19th July until 13th  August 2010. For further information please visit our website. Click here for more information about IN SITU 2009.

 

GRIT - basic course in IT-law: Am I allowed to copy photos, maps or logos from the internet to my company’s website? What is personal data? How long am I allowed to store these data? For what kind of website content am I liable? How do I prove the validity of an internet contract? The next Basic Course of IT-Law (GRIT) for employees and self-employed people will be offered in March 2010 and will answer all these questions [read more].

 

Kompetenzwerk: On the 22nd of April IRI will host a workshop called the “Kompetenzwerk” which aims at bringing together IT-lawyers in the Hannover region.

 

Forthcoming lectures of and conferences with Prof. Forgó: Nikolaus Forgó has been invited to a number of conferences as a guest speaker in the year 2010 such as

- The Ankara Bar Congress from the 11th of January to the 15th at Ankara. The Congress is held every two years. It is expected that there will be around 4500 attendees (judges, ministers and lawyers).  The speech is scheduled on the 13th of January. Prof. Forgó will present a topic in the realm of data protection and intellectual property in clinical trials using genetic data. For more information please see http://www.hukukkurultayi.org/eng/2010.html.

- The International Legal Informatics Symposium (IRIS) which will take place at the Law Faculty of the University of Salzburg from 25-27th February 2010. The theme of the conference will be: „Global Security and Proactive State in the Economic Context“ where Prof. Forgó together with some other IRI members of the staff will participate and present several topics. For more information please see http://www.univie.ac.at/RI/IRIS2010/.

- The symposium for „Clinical Research and Data Analysis with EHR“ on the 5th of March 2010 at the University of Tokyo. The focuses of this symposium are medical decision support, health policy decision support and clinical study with secondary use of Electronic Health Records. Prof. Forgó will highlight the legal and ethical issues related to clinical data use.

- The Austrian ARGE-Daten where Prof. Forgó will present a topic on the 15th of April. For more information please see http://www.argedaten.at/php/cms_monitor.php?q=AD-NEWS-LAST.

- The „Kompetenzforum Geomarketing“ (Bonn): The first day (4th May), Prof. Forgó will give a presentation in a topic regarding „Geomarketing and Data Protection“. There are about 100 participants expected to the Forum which will take place at the brand new Kameha Grand Hotel in Bonn.

 

Forthcoming conferences with and lectures of Prof. Metzger:

- 14/15.01.2010: Lecture "Copyright - International and European Perspectives". ETH Zurich, Master in Intellectual Property

- 17/18.03.2010: Conference "Commons, Users, Service Providers - (Self-)Regulation and the Internet", University Hannover

- 14.05.2010: Lecture "General Principles of Law in European Private Law", University Tilburg

- 11.05.2010: Lecture "Damages for Infringment of Intellectual Property under the Directive 2004/48", University Wuerzburg

 

3. New Projects and Cooperations

BALSOBIDOK is a follow-up project to ALSOBIDOK (mainly dealing with different forms of IDs for statistical purposes and their compliance with the requirements of data protection legislation) being delivered by Prof Dr. Forgó to the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture.

 

JIPITEC - Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce: IRI is preparing the launch of a new Open Access Journal on Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce. The first issue will be available in March 2010. The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Articles will be mainly in English, but papers from other European languages will also be accepted. The editors are Prof. Axel Metzger (IRI, Leibniz University Hannover), Prof. Gerald Spindler (University Goettingen) and Prof. Thomas Dreier (University Karlsruhe). The journal will be published according to the principles of Open Access as laid down in the Berlin Declaration.

 

ASPERA: Prof. Dr. Forgó was entrusted by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture (BMUKK) with delivering an expertise regarding the legal framework for the usage of electronic ID cards in Austrian schools. The project will, inter alia, deal with questions concerning Austrian and European data protection legislation as well as the aspects of E-Government.

 

PONTE is a new EU funded project which will start running on February 2010. PONTE aims at providing a platform following a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach that will offer automatic intelligent identification of patients eligible to participate within well-specified clinical trials for drug repositioning with specific focus on mitigating patient safety risks, reducing clinical trial costs and improving clinical trial efficacy. IRI will tackle legal issues concerning data protection.

 

CONSENT is a new EU funded project which will start running on May 2009. This project seeks to examine how consumer behavior and commercial practices are changing the role of consent in the processing of personal data. While consumer consent is a fundamental value on which the European market economy is based, the way consumer consent is obtained is questionable in popular online services (including sites like MySpace, YouTube and Facebook), whose commercial success depends to a large extent on the disclosure by their users of substantial amounts of personal data. IRI will coordinate WP2 which involves a study of the different UGC services currently available to consumers in participating EU member states as well as foreseeable future offerings in this area.

 

4. Past Events

EULISP XIV graduation ceremony: The EULISP class of 2009/2010 has come to an end. On 4th December 2009 the students from Germany, Austria, Greece, Africa and Asia received their LL.M.-degrees in a traditional ceremony in Hannover [read more].

 

Summer School IN SITU 2009: From 6th-31st July 2009 IN SITU (International Summer School in IT-Law at Leibniz Universität Hannover) took place for the first time at the IRI. 20 students from all over the world (Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Great Britain, Latvia, Panama, Spain, and the Czech Republic) successfully took  part in the programme [read more].

 

CLIP: The CLIP working group presented the Second Preliminary Draft of the Principles for Conflict of Laws in Intellectual Property at a workshop held at the Max-Planck-Institute in Munich in October 2009. Axel Metzger presented the principles of law applicable to contracts to the audience [read more].

 

Jürgen Basedow's 60th Birthday: On his 60th birthday, Professor Jürgen Basedow, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, was presented with a Festheft. Axel Metzger, as former Institute research fellow, presented the special issue to the evening's honouree [read more].

 

Forum IT law: The IRI together with EULISP Alumni (EAD) once again hosted the well known Forum of IT-Recht. This year's topics were "The problems of blocking access to the internet" and "The legal problems of used software" [read more].

 

In autumn 2009, IRI was approached by a German major federation of enterprises, being invited to draw up an opinion on the personal quality of object data under respective conditions, and thus the question of such data falling into the scope of application of data protection law. Object of examination was a centralized electronic risk management system, which is supplied by data of the involved enterprises and which in due course can be consulted on request to supply additional information as part of risk evaluation processes. The multitude of players involved creating a complex setup of data procession, as well as the widely unexplored field of classification of object data in regard of data protection law, created a challenging surrounding for this legal opinion, which will be successfully completed and communicated by the end of 2009.

 

2nd meeting of the DGRI expert panel: Axel Metzger together with Joerg Wimmers LL.M. (Attorney-at-Law in Hamburg) founded the DGRI expert panel (= Fachausschuss) "Internet & eCommerce". The group met on 9th December 2009 for its second session which dealt with civil law actions against ISPs to be informed about the identity of violators of copyright law (§ 101a of the German Copyright Law). Nikolaus Forgó spoke about the issues of data protection. Other speakers included  judge Bolko Rachow and Dr. Till Kreutzer. 

 

ACGT news from Japan and Homburg: Dr. Tina Kruegel participated in the Workshop on European-Japanese Research Collaboration in Medical ICT which was held on 14th and 15th September 2009 at Hokkaido University. Tina presented a topic on "Law, ethics and security for networked medical data". She and Prof. Nikolaus Forgó recently participated in the ACGT Consortium Meeting in Homburg in November where Prof. Forgó outlined the legal and ethical concerns of  the project [read more].

 

First iRing lectures: In this year's winter term, the e-learning team started the pilot project "iRing - eLECTURE SERIES". For the first time in it's 25 years of existence, the IRI offered a series of online lectures, using an innovative virtual classroom software. The topics presented cover various legal issues of IT and IP law [read more].

 

In October 2009 a Round Table concerning copyright law and the Google Book Settlement took place in Berlin. It was organized by Prof. Dr. Rainer Kuhlen who founded IUWIS (infrastructure copyright law in science and education), where scientists of various disciplines participated. The discussion of copyright law of academic books will be continued.

 

LSPI Conference in Malta: Christian Krökel and Marcelo Corrales participated in the Fourth International Conference on Legal, Security and Privacy Issues in IT Law (LSPI) and the Third International Law and Trade Conference (ILTC) held in Sliema, Malta on 3rd-5th November 2009. The event was an interesting mixture of academics and other specialists coming from different backgrounds, including a number of people from different law firms [read more].

 

eLearning: From 14th- 17th September 2009, the e-learning team of the IRI attended the conference "E-Learning 2009 - Lernen im Digitalen Zeitalter" ("learning in the digital age") at the Freie Universität in Berlin. More than 90 sessions dealt with subjects such as Web 2.0, electronic examination, virtual classrooms and video-lectures [read more].

 

Future Internet: During the first workshop of the Research Initiative Future Internet of the Leibniz Universität Hannover Eva Egermann, LL.M. gave a presentation on the topic "Challenges of the Future Internet for existing legal principles and regulatory approaches". The Research Initiative aims at facilitating an interdisciplinary exchange regarding the Future Internet at the Leibniz Universität Hannover.

 

FUNRIDE: The main part of the FUNRIDE project is coming to an end. It will go online on the 1st of January 2010 and with it the IRI will present its data security and data protection concept. Within the last few months the IRI  has worked on this concept in addition to advising the Ministry of the Interior regarding various legal questions arising during the project. The IRI - inter alia - drafted the legal foundation (NEAG = Niedersaechsisches Einheitlicher Ansprechpartner Gesetz), which is currently going through the legislative procedure of the state Parliament of Lower Saxony.

 

Geoinformation: IRI is currently undertaking research concerning data protection and intellectual property issues in geodata. Geodata contains geographic or spatial information being a hotly current debate at different groups of stakeholders. In this regards, one of the main stakeholders in the geoinformation industry offered IRI the possibility to extend its research activities in this field. Accordingly, many IRI members of the staff have actively participated in a number of lectures and workshops activities.

 

The Kompetenznetzwerk IT-Recht met on the 19th of November (and will meet again on the 22nd of April). Together with Mr Uwe Schmid (E.ON IS GmbH) the IRI organises a workshop bringing together IT-lawyers in the Hannover region. Nico Reiners from IRI gave a presentation on „Die drei Novellen im Bundesdatenschutzgesetz“ at this occasion.

 

Prof. Forgó participated in the following events:

- December 2009 „Und täglich grüsst das Murmeltier. Einige Rechtsfragen und ihre praktische Bedeutung für den Erfolg von E-Learning-Initiativen“ (= Over and over again. Some legal questions and their relevance for the success of e-learning initiatives), University of Zurich.

- November 2009 „Res facti, non iuris? Ein Versuch über die Makularisierung des Rechts in der Informationsgesellschaft“ (= Res facti, non iuris? A try of debasement of the law in the Information Society), Forums for Ethics, Art and Law in Vienna.

- October 2009 „Legal Issues arising from online marketing” at the Internationalen Liga für Wettbewerbsrecht in Vienna.

- September 2009 "E-Learning. Und wo bleibt das Recht?“ (= E-learning. What about the law?) and „E-Learning im Recht“ (= E-learning in law), Workshops E-Learning 2009 (Prof. Dr. Apostolopoulos) at the FU Berlin

- September 2009 „Vertrauen in der digitalen Wirtschaft“ (= Faith and trust in the e-economy)
Alpbach/Tirol.

- August 2009 „Einatmen. Ausatmen. Vom Schutz der Intimität im elektrischen Zeitalter“ (= Intake. Exhalation. About protection of intimacy in the digital age), University of Vienna under the Summer discourses in Strobl/Wolfgangsee.

 

Prof. Metzger dealt with the topic of "Reshaping Territoriality: The Reach of Trademarks in Global Digital Networks" at the Bucerius Law School Hamburg on 6th November 2009.

 

Editorial

The IRI newsletter is published twice a year. To subscribe to our newsletter or to see previous editions please click here.

If you wish to receive further information please contact Marcelo Corrales, LL.M. or Arne Nordmeyer, LL.M. We would like to thank all the IRIans for their contributions and in particular the webteam for their assistance.