The Electronic Trade Documents Act 2023 (ETDA) went into force on 20 September 2023. Despite receiving little attention from the media, the ETDA is one of the most significant pieces of legislation enacted by the UK government in the field of digital trade. The ETDA enables the legal recognition of trade documents such as bills of lading and bills of exchange in electronic form which are deemed to have the same legal significance of their paper equivalent.
Category: Digital law
Professor Elaine Fahey, Institute for the Study of European Law, City Law School, City, University of London
The EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC)
A Transatlantic Trade and Technology Council (TTC) has been set up quickly by the European Union (EU) with the US at the outset of the US Biden administration. It is not a trade negotiation and does not adhere to any specific Article 218 TFEU procedure, although it has many signature ‘EU’ characteristics. The TTC has high-minded goals to ‘solve’ global challenges on trade and technology with its most significant third country cooperating partner. Yet it is notably not the only recent Council proposed by the EU- there is also a new EU-India Trade and Technology Council. These new Councils represent a new modus operandi for the EU to engage with ‘complex’ partners, comprising executive to executive engagement, meeting agency counterparts regularly in close groups in an era of EU trade policy deepening its stakeholder and civil society ambit overall. The TTC has a vast range of policy-making activities, traversing many areas of EU law. Their precise selection and future is difficult to understand in EU regional trade and data policy, seemingly pivoting, like US trade law, to executive-led soft law.
In my recently published book, The EU as a Global Digital Actor: Institutionalising Global Data Protection, Trade, and Cybersecurity I have sought to try to capture a range of issues emerging as to the EU’s digital and international relations agenda.
Jed Odermatt and David Seymour
On 23 September 2022 the City Law School held its Research & Enterprise Day on the theme of Legal London. The event was an opportunity to highlight the research, teaching and scholarship at City Law School and to develop links across the University, professions and the wider community.
Artificial intelligence poses new questions for intellectual property (IP) law. Can machines be inventors for purposes of patent law? Do creative works produced by AI deserve copyright protection? Is new legislation required to govern AI creativity? Courts, IP offices, and legislators in multiple jurisdictions are considering these questions.
Imagine you are Olivia Rodrigo. This may be harder for some of us than others, but bear with me. You have just released your new single Brutal. Your new song has been called brilliant and one of the best songs of the year by critics. But then the phone rings with the bad news: your song contains a riff that is very similar to the famous guitar riff in Elvis Costello’s Pump It Up and you are being sued for copyright infringement.[1] Rats! As a responsible creator, you try to avoid copying material from others. You even have people in your record company who check your songs prior to release to avoid incidents like this. But alas, sometimes accidents still happen.
Elaine Fahey and Isabella Mancini
“Understanding the EU as a Good Global Governance Actor: ambitions, direction and values” is the provisional title of a book project forthcoming with Edward Elgar in 2022 and edited by (Elaine Fahey City Law School) and Isabella Mancini (City Law School/ Brunel Law School).
Referred to by some as Facebook’s “supreme court”, the oversight board tasked with reversing or upholding Facebook’s content moderation decisions has ruled that the social media company’s ban of Donald Trump should be maintained.
The board upheld Facebook’s January 7 decision to ban then-President Trump from posting content on Facebook and Instagram, after his social media activity was partially blamed for inciting the violence at the January 6 Capitol riots, during which five people died. However, the board noted that indefinite suspensions were not described in Facebook’s content policies – and so the ban will be reviewed again in six months.
A lot has been said about Facebook being an incumbent digital platform threatening competition on the markets (and arguably much more remains to be said). However, the ‘law of Facebook’ incorporates different dimensions ‒ e.g., public, international, transnational, European, comparative ‒ that are at least as important as competition law and policy. It is with this premise in mind that the Jean Monnet Chair in Law & Transatlantic Relations, City Law School and the Institute for the Study of European Law (ISEL) at City Law School hosted a webinar to shed light on these further dimensions of the law of Facebook and discuss whether it can function as a blueprint to understand legal issues ‒ and engineer possible solutions ‒ concerning the law of big techs in general. Let’s delve into the central matters discussed by the panellists concerning the multidimensional law of Facebook.
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