Lex Ferenda

That’s the end of live blogging from this year’s BILETA conference. Thanks in particular to Glasgow Calendonian for the wifi! More general reflections at a later stage.

I attended a session on ‘theory’ as I was one of the speakers! I don’t perceive my work as particularly theoretical but it was a very interesting session and I”m glad that I ended up there. My paper, Expression 2.0: from known unknowns to unknown knowns, will be posted on the BILETA website [...]

Wiebke Abel (Edinburgh) and Matthias Damm (an attorney in Karlsruhe, and LLM graduate of Strathclyde) both addressed the topic of trojans and spy software and their use by law enforcement agencies in particular.
Wiebke started things off with an overview of how ‘the world has changed’ and what this means for crime. Are [...]

Chris Marsden (Essex) is an expert on net neutrality in Europe (and other things); see his SCRIPT-ed article on the topic here. And that’s also his topic for this morning’s keynote. Oh, and and it rained lots aréir but it’s quite mild this morning.
This presentation : It’s about convergence, it’s different in Europe, [...]

The last (official) business of the day was a series of parallel presentations/experiments/workshops; I passed by the fun-looking projections and computers and went to an interesting panel under the banner of the recently relaunched SCRIPT-ed (the open access periodical managed by the University of Edinburgh). Journal editors Wiebke Abel and Shawn Harmon put together [...]

Burkhard Schafer (Edinburgh) started by shooting the Chair.
He then went on to discuss evidence and hearsay and computer-generated speech; how relevant is the hearsay rule when you have lots of information ’spoken’ (aural or visual) by a computer. This works for something as simple as the ‘time’ of a particular event; if the computer [...]

Prof. Diane Rowland (Aberystwyth) spoke about the Promusicae case (see here), noting that it deals with five directives and 20 specific Articles and raises many more questions to be dealt with in future cases. She mentioned six issues or elements that were relevant : (in no particular order), theories of governance, hierarchies of rights, [...]

TJ McIntyre is chair of Digital Rights Ireland and a lecturer in law at University College Dublin. He spoke to the title above at a session on regulation this afternoon.
TJ spoke about the shift from cyberlibertarianism to cyberpaternalism. We didn’t really get what the libertarians suggested; they looked at disintermediation, practicalities (jurisdiction, geography), [...]

Hello from the BILETA (British and Irish Law, Education and Technology Association) annual conference at Glasgow Caledonian University in lovely, rainy Scotland. The conference (agenda, abstracts etc available here) is taking place today and tomorrow. I’m speaking about ‘Expression 2.0‘ tomorrow afternoon.
This morning, I popped into a talk by Dr. Carlisle George (Middlesex) [...]