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Join us Friday afternoon at our “To Decentralize Everything, Hash Here: Blockchains and Information Law” panel at Tilting Perspectives 2019 conference

Blockchain is the latest technological hype to promise disruptive decentralization, especially as it relates to information goods and services. While one of the goals of decentralized technologies is to operate without the need to adhere to existing legal systems, blockchains face challenges of compatibility with these systems so as to facilitate wider adoption. This panel examines these challenges from the perspective of information law, focusing on their treatment under the legal regimes of copyright, data protection and competition. Panelsts will be Balazs Bodo, Alexandra Giannopoulou, Valeria Ferrari, Daniel Gervais and Jurgen Goossens

Source: Program for Friday, May 17th

Blockchain solutions have been proposed to restrict the power of these big middlemen. But Dr Bodo warns that these could struggle to translate the complexity of the old system into the inflexible logic of computer programming, without introducing new power injustices.‘The question is not blockchain per se – blockchain is a wonderful technology,’ he continued. But, he says, there is an open question about what happens when blockchain challenges the power of the law and the power of existing institutions.

Source: Blockchain could democratise banking, music – but at what cost? | Horizon: the EU Research & Innovation magazine | European Commission

Between 14-17 February we were in Washington DC at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, proudly representing European science and research in the US together with Philip Howard and Sarit Kraus.

Our panel is on how technology affects society. Check out the program here.

The video of our CPDP panel is now up!

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Organised by Blockchain and Society Policy Research Lab, Institute for Information Law, UvA

Chair Balazs Bodo, Blockchain and Society Policy Research Lab, Institute for Information Law, UvA (NL)

Moderator: Mireille Hildebrandt, VUB-LSTS (BE)

Speakers: Michèle Finck, Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (DE); David Ci- liberti, DG JUST (EU); Alexandra Giannopoulou, Blockchain and Society Policy Research Lab, Institute for Information Law, UvA (NL); George Danezis, UCL (UK); Konstantinos Stylianou, University of Leeds (UK)

Individual user control of data has become a central issue in the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), creating a more demanding data protection framework for involved actors, all while coming in conflict with fundamental characteristics of blockchains. Thus, the difficulty lies in designing a system without compromising core values of both privacy regulation on the one hand and blockchain technology on the other. Given the right incentives there is no doubt GDPR compliant distributed ledgers can, and will be designed. The real question is what happens if there is persistent market/social/political interest in those blockchain implementations which do not care for, or are unable to achieve GDPR compliance.

Considering the interdisciplinary nature of the main question, the proposed panel consists of invited experts selected to cover various privacy-related fields including law and computer science.

• What are the main points of friction between blockchains and the GDPR?

• What are the technological privacy enhancing mechanisms that could apply?

• What are the appropriate and necessary conciliations for the creation of privacy-preserving blockchains in accordance with data protection regulation?

• Is there a market for non-compliance that blockchain technologies are best suited to serve?

The Korea Copyright Commission invited us to talk about blockchains and copyright at the Seoul Copyright Forum 2018. Balazs presented our paper on blockchain and copyright.

See the talk here:

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And the slides here:

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The Institute for Information Law (IViR) cordially invites you to the next

Blockchain&Society Policy Research Lab Lunchtime talk

Eliza Mik: What is blocking blockchains?
A common sense, legal evaluation

Despite dozens of pilot projects and an incessant buzz surrounding blockchain technologies, actual mainstream implementations are few – unless we limit the discussion to crypto-currencies and fundraising platforms. One of the reasons is a lack of general understanding of the technologies in question or, more specifically, of their actual practical capabilities. At a basic level, blockchains are nothing but databases – and to state that a database in itself will revolutionize commerce and reform society seems unfounded, if not outright ridiculous. The lack of understanding of certain technical characteristics of blockchains hinders their evolution and adaptation to commercial needs. The problem is particularly prominent in permissionless (aka public) blockchains, where technological misconceptions merge with a strong ideological bias: certain features, such as trustlessness and decentralization, are regarded as absolute values that require preservation – even if such preservation runs counter to the basic needs of the commercial market place.    Another reason might lie in the indiscriminate and uninformed use of certain terms, such as validation, smart contracts or transaction, without understanding their actual, technical meaning and implications. It is, after all, impossible to “transplant” legal or technical nomenclature from its original context into another and expect it to have the same meaning and/or effect. The problem is particularly prominent when it comes to smart contracts, which are often touted as the ultimate technological tool guaranteeing legal certainty. Such claims are, however, completely unfounded. On one hand then, the commercial use of blockchains is hindered by a lack of awareness of what they can or cannot do. On the other, the development of a solid theoretical approach is prevented by a lack of standardized terminology. In effect, when talking about blockchains – we often don’t know what we talk about.

Eliza Mik teaches contract law and the law of e-commerce at the Singapore Management University. In parallel with a line of research focused on distributed ledger technologies and smart contracts, she is involved in multiple projects relating to the legal implications of automation, the deployment of ‘intelligent agents’ in retail environments as well as the transactional imbalances created by the use of consumer-facing technologies, such as predictive analytics and AI. Before joining academia, she has worked in-house in a number of software companies, Internet start-ups and telecommunication providers in Australia, Poland, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates. Eliza advised on e-commerce, payment systems, software licensing and technology procurement.

https://law.smu.edu.sg/faculty/profile/56155/Eliza-MIK

Date and Location: 12.30, Friday, 28^th of September, 2018, Room REC A7.23

PLEASE RSVP here.