Legal Issues In The Digital Economy

It is a matter of fact that technological innovation is deeply impacting on our culture, society, economy and labour market. The massive and widespread use of Artificial Intelligence and the strengthening of the collaborative economy (also known as ‘gig’ or ‘platform’ economy) are blurring the traditional legal categories and creating new requirements for protection for employed and self-employed workers. This book represents a tool to understand where we are and where we are going, focusing on old and new legal categories and labour market policies. The chapters included in this volume cover different disciplines, such as legal informatics, labour law, social security law, civil law, and tort law, in order to offer scholars and legal specialists an overall view of ongoing changes, challenges and opportunities from a European Union law perspective.

This taxonomy has been prepared by the secretariat of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) to map the main legal issues relating to emerging digital technologies in trade. It covers the key topics of artificial intelligence, data, digital assets, online platforms, and distributed ledger systems. For each topic, the taxonomy defines key concepts, explores the actors, legal relationships and legal issues involved, and appraises the application of existing legislative texts developed by UNCITRAL. The publication supports the central and coordinating role of UNCITRAL within the United Nations system in addressing legal issues related to the digital economy, and is designed to guide future legislative projects aimed at enabling digital trade.

"Digitisation is fundamentally transforming our entire economy and our society. The datafication of business processes leads to an incredibly fast and ever increasing mass of data. Such data is the blood in the veins of the digital economy. Many existing and future business models, which will drive innovation and create economic growth, depend on being able to use this data. Trading Data in the Digital Economy is therefore a central aspect of the development of the EU Digital Market. In continuing with the aim of the 'Münster Colloquia on Digital Law and the EU Economy', this book examines the 'Legal Concepts and Tools' with a view to determining how EU law should react to the challenges and needs of this aspect of the digital economy. This volume is a collection of contributions to the 3rd Münster Colloquium, held on 4-5 May 2017 in Münster, Germany. The colloquium analysed the academic, practice-based, and political aspects of the various legal concepts and tools surrounding the trade in data. More specifically, the volume focuses on the starting points and challenges, exclusivity rights, compulsory licences, and contractual concepts."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Increasingly, we conduct our lives online, and in doing so, we grant access to our personal information. The crucial feedstock of the world economy thus generated - the commercialization and exploitation of personal data and the intrusion of digital privacy it entails - has built an imposing edifice of market power. As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, this detailed exploration of the interlinkage between competition and data privacy takes a critical look at competition policy to evaluate whether the system in its current form and with the existing approach is capable of tackling the challenges raised by the role of personal data in the shift from an offline to an online economy. Challenging the commonplace assumption that privacy has little or no role and relevance in competition law, the author’s penetrating analysis accomplishes the following and more: provides an in-depth understanding of the intersection of competition and privacy in the data-driven economy; surveys legal policy developments on the role of privacy in competition law; underlines the importance of non-price parameters in competition, such as consumer choice; clearly explains why and how competition law can protect privacy among its policy objectives; and addresses challenges in measuring the intangible harm of digital privacy violation in assessing abuse of market power. Recent case law in Europe and elsewhere, a revealing comparison between relevant European Union (EU) and United States (US) practice, the expanded role of the EU’s Competition Commissioner, and the likely impact of such phenomena as the coronavirus pandemic are all drawn into the book’s remit. In her analysis of the growing privacy dimension in competition policy, the author examines the topic from a broad perspective that includes societal, political, economic, historical and cultural elements. Her insightful multidimensional and value-based review will prove of immeasurable value to practitioners, academics, policymakers and enforcers in its identification of implications for business practice as we go forward.

A rapidly evolving global digital economy has facilitated the integration of new activities, like social networking, virtual gaming, and texting, into our everyday lives. It has also placed an economic premium on the gathering of personal information that has never before existed. These everyday activities are giving rise to different forms of invasion of privacy by other individuals and private business. Historically, the government has been seen as the major threat to the privacy rights of individuals; in the global digital economy, it is also important to take seriously privacy rights threats from the private sector of the economy. This book maps the complex privacy protection landscape in Canada. Chapters address privacy rights and privacy protection, the mobilization of privacy rights in the context of social networking, the protection of children's privacy in virtual-world games, the threats of "smart" advertising, and the very current issue of cyberbullying and privacy. What is social networking? What are virtual-world games? What is cyberbullying? How are the legal problems that these engender for privacy rights part of our everyday life? What can we do about them? How could strengthening paths to justice help? These are the questions the book seeks to answer. These themes will be of interest to lawyers, academics, political scientists, criminologists, and those with an interest in public policy, access to justice, international relations, and the relationship of law and society.

The digital economy is gradually gaining traction through a variety of recent technological developments, including the introduction of the Internet of things, artificial intelligence and markets for data. This innovative book contains contributions from leading competition law scholars who map out and investigate the anti-competitive effects that are developing in the digital economy.

The increasingly digitalized global economy is undermining the usefulness of many traditional tax concepts. In addition to issues of double taxation and double non-taxation, important questions arise concerning the allocation of taxing rights in respect of income from cross-border digital transactions. This is the first book to analyse what changes are possible, necessary and feasible in order to forestall the unravelling of the existing international tax framework. Focusing in turn on the legal framework, specific proposals for adapting tax concepts for the digital economy, types of transactions and administrative issues such as those around data protection and digital currencies, the expert contributors discuss such challenges to taxation as the following: the pervasiveness of intangible assets; new value creation models; the ascendance of the sharing economy and digital services; virtual currencies; the importance of user participation for digital platforms; cloud computing; the impact of Big Data on tax enforcement; virtual business presence; and the influence of robotization. Throughout, the authors describe and analyse proposals made by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Union (EU) and individual countries and their likely impact going forward. They also attend to the limits imposed on reform possibilities by public international law, EU law and constitutional law. It is generally acknowledged that there is a need to monitor how the digital transformation may be impacting value creation. This book is a key milestone toward developing a durable, long-term solution to the tax challenges posed by the digitalization of the economy. With its thorough scrutiny of proposals for digital services tax and virtual permanent establishments, insightful analysis of digital services and detailed description of the impact of big data on tax administration and taxpayer protection, it will quickly prove indispensable for tax practitioners and the international tax community more generally.