Almost 200 lawyers and business lawyers took part in the second ITM webinar, this time on transformative use in copyright law. On this topic, Professor Dr. Guido Westkamp (Queen Mary College in London) reported on current trends in connection with persiflage and quotations and their use in copyright law. Particular attention was paid to the different national implementation of the Copyright Directive. Professor Westkamp related this implementation to the ongoing legal dispute about sound snippets by the group Kraftwerk. He intensively examined whether the problem of barriers could be solved by writing a general clause into copyright law according to the American model (fair uses). He criticised the narrow wording of the German implementation of the Copyright Directive and stressed that there was no end in sight to the legal dispute surrounding Kraftwerk. In numerous questions, the participants still asked about details of the implementation. The webinar series will continue on 25 January with a presentation by Yannick Borutta on intellectual property issues of artificial intelligence.

Sorry, this entry is only available in German.

Sorry, this entry is only available in German.

On 11 January 2020, the ITM (University of Münster) held a one-hour webinar on current problems of blockchain technology in law. Alexander Bauer from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology reported on the basics of blockchain technology and the resulting legal issues, particularly in the German Civil Code (BGB), compulsory enforcement and insolvency, to an audience of around 200 from the student body, the legal profession and business. The lecture series will continue on 18 January with a zoom lecture by Professor Dr Guido Westkamp (Queen Mary College/London) on transformation as a phenomenon in international copyright law.

Sorry, this entry is only available in German.

Sorry, this entry is only available in German.

Sorry, this entry is only available in German.

The ITM continues its webinar series in the new year. The following lunchtime seminars (12 noon) will be held
11 January 2021: Attorney Alexander Bauer (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Munich) – Current problems of block chain law
18 January 2021: Professor Dr. Guido Westkamp (Queen Mary College/London) – Copyright and the transformative use of content
25 January 2021: Yannick Borutta (research assistant at the Goal Project) – artificial intelligence and intellectual property rights.
The zoom events are open to the public. Registrations are requested to aurelia.merbecks@uni-muenster.de

In December the second project-internal GOAL Expert Talk took place with Prof. Karen Yeung. Prof. Yeung has been an Interdisciplinary Professorial Fellow at Birmingham Law School and Birmingham School of Computer Science since 2018. Previously, she was a professor at King’s College London from 2006 – 2017. Currently, Prof. Yeung is conducting research on regulation and transparency and risk assessment of algorithms. The conversation began with a presentation in which she discussed in detail the EU Commission’s new white paper on the regulation of algorithms. Afterwards, a lively discussion developed in which the individual problem areas of AI regulation could be worked out. In the end, however, Prof. Yeung and the project partners came to the conclusion that no completely convincing solutions existed for numerous problems at the present time and that further intensive, particularly interdisciplinary, research was required in order to be able to convincingly master the challenges posed by AI.

In cooperation with the Legal Research Unit at DFN, a 90-minute zoom lecture on the topic “Digital legacy – What happens to our data after death?” was held at the TH Nuremberg on 23 November 2020. Marten Tiessen, research associate at DFN’s Legal Research Centre, gave the lecture to an audience of more than 60 people. As part of a series of lectures on the topic of “Elder Care”, the event was addressed to all employees and students of the university who were interested in the topic either professionally or privately.

After the speaker gave a brief overview of the special legal challenges of digital inheritance, he illustrated the problem with the help of the lengthy Facebook proceedings, which ultimately ended up twice before the Federal Court of Justice. Subsequently, the question was discussed to what extent the reasons for the judgement can be transferred to other services. The final topic was the different precautionary measures that service providers or testators can take to prevent, simplify or otherwise arrange the transfer of the digital estate.

The positive response and interested enquiries from participants underline the increasing practical importance of the subject.