A new research project on technological solutions in a Covid-19 exit strategy, with a particular focus on the legal, ethical and societal conditions, has started in June. The project was commissioned by ZonMW as a so-called ‘urgent research question’ project, and is a combined research effort of researchers from the Digital Transformation Initiative at the Faculty of Law, and the Research Priority Area ICDS (Information, Communication & The Data Society) at the University of Amsterdam.

Digital technologies are an important part of strategies to manage the pandemic and the exit strategy. Examples range from automated medical data mining, digital self-reporting to apps for contact tracing. The recent discussion on contact tracing apps in particular has also raised an important question, namely how can we steer clear of technological solutionism and implement new technologies in a way that is effective and at the same time respects fundamental rights and the need for democratic control?

This is the question that this research project will address. It concentrates on the question of which legal, ethical and societal conditions need to be fulfilled for the use of digital solutions in managing the exit period in the corona crisis. The research starts with mapping the possible technological solutions and expectations and concerns associated with the use of digital technology and is followed by an in-depth analysis on legal and societal conditions of implementation. Moreover, a longitudinal survey will be used to monitor people’s perceptions, expectations of and experiences with apps and other digital technologies, in managing the crisis.

The research is led by Prof. Natali Helberger, Prof. Claes de Vreese, Prof. Joris van Hoboken and Prof. Mireille van Eechoud and assisted by an interdisciplinary research team from the Institute of Information Law (IViR), the Amsterdam Law School and the Amsterdam School of Communication (ASCoR). The project will also involve a core group of experts from various fields of SSH, medicine and technology and research institutions across the Netherlands. The way the research is designed is geared towards maximum transparency and wide dissemination of the research findings. Next to informing policy making today, the research will draw lessons from the Covid-19 crisis for the future role of digital technology in solving societal problems.

Introduction

The starting point for this research project, lead by Tarlach McGonagle, was a 2018 study on “fake news” that was commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. The project has expanded from that study to generate further academic output. This project page brings together the main output.

Media and news items

• Masterstudenten Informatierecht werken mee aan onderzoeken voor (inter)nationale organisaties, 16 juli 2018
• Twee IViR studies opgenomen in Kamerstuk over de toekomst van de onafhankelijk journalistiek in Nederland, 7 maart  2018
• Melanie Klus – VPRO Tegenlicht meet-up, 21 november 2018

This project has received funding from the Democracy and Media Foundation

Project leader: Tarlach McGonagle

This project is coordinated by IViR and operated in collaboration with the Netherlands Network for Human Rights Research’s (NNHRR) Working Group on Human Rights in the Digital Age. The NNHRR is a collaborative initiative among Dutch universities conducting research on human rights, especially Ph.D. candidates, but also including senior researchers. The Working Group (WG) has two tracks, focusing on: 1) free expression and public debate in the digital age, and 2) privacy and data protection in the digital age. The WG’s coordinators are Tarlach McGonagle (Track 1) and Aviva de Groot, Jenneke Evers and Silvia de Conca (Track 2).

Description of problem and project:

Public debate – the shared space where matters of interest and importance to society are debated openly, robustly and without fear – is under increasing pressure. Political spin, propaganda, disinformation, deception and fabrication, amplified and multiplied by computational and algorithmic techniques, often controlled by powerful online gatekeepers, are disrupting and destroying public debate. The public’s trust in political leaders, media, social media and other actors who participate in public debate, is at a very low ebb.

In public debate and public policy-making, ideas matter; expertise matters, and academic expertise matters. This project addresses the specific problem of the disruption and destruction of public debate and the devaluation of academic expertise in both public debate and public policy-making. The project sees effective academic contributions as key ways of revitalizing public debate and policy-making. Yet academic expertise does not always travel smoothly into public debate and policy-making. Well-honed communicative skills are needed to render academic expertise relevant and accessible to wider audiences. This project seeks to provide the capacity-building necessary to acquire those skills.

The activities will help WG members to communicate their academic expertise more widely and more effectively in policy-making processes and in public debate. To achieve this aim, a series of structured activities will help members to sharpen their insights into the workings of international organisations and sharpen their multi-media communication skills.

The title of this project plays with the phrase ‘town and gown’, which points to the relationship between a university community and the wider population of its host town, or more broadly, academia and society.

Visualisation of the project’s strategies/objectives

The planned activities include:

• A series of fireside chats – informal, roundtable meetings involving key representatives of (inter)governmental organisations (or NGOs) and WG members.
• A series of trainings or workshops to hone WG members’ communication and digital research and dissemination skills. The focus will be on particular techniques, formats and/or genres.
• Public symposia on selected topics relating to the WG’s thematic priorities.

Activities:

Previous fireside chats:

• Nani Jansen Reventlow (Director, Digital Freedom Fund), ‘The relationship between academic research, (clinical) legal education and strategic litigation in the field of digital human rights’, IViR, Amsterdam Law School, 26 June 2019.
• Urška Umek (Head of Media Unit, Information Society Department, Council of Europe), ‘The draft Recommendation on promoting a favourable environment for quality journalism in the digital age’, IViR, Amsterdam Law School, 4 July 2019.
• Jennifer Adams (independent expert/consultant), ‘Gender and Media – representation and protection of women journalists online’, Leiden Law School, 15 November 2019.

Researchers: Joost Poort (coordinator) Mireille van Eechoud João Quintais Stef van Gompel Daniel Gervais Duration: 2020-2022 Website: www.recreating.eu

Abstract:
Technologies enable unprecedented democratization of cultural practices and the production and use of IP. The creation of an effective system of sustainable norms for digital copyright is a major challenge due to four phenomena: copyright complexity, sidestepping, knowledge gap, and awareness gap. With its multi-disciplinary approach, bringing together researchers, practitioners and stakeholders, reCreating Europe will deliver ground-breaking contributions towards a clear understanding of what makes a regulatory framework that promotes culturally diverse production, and optimizes inclusive access and consumption.

First, reCreating Europe yields unprecedented cross-national maps of (i) multi-level regulatory responses that impact access to culture, cultural production, competitiveness of creative industries, and (ii) coping strategies of stakeholders vis-à-vis IPRs pitfalls and constraints. Second, it develops innovative qualitative and quantitative methods to measure the impact of digitization on the production and consumption of cultural goods and services. Changing intermediaries, specific creative communities, micro/SMEs and vulnerable users get special attention. Third, reCreating Europe performs a legal and technological mapping and evaluation of TPMs and content-filtering algorithms, and their impact on cultural diversity, access to culture and the generation of cultural value. Last, it offers policy recommendations and best practices, aimed at democratizing culture while reinforcing the sustainable development of rich and diverse cultural/ creative industries.

reCreating Europe’s unique comprehensive focus on five key groups of stakeholders -individual authors and performers, creative industries, cultural and heritage institutions, intermediaries, end-users- allows it to assess needs along intertwined research patterns, while its multi-disciplinary innovative approach joins different methodologies within the framework of participatory research strategies.

IViR will be engaged – partly in collaboration with other partners in the consortium – in five subprojects:

• A study based on an EU-wide survey of the views and experiences of makers and performers with regard to digitisation, copyright and the Digital Single Market;
• A study into the growing role of artificial intelligence as a producer of cultural work and the challenges that it poses for human authorship;
• An investigation into the role of territoriality in copyright;
• A study aimed at developing ‘best practices’ for legitimate use of material in specific cultural sectors;
• A study looking at the role of automatic removal of content by platforms and the effect of this on access to cultural products.

Participants:

• Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento Sant’Anna (Coordinator), Italy
• Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
• Alexander von Humboldt-Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft Gmbh, Germany
• Stichting Liber, The Netherlands
• National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland
• Tartu Ulikool, Estonia
• Università degli Studi di Trento, Italy
• Kobenhavns Universitet, Denmark
• Szegedi Tudomanyegyetem, Hungary

Press release:
Horizon 2020 grant for UvA research into the development of copyright in digital society, 19 November 2019

Throughout the project, outputs and related events will be posted on this page.

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(Daniel J. Weitzner, Ilaria Liccardi)

Project Details:
The key objective of the project is to understand how different regulatory environments for data privacy (EU and US) shape technical affordances and user behavior within smartphone ecosystems. To do so, the project studies variations of privacy perceptions and expectations in EU and US populations, across and within different smartphone ecosystems. We look specifically at different approaches transnational ecosystem providers take in providing transparency for users under varying regulatory, technical and social conditions. The project explores the following research questions

1. What are the transparency mechanisms in different smartphone ecosystems and how do they map to transparency requirements in the EU and US data privacy frameworks?
2. How is the effectiveness of transparency offered by apps dependent on the app ecosystem and do ecosystems influence the business models of apps in this regard?
3. How do transparency expectations vary with different populations (US, EU, incl. NL) and across different smartphone ecosystems (Apple, Google) and operating systems (Android and iOS)?
4. How can ecosystems improve data privacy protection to conform with people’s privacy expectations, preferences and concern? And how can regulators and lawmakers respond to the role of the ecosystem providers in protecting privacy?

This project is the first one of its kind to apply an interdisciplinary (law and human computer interaction) approach to the question of how differing legal and cultural factors in the US and Europe affect US/EU citizens privacy expectations, preferences and user behaviors.

See more about the results of this project on this poster.

Publications

• Fahy, J. van Hoboken & N. van Eijk, Mobile Privacy and Business-to-Platform Dependencies: An Analysis of SEC Disclosures, 13 Journal of Business & Technology Law (2018) (forthcoming).
• Fahy and J. van Hoboken, Smartphone Ecosystems and Upcoming European Regulation, Smartphone Ecosystems Roundtable, Amsterdam Privacy Conference 2018, University of Amsterdam, 8 October 2018.
• van Hoboken, R. Fahy & N. van Eijk, The Data-Driven Transformation of Games to Services: Mobile Platforms, User Data Governance and the Shaping of App Business Models, Computational Culture (2019) (abstract accepted).
• Fahy, J. van Hoboken & N. van Eijk, Mobile Privacy and Business-to-Platform Dependencies: An Analysis of SEC Disclosures, TPRC 2018, American University Washington College of Law, Washington DC, 21 September 2018.
• Fahy, J. van Hoboken & N. van Eijk, Data Privacy, Transparency and the Data-Driven Transformation of Games to Services, IEEE Games, Entertainment and Media Conference 2018, National University of Ireland, 16 August 2018.
• Fahy, J. van Hoboken & N. van Eijk, Mobile Privacy and Business-to-Platform Dependencies: An Analysis of SEC Disclosures, Privacy Law Scholars Conference 2018, Washington DC, 30 May 2018.
• Fahy, J. van Hoboken & N. van Eijk, The Data-Driven Transformation of Games to Services: The Impact of Mobile Platforms on App Business Models, Privacy Law Scholars Conference Europe 2018, Brussels, 27 January 2018.
• Van Kleek, I. Liccardi, R. Binns, J. Zhao, D. J. Weitzner & N. Shadbolt, Better the devil you know: Personalized Data Controller Indicators that Expose Data Sharing in Smartphone Apps, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2017, Denver, CO.
• Binns, J. Zhao, M.Van Kleek, N. Shadbolt, I. Liccardi & D. J. Weitzner, My Bank Already Gets this Data: Exposure Minimisation and Company Relationships in Privacy Decision-Making, ACM Conference Extended Abstract on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2017, Denver, CO.
• van Hoboken, R. Fahy, N. van Eijk, I. Liccardi & D. J. Weitzner, Transparency and Privacy in Smartphone Ecosystems: A Comparative Perspective, TILTing Perspectives Conference 2017, Tilburg University, 19 May 2017.

Please visit this page for the project.

Van Eechoud is active member of the Committee on Intellectual Property and Private International Law of the International Law Association ILA. The Committee develops guidelines for jurisdiction, conflicts of law and recognition of foreign judgments for transborder intellectual property cases. Professor Toshiyuki Kono (Japan) is Chair, professors Pedro A de Miguel Asensio (Spain) and Axel Metzger (Germany) serve as co-rapporteurs. The Committee builds on the work of earlier groups. 

Van Eechoud was member of the  European Max Planck Group on Conflict of Laws in Intellectual Property (CLIP). CLIP is a group of scholars in the fields of intellectual property and private international law. It was established in 2004 and has regularly met to discuss issues of intellectual property, private international law and jurisdiction since then. The Group has drafted a set of principles on conflict of laws in intellectual property and tends to provide independent advice to European and national law makers.

See http://www.ila-hq.org/index.php/committees

This project has received funding from the Democracy and Media Foundation

Project leader: Tarlach McGonagle

Description:
The project will provide an academic study, or ‘audit’, of the laws, policies and practice affecting freedom of expression and participation in public debate in the Netherlands. The audit will focus on a range of themes and seek to ascertain whether Dutch law, policy and practice measure up to leading European standards. This will involve identifying good or promising practices, as well as possible shortcomings. Its findings will in turn serve as a basis for the development – in consultation with experts and stake-holders – of proposals for legislative reform and policy-making initiatives.

The project’s desired short-term impact is to stimulate, inform and guide further reflection and public debate about the need to strengthen the existing law and policy framework for freedom of expression in the Netherlands. Longer term, it also aims to serve as a ‘pilot’ study for similar studies in other countries. As such, the project has been designed in the spirit of Recommendation CM/Rec(2016)4 on the protection of journalism and safety of journalists and other media actors.

An initial research paper, which will be published on a dedicated project webpage, will serve as a basis for consultations with experts and stake-holders and provide input for a policy paper. The initial research findings have been presented at two public conferences and an invitation-only expert workshop and the policy paper will be presented at a public conference.

The project’s expert advisory group comprises experts from a variety of backgrounds: government ministries, civil society, journalists’ organisations, the media, law and academia.

Draft study:

• A favourable environment for journalists in the Netherlands, G.H. Lokhorst, L.S.A. Trapman (authors) & T. McGonagle (editor), April 2018;
• Executive summary;
• Executive summary in Dutch.

We welcome feedback on this draft study until 15 June 2018.
Please send comments, suggestions and media enquiries to: fefj@ivir.nl

Tarlach McGonagle and Leon Trapman will present the project and the main findings of the (draft) study to the Council of Europe’s Steering Committee on Media and Information Society (CDMSI) in Strasbourg on 20 June 2018.

This research project studies the acquisition and consumption of music, films, series, books and games through the various legal and illegal channels that exists nowadays.

It combines a survey amongst over 35 thousand consumers aged 14 and older in 13 countries, with an analysis of copyright legislation and enforcement in these jurisdictions. The countries studied are Brazil, France, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, and UK. For the European countries in this set, the researchers will be able to partially target the same respondents that have been approached a few years earlier with comparable questions resulting in various reports and academic publications. This will give a unique opportunity to study the evolution of content acquisition over time at an individual level and to resolve methodological issues this type of research is typically prone to.

The main purpose of the study is threefold:

1. Provide factual information about the state of legal content acquisition and online piracy in various countries
2. Assess the underlying motives and mechanisms, in particular the link with enforcement measures and legal supply
3. Assess the effect of online piracy on consumption from legal sources.

In this project, the Institute for Information Law partners with Ecorys. Data collection will mainly be conducted by SSI (Survey Sampling International).

The research project is financed by Google. It will be conducted in full compliance with the Declaration of Scientific Independence as formulated by the Royal Dutch Academy of Science.

Project team

Joost Poort (Principal investigator)                                                                          Martin van der Ende
Nico van Eijk                                                                                                            Anastasia Yagafarova
João Pedro Quintais                                                                                                Robert Haffner

Despite the wide spectrum of blockchain applications and their proven potential to disrupt fundamental societal processes and institutions, there is very little research on their non-technical, societal, economic, policy and legal implications. Without funded research we can only speculate on how blockchain applications may affect our everyday practices, institutions, and laws. To address this gap, the BLOCKCHAIN & SOCIETY project will focus on 3 questions:

1. What internal factors contribute to the success of a blockchain application?
2. How does society adopt blockchain?
3. How to regulate blockchain?

See the project website at: https://blockchain-society.science/