Saudi Arabia grants nationality to an AI robot; the first “clash of robots” took place in Japan; and, Bill Gates suggests that robots start paying taxes. We believe that these developments justify new legal fiction interventions. Software has long now exceeded the intellectual property...

Museums are, in most cases, publicly-owned holders of vast amounts of information that are, by definition, open to everyone. Location restrictions, however, usually limit public access. The Internet could change this: once museums digitise their collections and upload them onto their Internet...

The die is cast. At the time of drafting this paper the so-called Brexit, the exit of the UK from the EU, seems like a certainty after the poll results of 23 June 2016. Within such historic, indeed seismic, developments data protection seems but a minor issue, a footnote to a world-changing...

Seamless air commuting between the EU and the USA appears to constitute nowadays a much sought-after but nevertheless still elusive cause. The level of co operation between the two parties has had, and is still having, its best and worst days. The protection of individual privacy continues to...

This study aims, first, at identifying data protection shortcomings in the inter-agency cooperation regime in the EU criminal justice and law enforcement area and, second, at outlining, under six possible scenarios, the interplay among the data protection legal instruments in the law-making...

Data matching operations have been promoted as an administrative panacea that helps to reduce costs while maximising efficiency and combating fraud. Nevertheless, they may constitute at the same time a brutal invasion into individuals' privacy. After an extensive effort to define precisely data...

This study looks at the possibilities to complement the general data protection framework with specific rules for employment relations. Data protection in employment relations clearly touches on labour law. The specific actors involved, the social partners, and the strategies used in the past to...

Recent years have been marked by a growing demand of personal data for public security purposes. Access and protection of those data are climbing the transatlantic political agenda. They have raised tensions and fostered forms of cooperation. The possible conclusion of an international binding...

The Microsoft Ireland case brought before the Supreme Court in 2018 and dropped the very same year has attracted attention world-wide from policymakers and scholars. This contribution focusses on two important features of the case: the conflicting and often chaotic approaches to the notion of...