Striking a Balance between Property and Personality. The Case of the Avatars

Virtual worlds, as powerful social platforms of intense human interaction, gather millions of users worldwide, producing massive economies of their own, giving rise to the birth of complex social relationships and the formation of virtual communities. By enabling the creativity of the player and figuring as an outstanding example of new online collaborative environments, virtual worlds emerge as context for creation, allowing for users to undertake a digital alter-ego and become artists, creators and authors. Nevertheless, such digital egos are not merely creations, but a reflex of their creators, an extension of their personalities and indicia of their identities. As a result, this paper perceives the avatar not only as a property item (avatar as the player’s or [game-developer’s] property) but also, and simultaneously, as a reflex of our personality and identity (avatar as the projection of one self in the virtual domain, as part of an individual persona). Bearing in mind such hybrid configuration, and looking at the disputes over property rights in virtual words, this essay makes three fundamental arguments. Firstly, it proposes a re-interpretation of intellectual property rights (namely of copyright law) according to its underlying utilitarian principles, as such principles seem to have been forgotten or neglected in the sphere of virtual worlds. The idea is to re-balance the uneven relationship between game owners and players perpetuated by the end-user license agreements (EULAs), recognising property rights to users over their own virtual creations. In order to evaluate whether a user’s contribution to the virtual world amounts to an original and creative work and is worthy of copyright protection, the essay proposes the image of a jigsaw puzzle as a tool and criteria to carry out such examination

Electronic Identity in Europe: Legal challenges and future perspectives (e-ID 2020)

This deliverable presents the work developed by the IPTS eID Team in 2012 on the large-encompassing topic of electronic identity. It is structured in four different parts: 1) eID: Relevance, Le-gal State-of-the-Art and Future Perspectives; 2) Digital Natives and the Analysis of the Emerging Be-havioral Trends Regarding Privacy, Identity and Their Legal Implications; 3) The "prospective" use of social networking services for government eID in Europe; and 4) Facial Recognition, Privacy and Iden-tity in Online Social Networks.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

Global burden of 288 causes of death and life expectancy decomposition in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations, 1990–2021: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021

BACKGROUND Regular, detailed reporting on population health by underlying cause of death is fundamental for public health decision making. Cause-specific estimates of mortality and the subsequent effects on life expectancy worldwide are valuable metrics to gauge progress in reducing mortality rates. These estimates are particularly important following large-scale mortality spikes, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. When systematically analysed, mortality rates and life expectancy allow comparisons of the consequences of causes of death globally and over time, providing a nuanced understanding of the effect of these causes on global populations. METHODS The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2021 cause-of-death analysis estimated mortality and years of life lost (YLLs) from 288 causes of death by age-sex-location-year in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations for each year from 1990 until 2021. The analysis used 56 604 data sources, including data from vital registration and verbal autopsy as well as surveys, censuses, surveillance systems, and cancer registries, among others. As with previous GBD rounds, cause-specific death rates for most causes were estimated using the Cause of Death Ensemble model-a modelling tool developed for GBD to assess the out-of-sample predictive validity of different statistical models and covariate permutations and combine those results to produce cause-specific mortality estimates-with alternative strategies adapted to model causes with insufficient data, substantial changes in reporting over the study period, or unusual epidemiology. YLLs were computed as the product of the number of deaths for each cause-age-sex-location-year and the standard life expectancy at each age. As part of the modelling process, uncertainty intervals (UIs) were generated using the 2·5th and 97·5th percentiles from a 1000-draw distribution for each metric. We decomposed life expectancy by cause of death, location, and year to show cause-specific effects on life expectancy from 1990 to 2021. We also used the coefficient of variation and the fraction of population affected by 90% of deaths to highlight concentrations of mortality. Findings are reported in counts and age-standardised rates. Methodological improvements for cause-of-death estimates in GBD 2021 include the expansion of under-5-years age group to include four new age groups, enhanced methods to account for stochastic variation of sparse data, and the inclusion of COVID-19 and other pandemic-related mortality-which includes excess mortality associated with the pandemic, excluding COVID-19, lower respiratory infections, measles, malaria, and pertussis. For this analysis, 199 new country-years of vital registration cause-of-death data, 5 country-years of surveillance data, 21 country-years of verbal autopsy data, and 94 country-years of other data types were added to those used in previous GBD rounds. FINDINGS The leading causes of age-standardised deaths globally were the same in 2019 as they were in 1990; in descending order, these were, ischaemic heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lower respiratory infections. In 2021, however, COVID-19 replaced stroke as the second-leading age-standardised cause of death, with 94·0 deaths (95% UI 89·2-100·0) per 100 000 population. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the rankings of the leading five causes, lowering stroke to the third-leading and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to the fourth-leading position. In 2021, the highest age-standardised death rates from COVID-19 occurred in sub-Saharan Africa (271·0 deaths [250·1-290·7] per 100 000 population) and Latin America and the Caribbean (195·4 deaths [182·1-211·4] per 100 000 population). The lowest age-standardised death rates from COVID-19 were in the high-income super-region (48·1 deaths [47·4-48·8] per 100 000 population) and southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania (23·2 deaths [16·3-37·2] per 100 000 population). Globally, life expectancy steadily improved between 1990 and 2019 for 18 of the 22 investigated causes. Decomposition of global and regional life expectancy showed the positive effect that reductions in deaths from enteric infections, lower respiratory infections, stroke, and neonatal deaths, among others have contributed to improved survival over the study period. However, a net reduction of 1·6 years occurred in global life expectancy between 2019 and 2021, primarily due to increased death rates from COVID-19 and other pandemic-related mortality. Life expectancy was highly variable between super-regions over the study period, with southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania gaining 8·3 years (6·7-9·9) overall, while having the smallest reduction in life expectancy due to COVID-19 (0·4 years). The largest reduction in life expectancy due to COVID-19 occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean (3·6 years). Additionally, 53 of the 288 causes of death were highly concentrated in locations with less than 50% of the global population as of 2021, and these causes of death became progressively more concentrated since 1990, when only 44 causes showed this pattern. The concentration phenomenon is discussed heuristically with respect to enteric and lower respiratory infections, malaria, HIV/AIDS, neonatal disorders, tuberculosis, and measles. INTERPRETATION Long-standing gains in life expectancy and reductions in many of the leading causes of death have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the adverse effects of which were spread unevenly among populations. Despite the pandemic, there has been continued progress in combatting several notable causes of death, leading to improved global life expectancy over the study period. Each of the seven GBD super-regions showed an overall improvement from 1990 and 2021, obscuring the negative effect in the years of the pandemic. Additionally, our findings regarding regional variation in causes of death driving increases in life expectancy hold clear policy utility. Analyses of shifting mortality trends reveal that several causes, once widespread globally, are now increasingly concentrated geographically. These changes in mortality concentration, alongside further investigation of changing risks, interventions, and relevant policy, present an important opportunity to deepen our understanding of mortality-reduction strategies. Examining patterns in mortality concentration might reveal areas where successful public health interventions have been implemented. Translating these successes to locations where certain causes of death remain entrenched can inform policies that work to improve life expectancy for people everywhere. FUNDING Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Human Genetic Manipulation and the Right to Identity: The Contradictions of Human Rights Law in Regulating the Human Genome

This paper analyses an overlooked tension between the right to personal identity and the collective right to human identity in the context of human rights law as it applies to prospective human genetic modification. While the right to personal identity may justify a valid interest in the modification of one’s individual genome, the collective right to identity defends a global interest in the preservation of the human genome. Taking this tension into account, the article identifies a number of contradictions and problematic issues in the current international legal regulation of the human genome that undermine the right to personal identity. These are the cases of the notion of the human genome as common heritage of humanity and the unfounded idea of species integrity, among others. The article also argues that the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights (UDHGHR) and the Oviedo Convention, together with the UNESCO Bioethics Committee, adopt a “geneticist-identity framework” which favours a conception of human identity solely based on genetic components. By prohibiting any change to the constitution of that shared genetic inheritance, those international legal instruments place an unjustified brake on the possibility for human genetic modification. This, as the article explains, is at odds with the “personality-identity framework” of the European Convention on Human Rights Law (ECHR), which privileges a narrative and developmental idea of individual identity

Technology and Metaphors: From Cyberspace to Ambient Intelligence

This article analyses the metaphorical imaginative discourse created around the various inventions and technical breakthroughs in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), focussing namely in the Internet. By examining such technologies in their physical and metaphorical components, the article explains how the former has been perceived, understood and even shaped by the images and representations of the latter. The paper, by emphasizing the intrinsic cognitive, prospective and creative characteristics of metaphors, aims at demonstrating how the powerful, imaginative and self-enforcing metaphorical terminology (composed by visions and imagined concepts such as "giant brains", "information highways", "metaverse", "cyberspace" and "ambient intelligence") has been not only accompanying but also driving the incessant pace of technology, contributing to its social acceptance and implementation. In this way, the metaphorical terminology enterprise keeps re-inventing itself, providing continuously additional terms and notions to express the new realities that the emerging technological machinery is fabricating. Within the historical and the future evolution of the Internet (as well as of its metaphorical counterpart cyberspace) proposed by this article, the latter introduces the next technological scenario in the pipe-line - the so-called Ambient Intelligence (AmI) space - and announces the emergence of a new "wave" of metaphors and images that are being created to capture the prospective realities promised by the novel generation of ICTs

The right to personal identity in the information age : a reappraisal of a lost right

Defence date: 24 February 2012Examining Board: Prof. Giovanni Sartor, EUI/Supervisor ; Prof. Miguel Poiares Maduro, EUI ; Prof. Yves Poullet, University of Namur ; Prof. Jon Bing, Norwegian Research Center for Computers and LawThis thesis presents a novel conceptualization of the right to personal identity: one that is adapted to the current technological environment in which we live, and that anticipates future technological developments. The study provides a comprehensive analysis of the right to personal identity, tracing its historical origins and main juridical developments from the Roman period to the present (and future) time. It also distinguishes the right to identity from other rights (such as the right to privacy and the right to data protection), thus contributing to the autonomy of this legal figure. This study puts forward a reconceptualization of the right to personal identity as a right that encompasses, controls and protects a series of different types of information related to or constitutive of our personal identity (digital, genetic, neural). Further to a right over information, the right to identity is presented as a right that regulates a series of identity movements and transformations between different ontological levels of “being” (possible real; actual virtual). Thus, the right to identity is the right to have one’s identity attributes registered (real possible), as well as the right to be recognized and identified (possible real) according to those defining features. The right to identity also encompasses the right to be represented as one wishes (virtual ?? actual) – that is, the right not to be misrepresented; the right to multiple identities (virtual actual) – that is, the right to create, control and uphold different identities in digital environments (such as pseudonyms and heteronyms); and the right to delete and recreate oneself (actual virtual), an identity movement that encompasses the right to be forgotten (and, consequently, the right to start again), as well as the eventual right to undergo genetic (post-human) and neural (memoryediting/ deletion) transformations. Following a postmodern conception of identity (as antiessentialistic, dynamic and multiple), the right to personal identity is defined as the right to be unique and different, not only from others but also from oneself. Further to this theoretical framework, the thesis also presents the foundations for an identity-regulatory system that grants the individual with the necessary and operational means to manage, control, change or delete his or her identity(ies)

El olvido: el derecho a ser diferente de uno mismo. Una reconsideración del derecho a ser olvidado = Oblivion: The right to be different � from oneself reproposing the right to be forgotten

Este artículo propone una nueva conceptualización del derecho a ser olvidado, argumentando a favor de su construcción teórica y aplicación concreta amparadas en el derecho a la identidad. Desde esta perspectiva, el artículo pretende arrojar una nueva luz sobre el derecho a ser olvidado contribuyendo a una conceptualización y una aplicabilidad más desarrolladas al tiempo que aclara su ámbito de aplicación. Basándose en la distinción entre el derecho a la identidad y el derecho a la privacidad, el artículo presenta las ventajas de relacionar el derecho a ser olvidado con el derecho a la identidad. Con esa conceptualización basada en el derecho a la identidad, se afirma que el derecho a ser olvidado también debe aplicarse al contenido generado por los usuarios y la información tratada para fines personales eliminando la exención para actividades domésticas establecida en la directiva europea sobre protección de datos. El artículo también sostiene que el derecho al olvido, enmarcado como parte del derecho a la identidad personal, también debe abordar hechos públicos e información, ofreciendo una justificación racional y más fuerte con la que alcanzar un equilibrio mejor y más justo con el derecho a la libertad de información con el que compite. En el artículo se comentan los conflictos de derechos más relevantes que el derecho a ser olvidado tendrá que abordar, es decir, el conflicto con la libertad de expresión y el conflicto con la necesidad de preservar la memoria social. Como ramificación del derecho a la identidad, el derecho a ser olvidado se presenta como el derecho a ser diferente, no de los demás sino de uno mismo, es decir, de lo que uno era antes. El derecho a ser olvidado también subraya el proceso de creación de identidad no solo constructivo, sino también deconstructivo