The Force Awakens: Artificial intelligence for consumer law

Recent years have been tainted by market practices that continuously expose us, as consumers, to new risks and threats. We have become accustomed, and sometimes even resigned, to businesses monitoring our activities, examining our data, and even meddling with our choices. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often depicted as a weapon in the hands of businesses and blamed for allowing this to happen. In this paper, we envision a paradigm shift, where AI technologies are brought to the side of consumers and their organizations, with the aim of building an efficient and effective counter-power. AI-powered tools can support a massive-scale automated analysis of textual and audiovisual data, as well as code, for the benefit of consumers and their organizations. This in turn can lead to a better oversight of business activities, help consumers exercise their rights, and enable the civil society to mitigate information overload. We discuss the societal, political, and technological challenges that stand before that vision

Against the failures of risk regulation. Liability and safety in air traffic management (ATM)

This article aims to analyse liability issues as a further means to regulate risks, in case the precautionary measures of the delivered safety system fail. Through liability, the risk that cannot be prevented can be transferred onto those parties who are in the best position to spread them. The allocation of liability thus works as an incentive to the correct functioning of the preventive measures. Liability rules appear to be a key legal remedy which can ensure both tort reparation and a fair and efficient distribution of burdens in a legal order. In this vein, air traffic management (ATM) is addressed as a case study, which shows the main issues and the gaps that liability rules face when dealing with the trade off between risk and safety as conveyed by technology. After having clarified the nature of the relations between risk and liability on the one hand, and automation and liability on the other hand, this article analyses liability issues in the framework of ATM by approaching this topic in a comparative way between the National Airspace System (NAS) of the United States of America (USA) and the Single European Sky (SES) of the European Union (EU)

Fill the Gap in the Legal Knowledge Modelling

There is a gap between the legal text description in XML trends and the legal knowledge representation of the norms that from the text starts. This gap affects the effectiveness of the legal resources exploitation and the integrity of the legal knowledge on the Web. This paper presents a legal document model for managing the legal resources in integrated way and linking all the different levels of representation

Agent-Based Contracting in Virtual Enterprises

Virtual Enterprises (VEs) use software agents (SAs) to reduce costs, speed up operations, and increase efficiency and competitiveness. Agents can carry out negotiations and make contracts without any human intervention. This makes them useful both in negotiations to set up a VE and in contracting with VE partners. Agents raise legal problems about the relevance and validity of their actions. The law may not always offer a solution to agent-based interactions. This paper investigates whether current laws are suitable to regulating agents and what new rules may need to be introduced

Legal Knowledge Representation: A Twofold Experience in the Intellectual Property Domain

This paper analyzes the representation of legal knowledge, and of Intellectual Property (or IP) law in particular. This is done by looking at two ways of representing the IP domain: through an IP ontology and by way of rule representation. And although these two solutions differ in many respects, they share the conceptual problems specific to this domain. This paper is based on research conducted under the EU-funded project ALIS (IST-2004-2.4.9)

Law enforcement in norm-governed learning agents

We study law enforcement mechanisms within a population of norm-governed learning agents. We show that a traditional analysis based on expected utility can be misleading, because learning agents tend to comply even though their surveillance is stopped. This has significant implications for the design of self-organising institutions with endogenous resources, where the cost of monitoring and norm enforcement has to be taken into consideration

Semantic Technologies and Web Services: A Primer on Legal Issues

This chapter adds a further dimension to interdisciplinary research on Semantic Web and Web Services: ICT is undergoing a strong and constant regulatory phenomenon at national, European and international level and needs to be constantly monitored. This makes it possible to develop and use technologies in a law-abiding manner and to be aware of the legal position (rights and duties) of oneself and third parties. This chapter aims at offering an overview of the legal framework that supports people\u2019s access to Web Services, according to the Semantic Web innovations. The basic aspects examined include: delegation, liability, privacy and e-identity. Finally, a specific section dedicated to e-business will give a dynamic approach to the analysis, so as to consent further developments on the other issues that Semantic Web implies