Content Week 49/2023

Hope to see you!

Dec 01, 2023

Lukas Faymann, Anna Tauber and me on a morning run in Brno. The important part of the picture is the building behind - the Villa Tugendhat

Retrospect

Brno

We were a group of eight joining Cyberspace 2023 at Masaryk University in Brno and it was marvelous. About 150 people of all ages and all backgrounds on law and IT in a very dense programme of high quality. With two keynotes, held by Martin Husovec and Ine Beyens on the Digital Services Act and correlations between social media usage and mental health among adolescents. I invited both for an #arsboni session and Martin is going to come on January 18 at 5 pm - you might wish to put this into your calendar. Old time friend, colleague, role model and vice rector Prof. JUDr. Radim Polčák, Ph.D. was the master of ceremony behind all this, trying to enforce a casual dresscode by his own example. This is, I need to insist, him, not me, despite of the misleading name tag in front of him, opening the plenary.

One of the problems with lawyers in general, and with IT lawyers in particular, is that they don’t want to follow rules so that Martin’s version of a casual dresscode was a rather free interpretation.

My Department was, in particular, active in a three hours workshop on new formats of legal education. It was outstandingly inspiring and heartwarming for me to see how well the young colleagues were doing when speaking about remote education, the legal hackathon, Jusprofi, privacy4kids and the Vienna art law clinic.

For me personally, the most intriguing learning was Catherine Liko’s report on how Large Language Models (in particular ChatGPT, Bard and Bing) would perform in our class on legal research (a compulsory course for first year law students I am responsible for) - and which grades they would get if they competed with “real” students (spoiler: all of them would pass!).

This is her presenting some of her results:

I will definitely return to Brno next year and you should consider doing the same. It’s outstandingly inspiring, very well organised, very diverse and up to date and a best practice example for an academic conference. And the building is also aesthetically and historically interesting.

#arsboni

We had a very intresting session on correlations between media and party preferences in Austrian politics with two very visible colleagues from UNIVIE: Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik and Jakob-Moritz Eberl.

And I had the pleasure to have Julian Hessenthaler in the laundry.

This is only a screenshot yet, the video is almost ready, but I will need some more time to publish it.

Books

The commentary on IP is out and it’s literally heavy:

And Michael Cepic’s PHD-thesis I had the privilege to supervise is out in print:

If you wish to learn a little more about the author and the content, here is a little interview I did some time ago:

Bundeskriminalamt

Together with 7 others from my team, I had the privilege to have an informal exchange of opinions on AI and the AI act at the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt). The building, very close to the former premises of the University of Economics, has a very special aura.

Prospect

We will have three streams this week.

Monday, December 4, at 16.00 (German) wil be about new and open approaches to publishing and quality control in the legal domain.

On Tuesday, December 5 at 10.00 we will discuss about (again) a rather fundamental failure to correctly interpret the European legal environment for a national law. We speak about the sad but forseeable fate of the law on communication platforms (“Kopl-G) that was recently declared to infringe the country of origin principle.All three speakers are outstanding experts in the domain with practical background,

And on Wednesday at 18.30 we will provide an episode on an NGO in Vienna supporting young generation’s input on matters of international law: UNSA Vienna. I will interview its president Mona Zaher - a lawyer and alumna of UNIVIE.

LLM-Graduation

Monday 6.30 pm I will have the honor to congratulate the most recent graduates of our LLM-programme on IT- and media law in the Festival Hall of UNIVIE. It makes me particularily proud that some of themmight be younger than the programme itself - which is in its 25th year.

This is a generic picture of me at this occasion (no worries, I won’t wear a gown there this time, but, however, most likely a mask).

AI Law

Wednesday and Thursday will be dedicated to an intensive course on AI and law that I may teach together with my friend and colleague Micha Friedmann from Primelegal

Some of the aspects we will deal with are already covered in this interview