Technology

Smart legal contracts – the Law Commission’s advice to the Government

10/12/21 – On 25th November 2021, the UK Law Commission published its advice to the Government on smart legal contracts. The advice expands on the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce’s legal statement on cryptoasset and smart contracts – see my post here. The Law Commission concludes that current legal principles can be applied to smart contracts in […]

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CJEU decides that downloaded software is a sale of goods, not services

23/10/21 – Back in 2013 The Software Incubator was appointed by Computer Associates as a sales agent to promote and market Computer Associates’ application service automation software, which was deployed by CA’s customers to manage applications across data centres.  The software was downloaded by customers directly from Computer Associates’ servers, subject to a perpetual licence […]

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UKJT’s Digital Dispute Resolution Rules

26/05/21 – The UK Jurisdiction Taskforce (UKJT) received extensive and overwhelmingly positive publicity for the Legal Statement on the Status of Cryptoassets and Smart Contracts that it published in December 2019 – you can read more about the Legal Statement here. On 22nd April 2021 the UKJT published its Digital Dispute Resolution Rules (Rules) which: Give […]

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Overview of the European Commission’s proposed AI regulation

26/04/21 – The European Commission aims to turn the EU into ‘the global hub for trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI)’.  With that objective in mind, on 21st April 2021 the Commission published its Proposal for a Regulation on a European approach for Artificial Intelligence. Very interesting, I’m sure.  But presumably not relevant to those of us […]

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Who owns the copyright in software created by your employees?

12/03/21 – In accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 where any work “is made by an employee in the course of his employment, his employer is the first owner of any copyright in the work, subject to any agreement to the contrary”.

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Checklist: Service levels

Issues to consider when drafting, reviewing or negotiating service levels include: Service levels Are uptime service levels measured monthly, or over a different period?  (A 99.9% uptime service level measured monthly allows for a single outage of approx. 43 minutes; measured quarterly, that increases to more than two hours.) Are out-of-hours outages dealt with in […]

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AA v Persons Unknown – recovering Bitcoin ransom payments

10/02/20 – In AA v Persons Unknown [2019], the Commercial Court confirmed that cryptoassets such as Bitcoin can constitute property under English law, and are therefore capable of being subject to a proprietary injunction (i.e. a court order which prevents the defendant from dealing with the relevant property). The judgment refers extensively, and gives considerable […]

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UKJT’s Legal Statement on the Status of Cryptoassets and Smart Contracts

04/12/19 – Prompted by a perceived need to provide legal certainty and market confidence in distributed ledger technology (DLT) and smart contracts, the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce (part of the LawTech Delivery Panel) published a Legal Statement on the Status of Cryptoassets and Smart Contracts on 18 November 2019.  The Statement follows on from a consultation launched […]

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Selling second hand software

It is usual for a perpetual software licence to be sold on the basis that the licence is non-transferable, ie that the purchaser (licensee) cannot resell or otherwise assign the licence to a third party.  And it was previously thought that the EU principle which prevents the owner of an article from controlling the downstream […]

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