Hasil untuk "Law of Europe"

Artur Pericles L. Monteiro

This article argues that security is not enough to fully capture what is at stake in government exceptional access to encrypted data. A conception of privacy as security has little to say about ``lawful-surveillance protocols'' -- an active research agenda in cryptography that aims to enable government exceptional access without compromising systemic security. But the limitations are not contingent on the success of this agenda. The normative landscape today cannot be explained if security is all there is to privacy. And fundamental objections to Apple's abandoned client-side scanning system gesture beyond security. This article's contribution is modest: to show that there must be more to privacy than the security mold it has taken. A richer understanding is needed both to assess policy and to guide research on lawful-surveillance protocols.

T. B. Shemeryankina, L. I. Shishova

INTRODUCTION. Amendments to Federal Law No. 61-FZ On Circulation of Medicines provide for additional data on excipients in general pharmacopeial monographs and pharmacopeial monographs; this necessitates the improvement of standardization requirements for excipients at a legislative level.AIM. This study aimed to determine the main growth vectors of pharmacopeial approaches to excipient standardization, as exemplified by propylene glycol and its derivatives.DISCUSSION. The study considered the concept of excipients and their standardization requirements at the national, regional, and international levels. It was established that the term “substances for pharmaceutical use” most correctly describes pharmacopeial approaches to excipient standardization. It was revealed that the number of excipient names for medicinal products available on the Russian pharmaceutical market remains a relevant issue. Approaches from the State Pharmacopoeia of the Russian Federation, the Pharmacopoeia of the Eurasian Economic Union, and foreign pharmacopeias (US, Europe, China) were compared regarding standardization of general quality requirements for excipients and specific requirements for propylene glycol and its derivatives. It was established that pharmacopeial requirements for excipients are based on an integrated approach that defines general quality parameters for the substances and assesses additional parameters that depend on the performance. A list of performance parameters was compared for various national pharmacopeias; noteworthy, the designations on the list were not always standardized.CONCLUSIONS. The pharmacopeial approach to excipient standardization is a critical tool for ensuring quality, efficiency, and safety of medicinal products. Based on the analysis of quality control data for propylene glycol and its derivatives, key pharmacopeial methods of excipient standardization include: developing and updating monographs for excipients; improving the requirements for universal quality parameters of excipients as per monograph Substances for Pharmaceutical Use and establishing performance requirements; expanding the range of excipients included in the State Pharmacopoeia of the Russian Federation; and increasing the number of pharmacopeial standards for certain excipients upon analysis and harmonization of national, regional, and international requirements.

Michael Veale, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius

This article discusses the troubled relationship between contemporary advertising technology (adtech) systems, in particular systems of real-time bidding (RTB, also known as programmatic advertising) underpinning much behavioral targeting on the web and through mobile applications. This article analyzes the extent to which practices of RTB are compatible with the requirements regarding a legal basis for processing, transparency, and security in European data protection law. We first introduce the technologies at play through explaining and analyzing the systems deployed online today. Following that, we turn to the law. Rather than analyze RTB against every provision of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we consider RTB in the context of the GDPR's requirement of a legal basis for processing and the GDPR's transparency and security requirements. We show, first, that the GDPR requires prior consent of the internet user for RTB, as other legal bases are not appropriate. Second, we show that it is difficult - and perhaps impossible - for website publishers and RTB companies to meet the GDPR's transparency requirements. Third, RTB incentivizes insecure data processing. We conclude that, in concept and in practice, RTB is structurally difficult to reconcile with European data protection law. Therefore, intervention by regulators is necessary.

Stefan Kulk, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius

In this chapter we discuss the relation between privacy and freedom of expression in Europe. In principle, the two rights have equal weight in Europe - which right prevails depends on the circumstances of a case. We use the Google Spain judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union, sometimes called the 'right to be forgotten' judgment, to illustrate the difficulties when balancing the two rights. The court decided in Google Spain that people have, under certain conditions, the right to have search results for their name delisted. We discuss how Google and Data Protection Authorities deal with such delisting requests in practice. Delisting requests illustrate that balancing privacy and freedom of expression interests will always remain difficult.

Gjergji Kasneci, Urs Gasser, Thomas F. Hofmann et al.

Europe is at a make-or-break moment in the global AI race, squeezed between the massive venture capital and tech giants in the US and China's scale-oriented, top-down drive. At this tipping point, where the convergence of AI with complementary and synergistic technologies, like quantum computing, biotech, VR/AR, 5G/6G, robotics, advanced materials, and high-performance computing, could upend geopolitical balances, Europe needs to rethink its AI-related strategy. On the heels of the AI Action Summit 2025 in Paris, we present a sharp, doable strategy that builds upon Europe's strengths and closes gaps.

Mengzhao Chen, Chaoyi Zhang, Jing Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) demand substantial computational and memory resources, creating deployment challenges. Quantization-aware training (QAT) addresses these challenges by reducing model precision while maintaining performance. However, the scaling behavior of QAT, especially at 4-bit precision (W4A4), is not well understood. Existing QAT scaling laws often ignore key factors such as the number of training tokens and quantization granularity, which limits their applicability. This paper proposes a unified scaling law for QAT that models quantization error as a function of model size, training data volume, and quantization group size. Through 268 QAT experiments, we show that quantization error decreases as model size increases, but rises with more training tokens and coarser quantization granularity. To identify the sources of W4A4 quantization error, we decompose it into weight and activation components. Both components follow the overall trend of W4A4 quantization error, but with different sensitivities. Specifically, weight quantization error increases more rapidly with more training tokens. Further analysis shows that the activation quantization error in the FC2 layer, caused by outliers, is the primary bottleneck of W4A4 QAT quantization error. By applying mixed-precision quantization to address this bottleneck, we demonstrate that weight and activation quantization errors can converge to similar levels. Additionally, with more training data, weight quantization error eventually exceeds activation quantization error, suggesting that reducing weight quantization error is also important in such scenarios. These findings offer key insights for improving QAT research and development.

Tom Dobber, Ronan Ó Fathaigh, Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius

In this paper, we examine how online political micro-targeting is regulated in Europe. While there are no specific rules on such micro-targeting, there are general rules that apply. We focus on three fields of law: data protection law, freedom of expression, and sector-specific rules for political advertising; for the latter we examine four countries. We argue that the rules in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are necessary, but not sufficient. We show that political advertising, including online political micro-targeting, is protected by the right to freedom of expression. That right is not absolute, however. From a European human rights perspective, it is possible for lawmakers to limit the possibilities for political advertising. Indeed, some countries ban TV advertising for political parties during elections.

Michał Mierkiewicz, Andrzej Dzikowski, Krzysztof Anusz

Prions cause infectious and fatal neurodegenerative diseases in mammals. Chronic wasting disease (CWD) affects wild and farmed cervids. The increasing number of cases in Europe, the resistance of prions to external conditions, and the persistence period threaten not only wild cervid populations but also the economy. The possible zoonotic potential of CWD is of growing concern. CWD is a relevant issue as far as the idea of “one health” is concerned, which is a fundamental principle of European veterinary law. Methods of legal text analysis and interpretation are used for this comparative legal study. Research reveals that countries struggling to tackle CWD employ different normative approaches to the problem and use different control and eradication schemes. The results of this study indicate that it is reasonable to issue uniform regulations in the European Union at the common, rather than national, level. The European legislation should creatively draw on the experience of North American countries that have been struggling with the discussed disease for a long time.

Alexis Buixan

Réfléchir à l’émergence du concept de « culture de constitution » dans le débat académique pose la question de l’intériorisation par les acteurs politiques et juridiques des formes constitutionnelles dans leurs pratiques politiques. Inscrit dans une démarche comparatiste, ce phénomène permet de mettre en évidence des trajectoires nationales singulières, déterminées par l’histoire, les mœurs, les contextes sociaux et les règles de droit. Ce concept devient ainsi un étalon pour éprouver la légitimité et l’adhésion ressenties à l’égard de la Constitution. Une telle méthode juridico-culturelle nous informe plus largement sur la fonction réflexive du droit constitutionnel comparé : « connaître l’autre pour mieux se connaître soi-même ».

Piotr Narowski, Dariusz Heim, Maciej Mijakowski

This article proposes new values and geospatial models of winter and summer external design temperatures for designing buildings’ heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. The climatic design parameters applicable in Poland for the sizing of these installations are approximately 50 years old and do not correspond to Poland’s current climate. New values of climatic design parameters were determined following the methods described in European standards and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Handbook of Fundamentals. The determined climatic design parameters, particularly the winter and summer external design temperatures, were compared with those currently in force by law in Poland. The external air design dry-bulb temperatures presented in the article were developed based on meteorological and climatic data from the years 1991–2020 from two data sources: synoptic data from the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management (IMWM) in Poland and reanalysis models of the ERA5 database of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). According to ASHRAE, with 99.6% and 0.4% frequency of occurrence, external air design dry-bulb temperatures for winter and summer were used to develop mathematical geospatial models of external design temperatures for the Central Europe area with Poland’s territory in the centre part. Scattered data from 667 meteorological stations were interpolated to 40,000 uniform mesh points using a biharmonic spline interpolation method to develop these models. Linear regression and ANOVA analysis for the ERA5-generated data from 900 checkpoint data items were used to estimate the correctness of these models. Verified models were used to calculate winter and summer external design temperature isolines presented together with colour space representation on Mercator projected maps of Central Europe.

Candida M. Greco, Andrea Tagarelli

Transformer-based language models (TLMs) have widely been recognized to be a cutting-edge technology for the successful development of deep-learning-based solutions to problems and applications that require natural language processing and understanding. Like for other textual domains, TLMs have indeed pushed the state-of-the-art of AI approaches for many tasks of interest in the legal domain. Despite the first Transformer model being proposed about six years ago, there has been a rapid progress of this technology at an unprecedented rate, whereby BERT and related models represent a major reference, also in the legal domain. This article provides the first systematic overview of TLM-based methods for AI-driven problems and tasks in the legal sphere. A major goal is to highlight research advances in this field so as to understand, on the one hand, how the Transformers have contributed to the success of AI in supporting legal processes, and on the other hand, what are the current limitations and opportunities for further research development.

Wenlong Li, Jiahong Chen

This paper explores the evolution of China's Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) and situates it within the context of global data protection development. It draws inspiration from the theory of 'Brussels Effect' and provides a critical account of its application in non-Western jurisdictions, taking China as a prime example. Our objective is not to provide a comparative commentary on China's legal development but to illuminate the intricate dynamics between the Chinese law and the EU's GDPR. We argue that the trajectory of China's Personal Information Protection Law calls into question the applicability of the Brussels Effect: while the GDPR's imprint on the PIPL is evident, a deeper analysis unveils China's nuanced, non-linear adoption that diverges from many assumptions of the Brussels Effect and similar theories. The evolution of the GDPR-inspired PIPL is not as a straightforward outcome of the Brussels Effect but as a nuanced, intricate interplay of external influence and domestic dynamics. We introduce a complementary theory of 'gravity assist', which portrays China's strategic instrumentalisation of the GDPR as a template to shape its unique data protection landscape. Our theoretical framework highlights how China navigates through a patchwork of internal considerations, international standards, and strategic choices, ultimately sculpting a data protection regime that has a similar appearance to the GDPR but aligns with its distinct political, cultural and legal landscape. With a detailed historical and policy analysis of the PIPL, coupled with reasonable speculations on its future avenues, our analysis presents a pragmatic, culturally congruent approach to legal development in China. It signals a trajectory that, while potentially converging at a principled level, is likely to diverge significantly in practice [...]

Michele Campolieti, Arturo Ramos

We study the distribution of strike size, which we measure as lost person days, for a long period in several countries of Europe and America. When we consider the full samples, the mixtures of two or three lognormals arise as very convenient models. When restricting to the upper tails, the Pareto power law becomes almost indistinguishable of the truncated lognormal.

Jasper Krommendijk, Dirk Sanderink

There has been a turn to fundamental rights in environmental and climate cases before national and international courts in recent years. We know very little whether there has been such a turn in relation to European Union (EU) law before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The CJEU occupies an increasingly relevant position in this nexus between environmental law and human rights because of strong and effective EU enforcement mechanisms, the abundance of specific EU secondary environmental law, the growing role of fundamental rights since 2009 and the self-standing provision on the environment in Article 37 of the Charter. An analysis of the case law, nonetheless, shows that Charter rights that can be used as ‘swords’ in the interest of environmental protection have so far played only a limited role. After explaining the absence of a rights turn, we argue that such a turn is warranted before the CJEU as well, also from a legal perspective. This article examines two potential avenues. The CJEU can derive positive obligations from relevant Charter provisions, including Articles 2 (right to life) and 7 (right to respect for private life and the home) of the Charter, or it can rely more extensively on Article 37 as a tool for interpreting primary and secondary EU law in an environmentally friendly way.

Bence Krusóczki

"This entry will deal with the history of competition law, including the first substantive competition law of Hungary, i.e Article V of 1923, which contained provisions regarding unfair competition. Currently, unfair competition is the subject of competition law, one of the branches of economic law, which contains regulations regarding the protection of economic competition and the prevention of consumer detriment. The purpose of Article V of 1923 was to offer general protection against any form of unfair competition. However, the description of each provision of the Article and the detailed demonstration and investigation of their practical implementation is not the topic of this entry. The present paper will specifically focus on the arbitral tribunals of the Chamber and the practice of the jury since the fact that the duty and practice of these two bodies were highly significant for the application of the law in that era can be clearly concluded from the summary of research results."

Sirijit Sunanta, Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot

The interview with Mrs. Chongcharoen Sornkaew Grimsmann, a long-term member and former president of Thai Women Network in Europe (TWNE), was originally conducted in English over email by Sirijit Sunanta and Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot in July 2022. It was supplemented by an online interview (via WebEx) in Thai by Sirijit Sunanta in November 2022. Mrs. Grimsmann served as the President of TWNE from 2019 to 2022. TWNE is well-established and one of the most active organizations of Thai migrant women with individual and organizational members in 16 European countries, the US, and Thailand. TWNE seeks to collaborate with governmental and non-governmental organizations, both in Thailand and the destination countries, to improve the welfare of Thai migrant women. They organize annual general meetings to discuss topics relevant to Thai migrant women’s lives in destination countries and publish an annual newsletter Sarn Satree (สารสตรี) to circulate information. Mrs. Grimsmann has extensive experience of providing community service as a social volunteer and working with international organizations, particularly in the area of women and children’s welfare. She is now based in France and Thailand.

Bar Aleksandra

Not only do advanced artificially intelligent (AI) systems play an increasingly important role in modern society, but they also significantly enhance industrial and economic development. AI systems are already capable of generating outputs, which, had they been created by humans, would be eligible for patent protection. Polish patent regime has yet to determine how it will address inventive computational results. This paper aims at addressing a question whether AI-generated outputs can be considered patentable inventions under Polish legal framework and if so, who would be recognized as the inventor. The author draws conclusions de lege lata and briefly outlines de lege ferenda observations. The author argues that vesting the inventor status in one of the persons who contributed to the AI-generated result offers a reasonable incentive to actors involved in the innovation process and, at the same time, leaving aside vexed problem of computational personhood, does not undermine established legal paradigms, in particular the traditional notion of human creator (inventor).

Albert Ammerman

One of the last chapters in the long course of human evolution was the shift from hunting and gathering to the production of food or strategies of subsistence based on farming and the herding of animals. In Southwest Asia, the first steps towards the origins of agriculture began some 12,000 years ago and then spread over most regions of Europe during the span of time from about 10,400 years ago (the start of the so-called PPNB on the island of Cyprus) through around 6,000 years ago. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview on the research that we have done on the question of the Neolithic transition in Europe, which began when Luca CavalliSforza, a leading figure in the field of human population genetics, and I began to work in collaboration at the University of Pavia in November of 1970. This draft forms the basis of my paper as part of the Festschrift prepared for the 45th anniversary of Ryszard Grygiel and Peter Bogucki's scientific cooperation.

Bernd Blasius

COVID-19 is an emerging respiratory infectious disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. It was first reported on in early December 2019 in Wuhan, China and within three month spread as a pandemic around the whole globe. Here, we study macro-epidemiological patterns along the time course of the pandemic. We compute the distribution of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths for countries worldwide and for counties in the US, and show that both distributions follow a truncated power-law over five orders of magnitude. We are able to explain the origin of this scaling behavior as a dual-scale process: the large-scale spread of the virus between countries and the small-scale accumulation of case numbers within each country. Assuming exponential growth on both scales, the critical exponent of the power-law is determined by the ratio of large-scale to small-scale growth rates. We confirm this theory in numerical simulations in a simple meta-population model, describing the epidemic spread in a network of interconnected countries. Our theory gives a mechanistic explanation why most COVID-19 cases occurred within a few epicenters, at least in the initial phase of the outbreak. Assessing how well a simple dual-scale model predicts the early spread of epidemics, despite the huge contrasts between countries, could help identify critical temporal and spatial scales of response in which to mitigate future epidemic threats.

Jeroen van Dongen

As the History of Science Society, which is based in America, holds its annual meeting in Utrecht, one of the key academic centers on the European continent, one may surmise that the field has returned home. Yet, this hardly reflects how today's world of scholarship is constituted: in the historiography of science, 'provincializing Europe' has become an important theme, while the field itself, as is the case across the world of academia, is centered around a predominantly American literature. At the same time, ever since historians of science have emancipated themselves from the sciences a long time ago, they often have appeared, in the public eye, to question rather than to seek to bolster the authority of the sciences. How has this situation come about, and what does it tell us about the world we live in today? What insight is sought and what public benefit is gained by the historical study of science? As we try to answer these questions, we will follow a number of key mid-twentieth century historians--Eduard Dijksterhuis, Thomas Kuhn and Martin Klein--in their Atlantic crossings. Their answers to debates on the constitution of the early modern scientific revolution or the novelty of the work of Max Planck will illustrate how notions of 'center' and 'periphery' have shifted--and what that may tell us about being 'in Europe' today.