Chapter 5 examines constitutional, legislative, and judicial developments in protecting the rights of nature in the United States and around the world. While significant progress has been made in advancing the rights of nature, there is an evolving backlash movement that has sought to declare such efforts unconstitutional. In the United States, rights of nature initiatives have been successfully implemented in many Indigenous communities and at the local government level, though some states have invalidated or are seeking to invalidate local rights of nature protections. The chapter provides an in-depth exploration of nations that have implemented rights of nature measures in their constitutions, legislation, and case law. Ecuador, Bolivia, and Colombia have been leaders in Latin America in promoting rights of nature protections. The chapter also compares New Zealand’s leadership on rights of nature measures with Australia’s challenges in making progress in this space. The chapter concludes with summaries of leading International Rights of Nature Tribunal decisions from various countries, with a focus on rights of nature analysis in the context of climate change challenges.

The press publishers’ right (granted under Art. 15 of the EU’s 2019 Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market) equips publishers with a legal basis for negotiations with digital intermediaries. However, the process of bargaining has not been specified by the EU legislator, which left it to the discretion of EU Member States and the market. This chapter examines the four main approaches to the operationalisation of the press publishers’ right in the EU, in contrast with the bargaining framework that has evolved in Australia without the underpinning of a new intellectual property right. It analyses these frameworks from the perspective of ‘bargaining in the shadow of the law’ to understand the relationship between statutory law and private bargaining as mediated by institutional frameworks. By defining and coding key parameters concerning the bargaining parties, their endowments (bargaining chips), measures to mitigate dependencies and the role played by the authority (such as a regulator), the chapter shows that bargaining frameworks sit as complex institutional constraints between pure private ordering and the law. It is the shape of the bargaining framework that matters for the range and frequency of agreements between press publishers and digital platforms.

Upcycling describes the process of altering an existing product by modifying it, which in many instances involves improving it and consequently giving a new lease of life to a pre-existing product. It has been increasingly recognized as a promising way to reduce material and energy use, and to promote sustainable production and consumption. Alongside this, there is an increasing customer preference towards environmentally friendly products and minimal waste. Unsurprisingly, upcycling has received considerable attention, particularly in discussion about the circular economy. However, upcycling also poses a challenge to businesses looking to control their IP rights, particularly those seeking to protect their brand and control their reputation through IP protections. This chapter explores these issues, with particular reference to trademark and copyright law in the Pacific region.

In 2019, the EU legislature introduced a right in favour of press publishers over their press publications. The rationale supporting EU intervention in relation to Article 15 of Directive 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSMD) is multi-fold, ranging from support for press publishers when licensing the use of press publications to ensuring a fair marketplace and the protection of a free and pluralist press in performing its societal functions. Article 15 CDSMD has now been transposed at the national level. Despite the harmonizing objective of EU legislature, the resulting legal landscape across the EU appears fragmented. Focusing on the exclusion of ‘very short extracts’ of press publications and considering selected divergent national transpositions, this chapter investigates whether such divergences will thwart the harmonization objective of 15 CDSMD, whether they are incompatible with EU law, and, if so, what the solutions could be. The chapter’s title question is answered: harmonization is necessary, but where the instrument chosen is a directive, national legislatures must correctly interpret and act within the freedom afforded to them under EU law. In many national transpositions of Article 15 CDSMD, this has not occurred.

This chapter develops a conceptual framework for understanding the Right to Repair (R2R) and its intersection with upcycling within contemporary intellectual property and sustainability discourse. It argues that the right to repair encompasses both negative and positive rights: the former protecting individual freedom from interference in repairing owned goods (‘freedom to repair’), and the latter requiring institutional and manufacturer support to ensure ‘repairability’. These differing conceptions manifest in contrasting policy models. Decentralized, market-oriented approaches in the US emphasizing ownership and autonomy, and centralized, circular economy frameworks in the EU prioritizing product design, durability, and extended producer responsibility.

To inform how we think about EU media law in the future, this chapter traces the understandings of harm evident in EU media laws, their proposal documents, and explanatory notes since the 1989 Television Without Frontiers Directive. It identifies a shift from concern with individual harm from exposure to content, to addressing a variety of sources of harm to individual consumers, collectives, and societal systems. It demonstrates that a link between assumptions about control over risk and responsibility remains persistent and shows how responsibility for preventing harm has been increasingly distributed among various actors as changes in the technology and design of services and in the harms being addressed have affected control over the risk. This chapter argues that future thinking in EU media law needs to focus on how the institutional architecture can support effective cooperative responsibility, including addressing imbalances of power and information asymmetries.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) represents a major shift in technological innovation, capable of transforming daily life and professional sectors, including the law. GenAI leverages advanced models to create new content, from text and images to music. In legal practice, it offers opportunities to streamline tasks like legal research, document drafting, contract review, and client communication. However, widespread use of general-purpose GenAI tools (e.g., ChatGPT) not designed specifically for legal contexts introduces significant risks. These include factual inaccuracies, breaches of confidentiality, privacy violations, and potential copyright infringements. Some US court cases have already revealed the misuse of AI, citing fabricated case-laws. In response, there is growing demand to regulate AI use in the legal field through revised codes of conduct and specific guidelines. This study focuses on the mentioned national and international guidelines issued for legal professionals using GenAI. Using content analysis methods, the research sheds light on shared policies such as the necessity of client consent and confidentiality protection and risks forecasted as intellectual property violations and the reinforcement of cognitive biases, highlighting how bar associations and similar bodies are shaping responsible AI use in legal practice.

Traditional Knowledge (TK) refers to any knowledge that results from intellectual activity in a traditional context. In addition to knowledge, TK may include practices, skills, and innovations. It embodies the traditional lifestyles of Indigenous peoples and local communities, and is passed down through the generations. As it has been pointed out, it is a living body of knowledge that is developed, sustained, and passed on from generation to generation within a community, often forming part of its cultural or spiritual identity. As such, it is not easily protected by the current IP system, which typically grants protection for a limited period to inventions and original works by named individuals or companies. The chapter reflects on the different ways in which TK can be protected through IP, and its importance and value in an economic context which encourages sustainable practices. Finally, an analysis is given of the extent to which TK may be affected by the practice of upcycling and if (as it happens with regard to other IP rights as trademarks) there is a conflict between them.

The adoption of AI in arbitration practice has increased significantly in the past few years. Even though AI has not been adopted to date for the purpose of arbitral decision-making in international commercial arbitration, questions arise regarding its use in the decision-making process by arbitrators. There have been new regulatory developments on this in the past year with the publication of several guidelines on the use of AI in international commercial arbitration and the promulgation of the EU AI Act. The chapter carries out an analysis of these instruments and the current arbitration framework in order to provide a clarification on the evolving position of the law on this matter. The chapter namely explores the extent to which the regulatory framework considers that the use of AI tools in the decision-making process by arbitrators could lead to influencing the arbitrators’ decision, which could lead to delegation of justice. The chapter argues that the international commercial arbitration framework does not expressly prohibit the use of AI in decision-making by arbitrators but that this use can come under breach of the arbitrator’s personal mandate and due process.

This chapter traces how contemporary media pass through different regulatory zones and examines the different rules that govern each zone and how the zones relate to each other. It briefly charts the recent and ongoing evolution of the media, from analogue roots to generative AI futures, and notes the fundamental rights and regulatory ramifications of technology-driven innovations. It draws an analytical line from these conceptualisations through to the contemporary threats to media freedom that regulation urgently needs to address.

This chapter analyzes the marketing of upcycled products from a perspective of European and German unfair competition law. As part of the sustainability trend, some traders use upcycled products to enhance their image or develop new business models. Marketing such products must not only comply with trademark law but also with unfair competition law rules. Under Articles 6, 7 UCP Directive, traders must not mislead consumers about a product’s commercial origin. When upcycling involves third-party products, consumers might wrongly assume the upcycled items come from the original producer, especially when both operate in similar markets. Clear information is therefore required to prevent confusion. If traders reference the original products in their advertising, the rules on comparative advertising under MCA Directive may apply, since even broadly interchangeable goods, like wine bottles upcycled into vases, can qualify as competitors. Additionally, German unfair competition law may restrict practices that exploit another trader’s reputation. For instance, using luxury goods to create everyday items could unlawfully damage the reputation of the original brand.

Access to justice is a fundamental right, yet for millions of people around the world resolution of legal problems via both formal and informal means is not available, affordable, accessible, or understandable. This chapter explains how artificial intelligence (AI) is making a practical difference in the problems of everyday people through the exploration of three case studies: two expert systems, including both an eviction defence system and a tool to help with a high-volume immigration clinic, and a conversational AI tool that incorporates a large language model to provide legal information to tenants in Illinois. Ultimately, this chapter shows the range of impacts that AI will have on the legal profession, from methods of legal service delivery, to replacing routine legal tasks, or by offering significant support by freeing up resources and providing essential legal assistance to those who might otherwise go without. Through concrete examples and discussions of both benefits and challenges, we invite legal professionals and policymakers to consider AI’s role in creating a more just global legal system.

Welfare economic theory seeks the justification for government intervention in markets, in market failure, and in distributional issues. An analysis of the market failures that exist in a specific industry or market can not only provide justification for government regulation or other kinds of intervention in general, but it can also suggest which type of intervention or regulation is optimal from a welfare economic perspective. This chapter addresses the question of how the emergence of news aggregator platforms and the introduction of generative AI in news production have affected the market failures that constitute the core problem underlying private investment in news production. The focus of the analysis is on the public good character of news and the positive externalities of news production. The question addressed is: Have the consequences of these existing market failures become more prominent or have they been resolved by these developments? Based on this analysis, the chapter discusses how this informs policy concerning these developments.

This chapter explores the delicate balance between the need to combat online disinformation and the safeguarding of fundamental rights, particularly media freedom and pluralism, as essential elements of freedom of expression and democracy. The chapter outlines the evolution of the EU’s policies and regulations related to information integrity and discusses the key elements and challenges of the EU’s approach to addressing disinformation in the context of media pluralism. Focusing on the Code of Practice on Disinformation, the Digital Services Act, and the European Media Freedom Act, the chapter discusses their complex interplay and overarching strategy, which delegates the critical task of assessing systemic risks and fundamental rights – including media freedom and pluralism – to very large online platforms.

Infrastructures that underlie public debate have a significant role in public opinion formation and have long been regulated in multiple ways. Limiting the domination of opinion power by particular interests has been one of the stated aims of such regulation. But the approaches have also depended on the often-unstated presumption of a journalistic-editorial role being highly influential in the formation of public speech and opinion. This chapter examines how communication infrastructures have changed with the development of major platforms and resulting changes in journalism’s role within public debate. These changes raise new regulatory challenges if opinion power is to be limited, and they make the positive dimensions of freedom of expression all the more valuable for understanding what would now be required for communicatively legitimate forms of democracy. The chapter examines aspects of the Digital Services Act and the European Media Freedom Act in light of freedom of expression’s positive dimensions to consider how European law and practice might promote a pluralism of public speech that is curated in the audience’s interests.

This chapter analyzes upcycling practices from the perspective of trademark law, verifying their compatibility under the functional approach governing such exclusive right, whose impact on trade is not going to diminish in the context of a contemporary market increasingly dominated by communicative and reputational logics of brands. The analysis refers to the new paradigm of the circular economy, within which upcycling tends to be included, in order to question whether this change of political horizon in the European production model may affect the lawfulness of such practices, similarly to what can be argued in light of EU case law for recycling and refurbishing practices. In this sense, correctness in product elaboration and presentation to the market, mirroring the actual positive (if not even sustainable) contribution of the upcycler, should play a decisive role to exclude trademark infringement. The analysis will further reflect upon the applicative side of this issue, questioning whether this permissive interpretation does not end up in a return to well-established ‘old-fashioned’ principles that, properly tailoring exclusivity according to a model of fair competition, offer a valuable counterbalance to the excesses of protection that the trademark evolution has long been suffering from, like other IP rights.

Platforms and legal tech tools have enabled new ways to draft, manage, conclude, and monitor contracts. This chapter will focus on contract performance management tools and automated systems for monitoring contract execution. Thanks to the granularity offered by technology, broader and more detailed monitoring is possible, even at the contract execution phase. These may include using key performance indicators (KPIs), feedback systems to automatically identify performance gaps and compliance verification mechanisms. Introducing tools for monitoring contractual performance may prevent disputes by providing a more precise qualification of non-compliance. Contract performance management tools can also be used in dispute resolution mechanisms, which can intervene in situations where the KPIs have already been identified. After an introduction to some of these tools and solutions and a description of the relevant software, this analysis will examine the effects on contract practices and contract law, focusing mainly on (a) performance determination and non-performance contestation, and (b) monitoring infringements of mandatory rules or policies with contract compliance.