International

MiCAR is the European Regulation 2023/1114 on markets in crypto-assets (MiCA). It provides a legal framework to the sector of crypto-assets, which was previously almost unregulated: only the crypto-assets qualifying as financial instruments were subject to the european legislation on financial services. The lack of a comprehensive set of rules was detrimental to the development of a market in crypto-assets and would have led to miss the opportunities these applications of distributed ledger technology may offer in terms of innovation in the financial sector.

The European Institutions have reached a deal on the final text of the European regulation on cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements, known as the Cyber Resilience Act.

With our previous article on the Cyber Resilience Act we have analyzed the terms of the proposed legislation; we have also seen that over the last few months the open source community has consistently pointed out the flaws of the proposed regulation, explaining why the Cyber Resilience Act poses a risk to the development of open source software in Europe.

The Digital Markets Act is the european regulation EU 2022/1925 on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector which addresses the lack of contestability of core platform services, and imposes obligations on the undertakings designated as gatekeepers. In this article, we are going to introduce the key points of the Digital Markets Act: we start with contestability, what does it mean and the relation between the new discipline and Competition Law. We will then see what the core platform services are, and when an enterprise qualifies as gatekeeper.
Lastly, the Digital Markets Act mandates chat interoperability, between different providers of messaging apps: while this is meant to overcome the well known network effect, we will explain why it also poses risks for privacy and security.

The AI Act is the proposed european legal framework on artificial intelligence: the objective of the regulation is to balance the development of AI technologies with the fundamental rights of the EU and ensure the proper functioning of the European internal market. The draft has been approved by the European Parliament on June 14 2023; the legislative process now continues with the negotiations among the Commission, the Parliament and the European Council, known as "trilogues", which will eventually lead to the approval of the AI Act and to a european regulation on artificial intelligence.

The proposal for a European Regulation on cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements, known as Cyber Resilience Act, introduces new requirements, obligations and penalties for software manufacturers, including open source developers: the goal is to improve cybersecurity in Europe. In this article, we analyze some aspects of the Cyber Resilience Act which would make it, as pointed out by many open source stakeholders like the Python Software Foundation, both ineffective and a threat for the open source ecosystem in Europe.

Lawyers and law firms willing to increase their visibility online will find very useful to learn some basic aspects of SEO: this will enable them to improve the ranking of their websites or blog posts on search engines and be found by new clients on Google. In this article we introduce some basic aspects of SEO for lawyers thinking to take up blogging and content marketing for law firms. We will talk about "on page SEO": how to optimize the content of a web page and improve its ranking on search engines.

Bitcoin uses public key cryptography for creating a key pair that gives access to the funds in bitcoin. The private key allows the user to sign transactions that spend funds; therefore, it needs to be kept secret. The public key derives from the private one and is used to receive bitcoin: it can be safely shared, since from the public key it's not possible to find the private key.

The legal market is pushing lawyers and law firms to do more for less: as clients now ask for a smarter service, the legal field turns to technology in search of solutions. In this article, we make the case for an online network of lawyers: how technology can help lawyers, and particularly lawyers in tech, to achieve a better connection with clients, provide legal services online and make their online presence more effective.