Call for Papers: IEEC 2010

A call for papers, with submission deadline of 18 March 2010, has been issued for IEEC 2010: The 2nd International Symposium on Information Engineering and Electronic Commerce, to be held 23-25 July 2010, in Ternopil, Ukraine.

Of the topic areas of the conference, the following contains the greatest number of law-related topics:

“Area 1 : Business and Social Applications

• E-Service
• E-Learning
• E-Entertainment
• E-Banking
• E-commerce
• E-Government
• E-Society
• Architectures and applications of B2B, B2C and C2C
• Business processes re-engineering
• Healthcare and Medical Applications
• Virtual Organizations
• Collaborative Business Systems
• Supply-chain Management
• CRM and Business Solutions
• Workflow Management Systems
• E-Marketing and Consumer Behavior
• Intellectual Rights
• Trust and Privacy Issues in Social Networks
• Semantic Web Applications and Ontology Sharing
• Adoption of Standards and Protocols for e-Business Applications
• Business Intelligence
• Information Infrastructures of Businesses”

For a complete list of topics, or for more information, please see the call for papers.

TrustVWs 2009 Papers

This post links to papers presented at TrustVWs 2009: Virtual Worlds: Trust, Security, Rule of Law, a workshop held 9 December 2009 in Venice, Italy, in conjunction with UCMedia 2009: The 1st International ICST Conference on User Centric Media. Respecting the legal informatics papers delivered at the workshop, here are abstracts with links to the full text:

• Overview of the Legal Issues in Virtual Worlds, by Prof. Gerald Spindler, Katharina Anton and Jan Wehage;
• ABSTRACT: “The following paper contains a summary and brief assessment of the legal problems that may arise in virtual worlds. The results presented herein were gained during the legal research in order to establish a virtual world platform named VirtualLife. Virtual Life is an FP7 ICT research project conveyed by the EU. The project aims to provide an immersive and secure environment, combining a high quality 3D virtual experience with the trustiness of a secure communication infrastructure based on a peer-to-peer architecture. The paper cannot provide a comprehensive solution to all problems, but has to be seen as a basic overview of the legal aspects of virtual worlds. The ultimate answer to any legal problem will hinge on the exact scenario and therefore be subject to the law of the individually competent legal system and the deciding court.”
• Virtual Persons + Virtual Goods = Real Problems, by Kai Erenli;
• ABSTRACT: “Virtual Worlds have become serious business models and thus gained the attention of law professionals. The legal problems arising out of Virtual Worlds have started a discussion which will be summarized in this article. Moreover arguments will be delivered which can be used to protect users of those Virtual Realities.”
• Transforming Legal Rules into Online Virtual World Rules: A Case Study in the VirtualLife Platform, by Prof. Vytautas Čyras.
• ABSTRACT: “The paper addresses the implementation of legal rules in online virtual world software. The development is performed within a peer-to-peer virtual world platform in the frame of the FP7 VirtualLife project. The goal of the project is to create a serious, secure and legally ruled collaboration environment. The novelty of the platform is an in-world legal framework, which is real world compliant. The approach ‘From rules in law to rules in artifact’ is followed. The development accords with the conception ‘Code is law’ advocated by Lawrence Lessig. The approach implies the transformation of legal rules (that are formulated in a natural language) into machine-readable format. Such a transformation can be viewed as a kind of translation. Automating the translation requires human expert abilities. This is needed in both the interpretation of legal rules and legal knowledge representation.”

To see other papers delivered at the conference, click here (and then click on “List All”).

HT Prof. Vytautas Čyras.

New Issue: Digital Evidence & Electronic Signature Law Review

A new issue, designated volume 6, 2009, of Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review has been published. The new issue contains many articles of potential interest to legal informatics researchers:

• “Digital data as hearsay: Steven W. Teppler rehearses the arguments for treating digital evidence as hearsay, and illustrates the failure of US courts to deal with digital data consistently
• Evidential issues from pre-action discoveries: Odex Pte Ltd v Pacific Internet Ltd: Daniel Seng considers a recent case in Singapore in which the lawyers failed to obtain statements from appropriate witnesses
• Judgment in the case of K.U. v Finland: the European Court of Human Rights requires access to communications data to identify the sender to enable effective criminal prosecution in serious violations of private life: Tuomas Pöysti examines an important decision by the European Court of Human Rights that must include the investigation of digital evidence
• Businesses’ perception of electronic signatures: An Australian study: Dr. Aashish Srivastava provides a summary of his research into the perception of electronic signatures in Australia amongst the business community, including lawyers
• Civil law liability for unauthorized withdrawals at ATMs in Germany: Assistant Professor DDr. Gerwin Haybäck analyses the present state of the law relating to liability for unauthorized withdrawals from ATMs in Germany
• Bank card fraud in Spain: Ricardo M. Mata y Martín and Antonio Mª. Javato Martín discuss the legal obstacles and remedies in Spain relating to the effective prosecution of thieves that steal bank cards, and consider how the EU is dealing with the issue
• Bread and Donkey for Breakfast: how IT law false friends can confound lawmakers: an Italian tale about digital signatures: Ugo Bechini considers a recent law in Italy that requires the transfer of a share in an Italian limited liability company to be effected by a digital signature, and a case where the judge has determined that the digital signature must be notarized to be effective
• The essential elements of an effective electronic signature process: Greg Casamento and Patrick Hatfield set out some of the practical and legal considerations when dealing with electronic signatures in the United States of America
• Reliability of Chip & PIN evidence in banking disputes: Steven J. Murdoch provides an outline of the ATM system that supports Chip & Pin in the UK, illustrating the complexities of the systems put in place by the banks and the weaknesses that customers may not be aware of
• PINs, passwords and human memory: Wendy Moncur and Dr Grégory Leplâtre provide an introduction to some of the problems relating to memory and the ability of the human to recall passwords
• Known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns: anti-virus issues, malicious software and internet attacks for non-technical audiences: Daniel Bilar illustrates the ease by which third parties can obtain control of computers without the authority of the owner or user, with the concomitant need for lawyers to more fully understand the issues, failing which they might be considered negligent
• Remote electronic discovery: Gib Sorebo takes a wide-ranging look at the changes that are taking place technically in respect of the ability of digital evidence specialists to obtain digital evidence without physically crossing national borders
• Legal privilege and the high cost of electronic discovery in the United States: should we be thinking like lawyers?: Daniel R. Rizzolo provides an insight into the costs of litigation in the United States, identifies a significant bottleneck, and proposes an answer to the problem
• International phishing gangs and operation Phish & Chip: Francesco Cajani provides an insight to the practical problems when dealing with cross-border crime
• Interception of communications: Skype, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft tools and electronic data retention on foreign servers: A legal perspective from a prosecutor conducting an investigation: Francesco Cajani illustrates the problems associated with dealing with evidence across borders and offers the perspective of an Italian prosecutor
• Digital evidence and e-signature in the Russian Federation: a change in trend?: Alex Dolzhich considers the approach of the Arbitrazh Courts and the Arbitrazh Procedural Codes in relation to digital evidence
• More on suppression and the internet in New Zealand: Ursula Cheer brings the reader up-to-date to her article on the decision of the judge in New Zealand Police v KOrs
• Whether a photograph taken for Google’s Street View can be used as evidence in a criminal process: a case note: Nadezhda Purtova and Arnold Roosendaal consider the implications for data protection and the admissibility of evidence where a photograph retained by Goggle presented evidence of a criminal act
• Digital evidence – do not confuse digital archiving with backups: Philippe Bazin indicates the difference between back-ups of data and the archiving of digital data in the light of a recent French decision
• Digital evidence in the new Swiss Federal Code of Civil Procedure: Christoph Gasser gives an outline of the new Swiss Code of Civil Procedure for the admissibility of digital evidence and the electronic filing of submissions to the courts
• Registered e-Mail and e-Invoicing in Turkey: Dr. Leyla Keser Berber sets out the developments in Turkey in relation to registered e-mail and e-invoicing, and how they may affect contractual relations
• The Indonesian law on electronic information and transactions: Hamud M. Balfas provides a summary of the new law regulating electronic signatures and electronic commerce in Indonesia
• A brief outline of the position in Uruguay in relation to cyber crime legislation: Luis Aguerre and Diego Baldomir provide a brief outline of the present difficulties faced by the authorities in Uruguay in relation to prosecuting cyber crimes
• Line based hash analysis of source code infringement: Svein Yngvar Willassen provides an insight into the complexities of investigating lines of code for the purposes of establishing the theft of intellectual property rights and proposes a new method of investigation
• On the complexity of collaborative cyber crime investigations: Peter M. Bednar, Vasilios Katos and Cheryl Hennell consider the various issues relating to investigating cyber crimes, and suggests a methodology that might prove to be helpful in dealing with such complex criminal investigations
• An investigator’s approach to digital evidence: Paul Lund’s article considers the practical issues, with examples, that a digital evidence specialist faces when dealing with complex allegations of fraud using digital evidence”

The issue also includes English-language translations of several recent significant judicial decisions respecting digital evidence or cybercrime, and reviews of the following books:

• George L. Paul, Foundations of Digital Evidence (2008);
• Electronic Disclosure in International Arbitration (David J. Howell ed., 2008);
• Professor Gerwin Haybäck, Risikohaftung bei missbräuchlichen Bankomatbehebungen Ein österreichisch-deutscher Rechtsvergleich (2008).