This chapter assesses the framework enabling private parties to enforce competition law and the implications this has both in relation to the evolution of national tort law in European Union (EU) member states and for an incipient acquis of EU tort law. It considers how the law has evolved since the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), in Courage v Crehan, confirmed that those able to show that they have suffered loss as a result of a competition law violation are able to recover compensatory damages and the progress made since the adoption of Directive 2014/104/EU on antitrust damages. The chapter focuses on four selected topics: the erosion of the requirement of fault; the erosion of individual responsibility; the extension of recoverable losses; and modifications to the burden of proof arising from a presumption of damage resulting from certain types of anti-competitive behaviour. It concludes by questioning whether traditional tort law doctrines at member-state level can survive under the pressure of these EU law developments. The chapter indicates areas of uncertainty that may serve to guide future research efforts.

Public sector digitalisation is transforming public governance at an accelerating rate. Digitalisation is outpacing the evolution of the legal framework. Despite several strands of international efforts to adjust good administration guarantees to new modes of digital public governance, progress has so far been slow and tepid. The increasing automation of decision-making processes puts significant pressure on traditional good administration guarantees, jeopardises individual due process rights, and risks eroding public trust. Automated decision-making has, so far, attracted the bulk of scholarly attention, especially in the European context. However, most analyses seek to reconcile existing duties towards individuals under the right to good administration with the challenges arising from digitalisation. Taking a critical and technology-centred doctrinal approach to developments under the law of the European Union and the Council of Europe, this paper goes beyond current debates to challenge the sufficiency of existing good administration duties. By stressing the mass effects that can derive from automated decision-making by the public sector, the paper advances the need to adapt good administration guarantees to a collective dimension through an extension and a broadening of the public sector’s good administration duties: that is, through an extended ex ante control of organisational risk-taking, and a broader ex post duty of automated redress. These legal modifications should be urgently implemented.

As part of its ‘pro-innovation’ approach to artificial intelligence (AI), the UK has left public sector AI procurement and deployment to ‘regulation by contract’ based on thin guidance. Borrowing from the description of AI ‘hallucinations’ as plausible but incorrect answers given with high confidence by AI systems, I argue that this is a ‘regulatory hallucination’: an incorrect answer to the challenge of regulating the procurement and use of AI by the public sector. The pretence that public buyers can ‘confidently and responsibly procure AI technologies’ can generate individual harms and broader negative social effects as the public sector ramps up AI adoption and accumulates a potentially significant stock of AI deployments across all areas of public sector activity. I sketch an alternative strategy to boost the effectiveness of the goals of AI regulation and the protection of individual rights and collective interests through the creation of an independent authority.

The present Study focuses on the economic rationale and effects of the private copy remuneration (or PCR) system, by virtue of which consumers pay the holders of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) a given amount in consideration of the private copying of their works. The scope of the Study is limited to the economic aspects of PCR and, consequently, legal, political, cultural, and other facets of the phenomenon are only incidentally referred to. This Study is not comparative, in the sense that it does not analyse alternative legal systems and, particularly, no argument is intended – either expressly or implicitly – to compare IPR systems based on fair use doctrines (such as the one currently enforced in the United States) with those that are based on legal private copying exceptions (such as those in place in most European Union countries). The Study focuses only on private copy exception-based systems. It does briefly compare systems of private copy exceptions with and without remuneration, but the conclusions reached cannot be automatically transplanted to any comparison between fair use-based and private copy exception-based legal systems. This Study focuses on the effects of PCR on the music sector. Notwithstanding this relatively narrow focus, the conclusions reached are applicable to a significant extent to all types of IPR-protected works (such as audiovisual or literary), with some adjustments to tackle certain peculiarities of the several types of intellectual and creative works. However, for the sake of simplicity and clarity, all the examples and data provided in the Study refer exclusively to music. The Study is limited to the setting and collection aspects of PCR, as well as its effects on incentives to creation of intellectual works. The collective administration of PCR, its distribution amongst right holders, and its use as a source of financing for cultural and social activities also lie outside the scope of the Study. Each of these topics might merit a separate report. Therefore, the Study assumes that PCR is efficiently distributed by the collective management societies to each rights holder according to a proper estimation of the number of copies made of her/his works. Similarly, the Study does not analyse the potential benefits to society that may derive from the cultural activities that are financed with a share of the PCR collected in different Member States. From a purely economic perspective, it must be stressed that the Study is implicitly based on certain assumptions that inevitably condition its content and its lines of reasoning, which are derived from economic theory and which will be out of question in the present Study. First, it is assumed that intellectual property rights are a part of the basic property rights on which developed economies have their foundations. Second, it is assumed that generating incentives for the creation of IPR-protected goods is a key role of economic regulation. Finally, it is also assumed that IPR-protected contents are a significant driver of economic growth for all societies and, particularly, for the Information Society. Finally, this Study does not intend to forecast precisely any future market or sector sales or penetration rates, nor does it intend to predict the exact total PCR collection by countries or products. Instead, based on sound assumptions regarding market conditions, the Study tries to assess the relative efficiency of the current system and to illustrate the potential quantitative importance of certain effects that are usually neglected in the ongoing debate about the PCR system.