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This article examines the diffusion effect of the General Data Protection Regulation (gdpr) beyond the European Union borders, particularly in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The article explores how the Brussels Effect (as a concept and observation) can explain non-EU jurisdictions' voluntary adoption of gdpr standards. This article seeks to develop a corpus of reasoning that could be used to determine when and to what extent the provisions in local data protection statutes need to be interpreted and applied in conformity with gdpr-related legal sources.

The current trend to improve language model performance seems to be based on scaling up with the number of parameters (e.g. the state of the art GPT4 model has approximately 1.7 trillion parameters) or the amount of training data fed into the model. However this comes at significant costs in terms of computational resources and energy costs that compromise the sustainability of AI solutions, as well as risks relating to privacy and misuse. In this paper we present the Erasmian Language Model (ELM) a small context specific, 900 million parameter model, pre-trained and fine-tuned by and for Erasmus University Rotterdam. We show how the model performs adequately in a classroom context for essay writing, and how it achieves superior performance in subjects that are part of its context. This has implications for a wide range of institutions and organizations, showing that context specific language models may be a viable alternative for resource constrained, privacy sensitive use cases.

In the quest for Smart City (SC) development, numerous examples of ‘good practices’ have circulated in national and international policy arenas. Learning from good practices elsewhere is a common approach for cities to initiate and develop SC policies of their own. Nevertheless, because of political, legal and cultural differences across countries and cities, policies will always be context dependent, and prosper under specific conditions. There is a vast literature on policy transfer and policy mobility, but much of it utilizes different concepts (i.e., policy translation, policy learning, and policy diffusion). Nonetheless, a critical omission they all share is limited concern for context-dependence and lack of prescriptive clues. Addressing both omissions would lead to a framework in which learning from good SC policy practices, formulating lessons, transferring them, and then adjusting them to fit the recipient's needs is taken up systematically in a stepwise manner. To develop a theoretical framework for Smart City adoption, this study brings together variegated existing literature under the heading ‘policy transplantation’ and synthesizes existing insights into a prescriptive procedure policymakers can follow. A systematic literature review is conducted to identify all key elements and sub-elements associated with SC policy transplantation, leading to a theoretical framework. This (prescriptive) theoretical framework is subsequently validated using an expert group and illustrated through a real-life case. The framework can be used as an analytical lens by researchers, but also constitutes a practical tool to guide policymakers aiming to use insights from good practices and implement them in line with their own contextual setting. Conducting contextual assessment before transplanting a SC policy is essential.

In the quest for Smart City (SC) development, numerous examples of ‘good practices’ have circulated in national and international policy arenas. Learning from good practices elsewhere is a common approach for cities to initiate and develop SC policies of their own. Nevertheless, because of political, legal and cultural differences across countries and cities, policies will always be context dependent, and prosper under specific conditions. There is a vast literature on policy transfer and policy mobility, but much of it utilizes different concepts (i.e., policy translation, policy learning, and policy diffusion). Nonetheless, a critical omission they all share is limited concern for context-dependence and lack of prescriptive clues. Addressing both omissions would lead to a framework in which learning from good SC policy practices, formulating lessons, transferring them, and then adjusting them to fit the recipient's needs is taken up systematically in a stepwise manner. To develop a theoretical framework for Smart City adoption, this study brings together variegated existing literature under the heading ‘policy transplantation’ and synthesizes existing insights into a prescriptive procedure policymakers can follow. A systematic literature review is conducted to identify all key elements and sub-elements associated with SC policy transplantation, leading to a theoretical framework. This (prescriptive) theoretical framework is subsequently validated using an expert group and illustrated through a real-life case. The framework can be used as an analytical lens by researchers, but also constitutes a practical tool to guide policymakers aiming to use insights from good practices and implement them in line with their own contextual setting. Conducting contextual assessment before transplanting a SC policy is essential., Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public., Organisation & Governance

The availability of human biological materials and data plays a key role in promoting biotechnological innovations and conducting biomedical research. While the function of patent rights in promoting innovation is widely discussed, there are still overarching concerns in patenting human biological materials and data, including triggering commercialization and commodification of the human body, precluding affordable access to the products or services and inducing interest extraction by patent holders to recoup investments and make excessive profits. This article aims to analyse the extent to which the ordre public and morality exclusion can protect the human being whose bodily material has been taken and prevent legal and ethical exploitation. We argue that the concept of ordre public and morality needs to be modified, sparking a new governance approach to better protecting human beings in a patent system that is more participatory, accountable and transparent in patent assessment.

This article reviews the manner in which two types of legislation in the Netherlands, namely laws on foreign direct investment and laws on network and information security, address the risks that arise from changes in control over companies in the cybernetwork. It also identifies the potential vulnerabilities of the existing regulatory framework, which are due to the failure to adopt a sufficiently ecosystemic approach. While the EU legislation on network and information security contains appropriate and proportionate risk-management measures that ensure the security of supply chains, the Union regulation of foreign-direct-investment screening instruments appears to neglect direct suppliers and service providers.

The increasing autonomy of artificial intelligence systems (AI-systems) has put the debate about a possible ‘accountability gap’ in liability law center stage. The debate is about a possible failure of incumbent liability regimes to pinpoint the accountable agent, if in the wrongdoing an AI-system is involved. A recent attempt to address this ‘accountability gap’ is a proposal of the European Parliament, which advances laws on civil liability for the entities that control AI-systems. These newly created entities, which have no blueprint yet in liability law, are called ‘Operators’. By branching out on the healthcare applications of AI-systems, this chapter analyzes the concept of operator’s civil liability. It starts with a description of the liability concepts presented in the proposed legislation, and how they fit doctrinally with the laws and regulations of the current medical liability regime. Complementing the doctrinal analysis, this chapter employs a law and economics analysis, which showcases that the accountability gap is a serious challenge also from a consequentialist point of view. Lastly, this chapter proposes a few legal alternatives that depart from the incumbent concept of strict liability.

Many countries adhere to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development creed that innovation is good for the economy. Experiments are often used to intentionally create space for innovation. Decisions allowing experiments result in temporary legal enclaves for a few, excluding many others. Therefore, they come with risks. The aim of this article is to provide a set of guidelines that help improve the legal resilience of experimentation policies, so they are better able to withstand legal attacks when they occur. To do so, we first arranged the existing diversity of legal experiments in a theoretical model. Special attention was paid to two archetypes of legal experiments: statutory experiments and regulatory sandboxes. Second, we analyzed the impact of both types of experiments on four core legal principles: legality, certainty, equality, and public accountability. From this assessment, we eventually formulated a set of guidelines to secure or improve legal resilience.