In general, the concept of open source is built upon three key tenets – i) the open source technology, ii) the open source community that stands behind it and iii) the open source licenses that regulate the use of that technology. These three elements are intertwined together to produce a phenomenon that provides significant benefits…Continue reading
Category: Articles
The concept of copyleft in open-source software licensing
What is copyleft? Copyleft is one of the most important concepts when it comes to distributing free and open-source software (FOSS). Before elucidating what copyleft is, we need to take a step back and take a quick look at the general concept of free and open source software. FOSS is known for the provision of…Continue reading
The legal protection of graphical user interfaces
Back in 2010 the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) was faced with an intriguing question with regards the legal protection of graphical user interfaces (GUI) – Case C-393/09 Bezpečnostní softwarová asociace – Svaz softwarové ochrany v Ministerstvo kultury. The question raised before the CJEU was whether a GUI can be protected as…Continue reading
On APIs, copyright protection and the fair use doctrine
What is an API? In simple terms, an API (Application Programming Interface) is a software intermediary that allows applications to talk to each other. For example, when you see a snippet with the weather forecast on the home screen of your mobile phone, this happens through an API which facilitates sourcing the weather data from…Continue reading
The notion of consent in the GDPR – a missed opportunity?
In our current digital economy consumers are increasingly more often required to disclose their personal data in order to obtain access to services. It seems that personal data is the fuel of this new economy as big data centers are slowly becoming almost as valuable as oil refineries. One of the reasons for this paradigm…Continue reading
Data Subject Rights under the GDPR
As the Data Protection Directive (DPD) is gradually closing on its last year of legal existence, the key provisions of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are ever more likely to continuously appear in the spotlight of legal analysis here at the Cybergarden. One of the key aims of the GDPR is to truly…Continue reading
Exploring the European Electronic Communications Code – Part 3: Spectrum
In the third and last article from the series devoted to the newly proposed European Electronic Communications Code the focus of analysis is on regulation of spectrum as a scarce resource. Spectrum, like other resources such as numbers, is a scarce resource that belongs to the EU Member States, and whose management and…Continue reading
Exploring the European Electronic Communications Code – Part 2: End-user protection
The second article from the series that deals with the key provisions of the newly proposed European Electronic Communications Code will focus on the amendments related to regulation of services and end-user protection. In the area of service regulation and end-user protection, the European Commission concluded, as part of its ex post evaluation…Continue reading
Exploring the European Electronic Communications Code – Part 1: Access obligations
In a series of articles The Cybergarden will attempt to shed light upon some of the most important changes that the proposed European Electronic Communications Code will bring to the legal landscape of EU telecom regulation. In Part 1 the analysis will focus on regulation of access. Since the last revision of the…Continue reading