Adam Polanowski | In Principle

An anti-obscenity association issued a proposal for an Act on Protection of Minors against Pornographic Content on 16 December 2019. It has gained the official support of the Family Council, which recommended to the Prime Minister that the proposal be adopted for further legislative work. The Minister of Family, Labour and Social Policy announced that work on the bill should conclude in the first half of 2020. The need to restrict children’s access to pornography is obvious, but the proposal has generated much controversy, mainly due to the proposed mechanism for age verification, which may invade internet users’ privacy. The proposal would also impose additional obligations on telecommunications operators, electronic service providers, and payment service providers.

When hackers exploited vulnerability due to software not being updated at a US credit agency, important data of millions of customers in the US, Canada, and the UK were leaked. The US federal authorities have launched an investigation that could lead to millions in fines. Bosses at the firm were questioned in a congressional hearing and the agency is facing the largest class action in US history. This sounds like the plot of a financial thriller, but the Equifax case did in fact happen and is a lesson for the future.

While the new data protection regulation provides for severe administrative penalties for failure to comply, it is well known that whether a penalty is effective is determined not by its severity but by its inevitability. Even though the personal data protection authority has been given broad powers, it does not have adequate means of exercising them. A solution could be a private enforcement mechanism within the regulation, whereby any person whose data has been breached can independently seek a judicial remedy.

Reports released by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance leave no doubt that Europe has fallen a long way behind the United States and Asian countries in development of modern financial services. This is especially noticeable in crowdfunding. In Asia Pacific countries, this method generates more than USD 200 billion per year, but only some USD 8 billion in Europe. The proposed crowdfunding regulation is intended to change this by harmonising European laws and introducing a European passport for service providers operating crowdfunding platforms.

It is hard to assess the scale of copyright infringement when it occurs on the internet. Proving the amount of the injury is one of the challenges facing the copyright holder. Lump-sum damages can help. This issue was recently addressed by the Warsaw Court of Appeal—a good occasion to cover a few ground rules for how to proceed in cases of this type.

A forthcoming breakthrough in smart algorithm systems will certainly revolutionise the entire economy, much as internet access has become universal. This revolution will not just impact opportunities for finding work in professions such as translator or driver, but will also completely transform the operations of the justice system. This was demonstrated in a recent competition to predict the results of court proceedings between a group of lawyers and an algorithm created by an English startup.

The General Data Protection Regulation entering into force on 25 May 2018 is not the only privacy revolution in store for the EU. The proposed ePrivacy Regulation is also generating greater and greater controversy and may change the shape of the internet as we know it.