Ghost in the Shell: Is Ownership of a Digital File Possible?

In the course of the past decades communitarian law has developed as a field of law whose theoretical explanation seems to present considerable difficulties. The traditional models of monism and dualism cannot sufficiently explain the position of communitarian law between international and municipal law. In addition the concepts of the so-called traditionalism and autonomics deal with only a part of the problem. The theoretical difficulties concentrate on the term “supranationality”, which on one hand may provide for mediation between the political actors, from the legal point of view however is a weak compromise. The article attempts to provide an overview of the relevant statements given by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) concerning the systematic of communitarian law. In the jurisdiction of the Court there occur terms like “autonomy”, “sovereign rights” and “constitutional charter”. Behind the application of such terms we may see the development of the concept which spans the period between the sixties and the nineties. In the next part of the article we attempt to critically analyse the jurisdiction of the ECJ in the light of concepts drawn from legal theory. As a starting point we have turned to the teachings of Hart and Kelsen, i.e. the most significant legal theorists of the twentieth century. Hart’s concept is characterized by empiric criteria, according to which the validity and identity of a legal order is explained as the result of the social acceptance of norms in the form of the so-called rule of recognition. On the other hand Kelsen constructs a legal order on the basis of the basic norm which does not have a factual character but is only the logical condition for the unity of a legal system. By comparing the legal theoretical concepts with the argumentation of the ECJ we find that the jurisdiction of the Court is grounded on a Constructivist approach. However, the basic norm of communitarian law has not been identified in convincing terms. The phenomenon of communitarian law evidently calls for a modification of the Constructivist approach. The function of the theoretical model according to Kelsen is the clearing away of systematic argumentation from factors that are not part of the law (policies and power). Such factors impede the transparency of a legal system and thus also legal certainty.

This Dissertation studies the jurisdiction of European and national courts over the rights of the consumer of air traffic. The Dissertation has highlighted the role of the European Court of Justice in protecting the rights of consumers of air traffic. The role of the European Court of Justice is to interpret the law and to ensure its uniform application in all EU Member States. The EU Court of Justice also resolve the legal disputes arising between the national governments of the Member States and The European Court of Justice. In addition, it has the right to penalize airlines for violating passenger rights. The Dissertation also highlighted the role of national courts in protecting the rights of consumers of air traffic. The Dissertation has shown that the national courts of the Member States have jurisdiction not only to examine cases but also to engage in judicial dialogue with the European Court of Justice. There are often conflicts between European and national courts. The Dissertation has also highlighted the power of national courts to choose whether to uphold the judgments of the European Court of Justice. Finally, the Dissertation identified that there is harmonization of European and Greek law to protect consumers' rights of air traffic since most European directives have been incorporated into Greek law.

The rekindling popularity of the vinyl record and record collecting provide a counternarrative to the ideals of technological progress and supersession, signalling the paradoxical return of a physical music format in the digital realm where "the fetish of newness is at its most aggressive" (Tischleder and Wasserman 7). In this way, the vinyl record provides a disruptive lens through which to question media history as "a history of obsolescence, where new media displace and redefine older media" and explore how "obsolescence resists becoming obsolete" (Tischleder and Wasserman 2). Magaudda (29) argues that the dematerialisation of music media has reconfigured the role of materiality in media practices and has seen physical formats such as the vinyl record "bite back" as mediators of distinct listening practices and unique material relationships to music. Against the background of on-demand streaming services and retro nostalgia in the digital age (Hogarty), record collecting may be dismissed as a resistant and obsolete collecting practice. However, as this article will explore, record collecting can be characterised as a highly social practice, providing a means to communicate identity and taste, maintain a sense of the past, and orient the social life and personal history of the collector. This article reports on the results of ethnographic research investigating the record collections of some young millennial music fans to locate the position and significance of vinyl records in their social lives as a legacy media format. To do this, I examine three key capacities of vinyl record collections in evoking autobiographical memories, maintaining personal histories and anchoring a sense of the past. The significance of personal record collections and collecting practices was investigated in a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews with a group of self-identified record collectors. The sentiments of the collector in describing their collecting can be found to reveal their acquisitions as transactions within the spheres of commodity culture and the gift economy, articulating the renewed appeal of vinyl records in the digital age. This perspective of the social meanings and media practices surrounding vinyl records in the digital age highlight the formats significance in understanding the complex trajectories of media history.

Ever since the 1960s, three closely related legal doctrines have been held key to conceptualizing and accounting for the specific nature of the European Union (EU) polity: ‘direct effect’ — the principle that EU law creates rights for individuals, which must be upheld by the member states’ national courts; ‘supremacy’ — the principle that within the area of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), EU law is superior to the national laws of the member states; and ‘preliminary ruling’ — the procedure, which allows a national judge ruling on a case involving EU law to refer to the ECJ for an interpretation of the legal issue concerned. Crucially, the EU’s ‘magic triangle’ has been interpreted to form the basis for the de facto constitution of Europe providing the EU polity not only with a rationale, but also an engine for further political, economic and social integration.1 According to the prevalent political science and law literature, the origins of this de facto constitution are to be found in the ECJ’s decisions in Van Gend en Loos of 5 February 19632 and Costa v. ENEL of 15 July 1964. Solidly linked together today, these two judgments are usually regarded as a moment of revelation of the constitutional foundations of the EU polity associating the two principles of direct effect and supremacy with the judicial mechanism of preliminary ruling before the ECJ. Accordingly, the EU’s legal order would fall apart if one of its core dimensions were compromised.3

The European Union is based on the rule of law to a far greater extent than any previous or contemporary international or transnational organization. The key to the notion of the rule of law is, as we have seen, the reviewability of decisions of public authorities by independent courts; the European Union goes far in recognizing this. The European Communities – starting with the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950 – were created by law, in the shape of treaties, and endowed with a Court of Justice, whose function, stated in the broadest terms, was to ensure that the law was observed. Moreover, in contrast to other international and transnational courts, the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) was not optional, but compulsory and automatic. The ECJ was given a wide jurisdiction – the key to the effectiveness of the Treaties and to the observance of the rule of law. Among its main functions was, and still is, to ensure the legality of the measures taken by the new institutions created by the Treaties, so that their considerable powers are exercised in accordance with the law. Specifically, the ECJ is to annul any measures where the institutions exceed or misuse their powers, or infringe other essential rules. In practice, any form of substantial wrongdoing, not necessarily requiring fault, is a sufficient ground for annulment.

By acceding to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the EU’s role as supranational player in the complex human rights architecture of Europe will be finally recognized. On 5 April 2013, the negotiators of the accession procedure of the European Union to the ECHR agreed on a package of draft accession instruments. Constituting a mile­stone on the road to accession, the now revised Accession Agreement still leaves vast room for discussion. By critically scrutinizing some of its modalities, this article will evaluate its impact on the human rights jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the Eu­ropean Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the relationship between both courts. To this end, it will address the somewhat disproportionate involvement of the European Union in the future jurisdiction of the ECtHR and in the decision making of the Council of Europe in matters linked to the ECHR. Furthermore, it will focus on the compatibility of the Draft Agree­ment with the principle of autonomous interpretation of European Union Law: a highly rel­evant discussion for the ECJ’s future Opinion under Article 218 (11) TFEU on the compatibil­ity of the finalized draft agreement with the Treaties - the next hurdle for accession.

The European Court of Justice in Bolagsupplysningen: The Brussels I Recast Regulation's jurisdictional rules for online infringement of personality rights further clarified

To reach climate goals, there is a need for large scale changes to the energy system. This requires speedy permitting procedures. However, permitting procedures are everything else but speedy. Thus, there is a need to simplify the rules to accelerate the permit procedures. While permitting procedures are largely governed by national law, the central issue for large scale infrastructure projects is to handle the high standards of EU Environmental law. Enlarged rights of individuals and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to bring any mistaken application of these rules to court and thus stop projects from realization for years, represent the major risks of delay for the realization of infrastructure projects. Shortcomings on the application of EU Environmental law in permitting procedures are not only caused by narrow time schedules and stingy project promoters, but mainly by an overcomplex system of partly unclear rules that is evolving in the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) only in one direction: Making every single rule even stricter case by case before the ECJ. This is reality. To cut on the duration of permit procedures for reaching climate goals in time, European environmental law needs to be adapted. Without streamlining and simplifying EU environmental law, all efforts to accelerate permit procedures are doomed to failure. This article suggests adaptations of the European Habitats and Birds Directives, Water Framework Directive and Environmental Impact Assessments Directive to significantly accelerate permit procedures. IMO Sulphur Regulation, Shipowner, Charterer, EGCS, Low Sulphur Fuel

The author of the article, analyzing the activities of the European Union in the field of prevention of marine pollution and the decision in case C-459/03 “European Commission against Ireland”, argues that the decisions of the Court of Justice are judicial precedents. The judgments on the protection of the environment, including prevention of pollution of the marine environment, consider the application and implementation of EU directives, clarify or define certain terms, specify the division of powers between the Member States and the EU on specific issues, and also supplement the content of the constituent documents , as was done in decision No. C-459/03 “Commission against Ireland”. On the example of MOX Plant cases, the author concludes that the conflict of jurisdictions of judicial and arbitration bodies takes place in situations where identical disputes are consistently or simultaneously submitted to the consideration of various bodies of international justice, none of which has an exclusive jurisdiction. According to the decision in case C-459/03 “Commission v. Ireland”, the exclusive jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice is determined not only by the constituent documents of the EU, but also by the European Court of Justice itself. The European Court of Justice found that only it has exclusive jurisdiction over the application and interpretation of EU law, including the rules of international law that have become part of the EU legal order (for example, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea)

The appropriate distribution of competences between a central authority and the respective decentralized units lies at the heart of every political multi-level system. This applies to the European Union as a legal community sui generis as well as to the United States of America as a federal state. First and foremost, one has to find an equilibrium between conflicting interests and the search for unity and integration on the one hand, and the fundamental respect for the constitutive units on the other hand. Federal systems are usually characterized by centralizing tendencies as far as the distribution of compentences and the interpretation of competence norms are concerned (cf. Schramm, “Anregungen” 11f.). This tendency becomes especially clear when one takes a look at the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the U.S. Supreme Court: For decades, these supreme courts have interpreted the vertical distribution of competences — founded on treaty or constitution, respectively — in a generous way and further enhanced it via development of the law, which has resulted in a systematic extension of the community’s or federation’s competences. The judicial enhancement in terms of a gouvernement des juges, which has exceeded acceptable boundaries, has recently met with growing resistance, especially by members of the European Union. Thus, the ECJ has been accused of inadmissible interference with the Union’s political development (cf. Dobler 510f.) This criticism raises the question of a proper relation between judicial restraint and judicial activism, which has so far mainly been a matter of legal policy in the USA.

The year 2016 was characterized by three elements: the incorporation of the Civil Service Tribunal within the General Court and transfer of jurisdiction; the implementation of the reform of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) through an increase in the number of judges at the General Court; a rise in judicial decisions of the ECJ concerning intellectual property rights and freedoms. Also, 2016 was the year in which the ECJ and the General Court dealt with cases concerning restrictive measures relating to Afghanistan, Belarus, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Russia, Syria, Tunisia, Ukraine and Zimbabwe. Emblematic of this jurisprudential trend are the judgments on the cases of Yanukovych and Others, where the General Court upheld the freezing of funds of several Ukrainians.

The European Court of Justice's (ECJ's) jurisprudence of fundamental rights in cases such as Schmidberger and Omega extends the court's jurisdiction in ways that compete with that of Member States in matters of visceral concern. And just as the Member States require a guarantee that the ECJ respect fundamental rights rooted in national tradition, so the ECJ insists that international organisations respect rights constitutive of the EU. The demand of such guarantees reproduces between the ECJ and the international order the kinds of conflicting jurisdictional claims that have shadowed the relation between the ECJ and the courts of the Member States. This article argues that the clash of jurisdiction is being resolved by the formation of a novel order of coordinate constitutionalism in which Member States, the ECJ, the European Court of Human Rights and other international tribunals or organisations agree to defer to one another's decisions, provided those decisions respect mutually agreed essentials. This coordinate order extends constitutionalism beyond its home territory in the nation state through a jurisprudence of mutual monitoring and peer review that carefully builds on national constitutional traditions, but does not create a new, encompassing sovereign entity. The doctrinal instruments by which the plural constitutional orders are, in this way, profoundly linked without being integrated are variants of the familiar Solange principles of the German Constitutional Court, by which each legal order accepts the decisions of the others, even if another decision would have been more consistent with the national constitution tradition, ‘so long as’ those decisions do not systematically violate its own understanding of constitutional essentials. The article presents the coordinate constitutional order being created by this broad application of the Solange doctrine as an instance, and practical development, of what Rawls called an overlapping consensus: agreement on fundamental commitments of principle—those essentials which each order requires the others to respect—does not rest on mutual agreement on any single, comprehensive moral doctrine embracing ideas of human dignity, individuality or the like. It is precisely because the actors of each order acknowledge these persistent differences, and their continuing influence on the interpretation of shared commitments in particular conflicts, that they reserve the right to interpret essential principles, within broad and shared limits, and accord this right to others. The embrace of variants of the Solange principles by many coordinate courts, in obligating each to monitor the others' respect for essentials, creates an institutional mechanism for articulating and adjusting the practical meaning of the overlapping consensus.

Created by the Treaty of Paris as a judicial authority which ensures respect for the law when interpreting and applying this treaty, the European Court of Justice has so far been repeatedly reformed. The latest reform of the judicial system of the European Union, put into effect by the Lisbon Treaty, largely relies on solutions contained in the unaccepted Treaty on the Constitution for Europe. Novelties that this treaty brings could be grosso modo divided into several basic categories. First, there are organizational changes related to the different name and composition of the courts, appointment of judges and advocates-general and the formation of specialized courts. The new terminology and organization aims to provide a clear distinction between the Court of Justice of the EU, which is an aggregate term or generic designation for the entire judicial system of the Union, and special judicial bodies that enter into its composition. These are the Court of Justice as the highest authority, the General Court which is actually the renamed Court of First Instance, and specialized courts that replaced the judicial panels. The second category includes changes that expand the jurisdiction of the Court to certain new areas owing to the abolition of the former EU pillar structure and the dissolution of the European Community. On such a basis, an integration of court jurisdiction regarding the first and third pillar ensued, as the Court of Justice was vested with general and compulsory jurisdiction over the entire law created in the newly established area of freedom, security and justice. The exception is the area of common foreign and security policy, in which the Court's jurisdiction still remains excluded. The third type of amendment extends the scope of judicial reviews of the validity of acts adopted by EU institutions and enables authorized subjects an easier access to the Court. Their aim is to strengthen the rule of law within the legal system of the Union, given that the action for annulment is the basic means to exercise judicial review of the institutions' activities. The last set of changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty refers to faster proceedings in deciding on preliminary rulings in certain areas when the interested person, whose position depends on the interpretation of EU law, is in custody. In addition, it allows for more effective judicial control in cases of default judgment or failure to fulfill commitments by Member States through the acceleration and simplification of the procedure for imposing financial sanctions.

Currently over the millions of digital audio files such as digital songs are copied illegally during file-sharing over the networks. It has resulted as the loss of revenue for music and broadcasting industries. The traditional protection schemes are no longer useful to protect copyright and ownership of multimedia objects. These challenges have prompted significant research in digital audio watermarking for protection and authentication. It helps to prevent forgery and impersonation of audio signal. In this paper, a novel audio watermarking based algorithm is proposed using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Furthermore, the Arnold transform and error correction technique are utilized to improve the performance of proposed algorithm. The performance is measured using Bit Error Rate (BER), Peak Sound to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) between the extracted watermark and original watermark. The experimental results show excellent resilience against typical signal processing attacks compared to the previous algorithm. The performance is improved in terms of BER for 0–3.9%, PSNR higher than 62-db and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) from 0.99 to 1.

Liability for Damage in Case of Bird Strike – a Holistic Approach