Jakub Harašta

Less is More? Protecting Databases in the EU after Ryanair

This paper discussed the current status quo of legal protection of databases after the Ryanair case (C-30/14). The first part focuses on the subject matter, scope and limits of legal protection for databases according to the Directive 96/9/EC and the related relevant Court of Justice of the European Union case law. Next, it briefly discusses further possibilities of protection for databases not protected by the copyright and/or sui generis database rights. The second part analyses the recent decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union in the case Ryanair (C-30/14). The third part then discusses the consequences of this decision as regards to potential monopolisation of synthetic data by contract. The conclusions are summed up in the final fourth part.

Annotated Corpus of Czech Case Law for Reference Recognition Tasks.

We describe an annotated corpus of 350 decisions of Czech top-tier courts which was gathered for a project assessing the relevance of court decisions in Czech law. We describe two layers of processing of the corpus; every decision was annotated by two trained annotators and then manually adjudicated by one trained curator to solve possible disagreements between annotators. This corpus was developed as training and testing material for reference recognition tasks which will be further used for research on assessment of legal importance. However, the overall shortage of available research corpora of annotated legal texts, particularly in Czech language, leads us to believe that other research teams may find it useful.

Legally critical: Defining critical infrastructure in an interconnected world

Abstract Cyber security becomes omnipresent within the society, stakeholders are taking actions necessary to reassure general public and to enhance the level of protection. One of the ways seems to be to incorporate cyber into existing frameworks for critical infrastructure protection. This text demonstrates how the introduction of cyber strains existing frameworks and demonstrates certain misconceptions on the case study of the legal change in the Czech Republic. Introducing cyber leads to selective choice of specific type of interdependency, while it ignores other significant types. The paper observes large discrepancy between the macro-level definitions and micro-level procedures and concludes that changes in the existing legal framework present a securitization exercise without significant added value.

Open Texture in Law, Legal Certainty and Logical Analysis of Natural Language

In this paper we use logical analysis of natural language to analyse a dilemma every legislator faces. This dilemma presents itself as a gap between what is literally prescribed by a legal rule and what goal had the legislator in mind when enacting it. First, we describe this dilemma in detail. We use Hart’s example of a rule prohibiting vehicles from entering the park to show how the dilemma could pass to a decision maker if it is not sufficiently addressed by a legislator. Then, we discuss how logical analysis of natural language could be used in order to mitigate, or at least assess, severity of the dilemma passed from a legislator to a decision maker. In general, we advocate usefulness of logical analysis of natural language in legislature as well as in legal decision making.