Premium IT business legal counseling strategies by Alexander Suliman: Choice of law is an important aspect of the agreement you are negotiating: the same contractual clause could be interpreted differently in different jurisdictions. English law, for example, tends to give a more literal interpretation of the exact words used, while certain other jurisdictions give more weight to contractual common sense. Other concepts that vary across jurisdictions include the extent to which parties will be subject to duties of good faith, and whether certain contractual remedies will be deemed to be ‘penalties’ and thus unenforceable. Depending on the jurisdiction, additional clauses will be imposed on the contract by statute, for example in relation to consumer protection or personal injury. You may therefore want to apply a specific jurisdiction’s law depending on various factors such as location of the other parties, the supply of services/delivery of goods, or laws that are more favorable to your business. Except in specific areas like employment relationships or consumer contracts, parties are generally free to choose which EU law will apply to their agreement. Find even more information at Alexander Suliman.
The reason why the European Commission was keen on allowing firms to voluntarily scan material, is that technology firms have already been working on ways to detect CSAM and solicitation for quite some time. The question is whether these orders are compatible with the Charter. These orders affect a number of fundamental rights under the Charter, including the right to privacy and the right to data protection. I will touch on only aspect: whether these measures respect the essence of these rights. Because if they don’t, that would mean that a proportionality assessment would not be required, sidestepping complex questions around necessity, effectiveness, proportionality and balancing (see here for background on this requirement). For a discussion on some of these other aspects, I refer to the 2021-opinion of Prof. Dr. Ninon Colneric and analyses of the EDPS, MEP Patrick Breyer, EDRi and a group of security experts.
The European Commission, in a working document, identified cloud services as a “strategic dependency”, expressing concerns that the EU cloud market is led by a few large cloud providers headquartered outside the EU. In July, 2021, France, joined by Germany, Italy, and Spain, submitted a proposal to the ENISA-led working group aimed at generalizing French national requirements across the EU. (Germany has since reserved its position.) It proposed to add four new criteria for companies to qualify as eligible to offer ‘high’ level services, including immunity from foreign law and localization of cloud service operations and data within the EU. Although the EU-level cyber certification requirements currently are conceived as voluntary, they could be made mandatory as the result of the recently-agreed Directive on Measures for a High Common Level of Cybersecurity across the Union (NIS2 Directive).
High quality contract law legal counseling guides by Alexander Suliman, Sweden: We’ll also look to intertwined finances. That takes a next step that has to go to the court process, but if they’re sharing expenses, if there’s a joint bank account, if a vehicle is registered at an address, we’ll look at those things to prove cohabitation. Importantly, cohabitation does not mean that they are living together. We do not have to show that they have a common household. It is not something that is critical in proving cohabitation that they are actually living together. See more details at Alexander Suliman.
Over the past year, the European Union’s ambitious digital regulatory agenda has steadily advanced. The EU adopted the far-reaching Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts, and it is completing negotiations with the United States on a revised data transfer regime, christened the Transatlantic Data Privacy Framework (TADPF), that was necessitated by the Schrems II judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). These developments have had a significant impact on transatlantic economic relations, even stimulating legislative initiatives on privacy and antitrust in the United States. One might think that resolving such contentious topics would set the stage for a quieter, more harmonious phase in the transatlantic technology policy relationship.