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Technology and Rights

Technology and Rights

The legal sector was an early adopter of computer technology, but the study of how information and communications technology (ICT) impacts human rights, access to justice and the functioning of the legal system is still in its early days. This research cluster examines issues raised by technology and artificial intelligence (AI) including the relationship to access to justice, the vindication of individual rights, freedom of speech, environmental impact and regulation, intellectual property, privacy and data protection, and other issues that impact these areas as technology evolves. The Technology and Rights cluster brings together researchers who explore these questions and engage in scholarship, policy development, and advocacy regarding the adoption of ICT and AI by society, industry, and government.

This website contains examples of our members’ recent activity.

About this Research Cluster

Cluster members:

Cluster Lead: Dr. Rónán Kennedy - ronan.m.kennedy@universityofgalway.ie

Cluster PhD Researchers:

  • Anıl Sena Bayındır (Supervised by Dr. Rónán Kennedy and Dr. John Danaher.)
  • Xinpeng Liu (Supervised by Dr. Rónán Kennedy, Dr. Abigail Rekas, and Dr. Mamoona Asghar.)
  • RaisuL Sourav (Supervised by Dr. Rónán Kennedy and Dr. Abigail Rekas.)

Recent Publications

Book Chapters

Articles

Reports

Conference Papers

  • Rekas, Abigail, Panelist at “The Good, The Bad & The AI” at the  Fís Television Summit  1st Feb 2024, hosted by Fís and Ardán in Galway
  • Rekas, Abigail, ‘Non-Discrimination not Copyright Exception’ Presented at CSUNATC24 18-22 March 2024 Anaheim CA, USA
  • Rekas, Abigail, ‘AI as the Brush: Protecting Creative Work Generated by AI’ Presented at Lawtomation Days ’23, 28-29 September 2023 Madrid Spain
  • Rekas, Abigail, ‘Accessibility Duties and Copyright Law - Considering the case of digital media players’ at Rethinking Copyright Flexibilities Department of Law of the University of Cyprus, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa) and the H2020 project reCreating Europe 31.10.22-1.11.22
  • Kennedy, Rónán, ‘Lawtech and Access to Justice’ New Frontiers and Tech Pioneers: Legal Tech Challenges and Opportunities (invited) (Athlone, January 2023)
  • Kennedy, Rónán, Panelist at ‘The role of Artificial Intelligence for global social goods provision in times of crisis - How the world deals with the war in Ukraine’ AI Fora workshop (Galway, November 2022)
  • Kennedy, Rónán, ‘Rules as Code and the (End of the) Rule of Law?’ (Lawtomation Days 2022, IE School of Law, Madrid, September 2022)
  • Kennedy, Rónán, ‘Algorithms, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in the Irish Legal Services Market’ (Whitaker Webinar, January 2022)
  • Kennedy, Rónán, ‘Good AI Global Framework for the Energy industry’ (AI4People Summit, online, December 2020)
  • Kennedy, Rónán, ‘GDPR and Archives’ (‘Open Data versus Privacy’ Aura Network workshop, online, November 2020)
  • Kennedy, Rónán, ‘Integrating Innovation into a Law School Curriculum: The Galway Experience’ (LawTech Education Network seminar, online, June 2020)

Lectures

  • Maeve O’Rourke, Invited lecture, ‘Institutional archives and human rights implications of lack of access to them’ Archives, Access and Human Rights (Royal Irish Academy, 13 June 2024). Recording available here.

Events Organised

  • Maeve O’Rourke, Conference Organising Committee, Archives, Access and Human Rights (Royal Irish Academy, 13 June 2024). Conference proceedings available to watch here.

Monday, 26 August 2024

Dr Maeve O'Rourke Gives Invited Lecture at Royal Irish Academy Conference

On 13 June 2024, the Historical Studies Committee of the Royal Irish Academy held a one-day conference exploring questions of access to and preservation (including digital preservation) of Irish historical records and archives. Dr Maeve O’Rourke, a member of the Royal Irish Academy’s Young Academy Ireland, was a member of the conference organising committee. The event was supported by the Irish Centre for Human Rights and by Boston College, the ARINS Project, Justice for Magdalenes Research, the Irish Committee for Historical Sciences, and the Archives and Records Association. Speakers included archivists, historians, civil servants from Ireland and Northern Ireland, and human rights experts. Access to the publicly and privately held records and archives of Ireland’s institutional and family separation abuses was the focus of one half of the day. The conference proceedings can be viewed here. A post-event report will be published later this year. Dr Maeve O’Rourke gave an invited lecture entitled ‘Institutional archives and human rights implications of lack of access to them’. Her presentation not only addressed current barriers to information access; it also explored the international and European human rights law, and EU GDPR, norms that should underpin the management of historical abuse information and the future operations of the National Centre for Research and Remembrance at Sean McDermott Street in Dublin 1. Dr O’Rourke’s lecture was covered by Fintan O’Toole, ‘Failure to prevent destruction of records is a further insult to those whose identities were stolen’ The Irish Times (18 June 2024).

Monday, 19 August 2024

The Technology and Rights panel at the Law School’s Research Day 2024

The Technology and Rights panel at the Law School’s Research Day 2024  

Tuesday, 16 April 2024

Copyright-AI-bility – Masterclass @ Centre for Creative Technologies

This session is part of a Masterclass Series run by the Centre for Creative Technologies at University of Galway. Further details on the series can be found at: https://www.universityofgalway.ie/creative-tech/ This talk provides a ten-cent tour of copyright doctrine in the US & Europe, particularly as it is impacted by the development of Gen AI. The rights of authors, creators, and artists will be explored, as well as those of intermediary businesses like publishers. It then moves to the various litigation ongoing in the US and UK brought by publishers, artists, authors and newspapers. The outcomes of these cases are highly relevant to the survival of Gen AI models as we know them. Lastly this talk turns to the question of who copyright serves, what its purpose is, and whether there is room at the table for new types of creativity – perhaps even creativity supported by Gen AI tools. Speaker Biography Dr. Abigail Rekas is a lecturer in law & innovation in the School of Law at University of Galway, and a US attorney. She is a copyright law and policy scholar with strong views about accessibility. She is also deeply interested in the preservation of and access to cultural heritage, including digital assets. Recent research centers around access to justice for persons working in the arts, including understanding and planning for the GenAI impact. She teaches intellectual property law and several microcredential courses around law and technology at University of Galway.

Monday, 3 July 2023

International Future of Law Association conference

The International Future of Law Association recently held its in-person event, which was a conference held in Dublin, Ireland and funded by the School of Law at the University of Galway. The event was convened by Dr Rónán Kennedy of the Technology and Rights cluster, who has been leading on the development of IFLA since its early days. The conference was opened by our keynote speaker and IFLA committee member, Professor Cat Moon of Vanderbilt University and Director of Innovation Design and the Program on Law & Innovation there. She presented food for thought on the new skills and competencies which lawyers may need in a changing world of work, and opened up the conference themes of 'Replacement or Collaboration? Imagining the Future(s) of Law, Lawyers & Justice'. The rest of the day featured panel discussions on the future of law teaching, how lawyers can work with data, the changes that are taking place in legal practice, and how we integrate concerns regarding access to justice into legal education and lawyering. It was a hybrid event, featuring speakers from across Europe, Asia and North America, with opportunities for discussion and debate. The first panel was on futures of law teaching and featured Paul Ippolito of the College of Law Sydney, Prof Andy Unger of London South Bank University, both addressing different aspects of future-proofing and modernising the curriculum; Prof Brian W Tang from the University of Hong Kong on integrating generative AI into law teaching and Dr. Liam Sunner of Queen’s University Belfast on using video games in the classroom. That was followed by a panel on the use of data in legal research and teaching, including Dr Rohit Verma of the National College of Ireland on investigating semantic textual similarity in legal documents, Prof Quisquella Addison of Northeastern University on how to train law students to use data for social change, and Jennifer Waters of University College Dublin, who suggested there is a need for a sector specific data protection impact assessment for irish legal analytics services. In the afternoon, the discussion moved to the future of legal practice. Dr Brian Barry of Technological University Dublin and Prof John Morison and Dr Ciarán O’Kelly, both at Queen’s University Belfast discussed similar research that they are conducting on the use of AI and other advanced technologies by solicitors in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Audrey Fried of Osgoode Hall Law School provided suggestions on how generative AI could be integrated into legal skills, while Marc Lauritsen of Capstone Practice Systems and Suffolk University Law School suggested that legal expertise might become 'too cheap to meter'. The final session focused on access to justice and ethics. Tereza Novotná of Masaryk University presented a project she is leading to provide online access to primary legal texts in the Czech Republic. Larry Bridgesmith of Vanderbilt University discussed principles for the responsible use of AI in the delivery of legal services which he has helped to develop. Finally, Dr Rónán Kennedy of University of Galway asked if it was ethical to use generative AI in legal teaching in light of its significant environmental footprint and the human harms caused by its development. Video recordings from the day are available on IFLA’s YouTube channel.

Collaborative Projects

Dr Aphrodite Papachristodoulou is working on a postdoctoral independent research project entitled ‘AI Technologies in Maritime Border Management: The Panopticon of Migration’ (Nov 2022- Nov 2024). This will investigate emerging human rights and ethical challenges posed by the use of technologies at Europe’s external borders in the context of migration by sea. She will be an academic visitor at Oxford University, Faculty of Philosophy at The Institute for Ethics in AI from September to December 2023, where she will continue working on her postdoctoral project. She will have the opportunity to present her current research on the impacts of technologies used at borders at the Lunchtime Research Seminar of the Institute.

Dr Abigail Rekas is working on a comparative note on implementation of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) art. 7 – Accessibility Measures. The European Commission has identified that the accessibility measures developed by audiovisual media service providers for persons with disabilities are an area of interest, in light of Article 7 of the  revised 2018 AVMSD. These revisions call for significant developments at the national level with regard to the accessibility of audiovisual media services for persons with disabilities. The implementation of the revised AVMSD requires greater obligations to be placed on audiovisual media service providers, in an effort to bring regulatory efforts on par with technical capabilities. This note will build on preexisting research published by the European Audiovisual Observatory on accessibility measures for persons with disabilities and provide an overview of the current regulatory situation in the EU member states. It will look at primary, and secondary, legislation developed at the national level to transpose Article 7 AVMSD, and provide a selection of national case studies.

Dr Rónán Kennedy and Dr Abigail Rekas are working on 3G4P: Towards a Göttingen-Groning-Galway Perspective on the digital revolution, involving colleagues in those institutions as part of the ENLIGHT project. With the digital revolution, data science is becoming an increasingly important tool in developing responses to various challenges. However, its successful application often hinges of the ability of data scientists and experts from various fields to work hand in hand. Students in many  disciplines often struggle with statistical approaches themselves, while STEM/statistics students can lack skills for symbiotic teamwork with diverse partners. This project will tackle this problem by developing open educational resources (OER) on the basis of H5P (an open source content collaboration framework) which will enable cross-disciplinary learning  – by considering  policy responses to three key challenges ­­­– to climate change, workplace stress, and access to justice – through the eyes of three disciplines – statistics, psychology and law. The course materials thus developed will be opened under a CC BY 4.0 licence and used in a pilot course for three years entailing roughly 30 students per university.

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