Consultation Responses

By Johan David Michels, Christopher Millard, and Chris Reed

In September 2021, the Cloud Legal Project responded to the Call for Evidence of the Law Commission of England and Wales regarding digital assets. We argue that the Law Commission's proposed criteria for possession create significant uncertainty for some types of digital asset, including security and utility tokens, domain names, digital files, and emails. We further encourage the Law Commission to consider the legal implications of its proposed reforms for post-mortem access to digital assets under succession law, so as to ensure that its approach will provide outcomes fit for the 21st century.

You can read the full text of our response on SSRN, here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3925095.

By Chris Reed, Professor of Electronic Commerce Law, Centre for Commercial Law Studies, School of Law Queen Mary University of London

This response addresses questions 8-10 of the Call for Evidence, focusing on transparency and thus particularly on question 9. It examines how a lack of transparency impacts on existing legal mechanisms, and how (and in what ways) the law might either change to accommodate uses of artificial intelligence (AI), or make demands about the use of AI. It focuses particularly on the use of machine learning techniques in the production of AI systems.

Read Professor Chris Reed's Evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, 20 October 2017.

In 2017, Vasiliki Koukoulioti and Chris Reed commented on the possible enactment of a tax on the revenues that businesses generate from the provision of digital services to the UK market.

Their response will focus specifically on the interim solution that the UK government is considering with respect to online advertising service providers. Apart from established multinational players, such as Google and Facebook, for whom this is their core business model, online advertising is increasingly utilized either as a main or as a complementary source of income by other businesses that provide services or goods through an online platform (e.g. online newspapers, online video games, online retailers, platforms of the sharing economy, etc.)

View the full Cloud Legal Project Response to HM Treasury position on corporate tax and digital economy [PDF 612KB]

Read the Cloud Legal Project Response to the Financial Conduct Authority's 2015 Consultation on Cloud [PDF 144KB] by by Dr Kuan Hon, Professor Christopher Millard, and Professor Ian Walden.

Read the Cloud Legal Response to the European Commission's 2014 'Trusted Cloud Europe' Survey [PDF 142KB].

Response [PDF 419KB] to Justice Select Committee's Call for Evidence on the EU Data Protection Framework Proposal, 17 August 2012. The written evidence of the CLP is also available as part of the Official Committee Report, available here.

Ministry of Justice Summary of Responses to the Call for Evidence on the proposed EU Data Protection Legislative Framework, 28 June 2012.

Cloud Legal Project response to the Ministry of Justice Call for Evidence on the European Commission's data protection proposals. [PDF 151KB].

This response is made by Christopher Millard, Ian Walden, W Kuan Hon and Alan Cunningham of the Cloud Legal Project, Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London.

Cloud Legal Project response to the European Commission's 2011 cloud computing consultation finds that days of 'one-size-fits-all' cloud contracts are numbered.