Research Projects

LAILA (Legal Analytics for Italian LAw) is a project funded by MIUR (Ministry of Education and Research) which has three main objectives:

1)     To apply, refine, and develop technologies for LA. This includes:

a)     Applying analytics technologies—including supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised learning—for the following purposes: ontology building, classification of legal documents, analysis of legislation, analysis of case law, extraction of “massime” (rationes) and principles, question-answering, and prediction of trends and decisions. Test applications, and corresponding evaluations, will concern large sets of legal sources, and selections of socio-legal data, including Italian legislation, the case law of the Court of Cassation and lower courts, decisions of the Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante), parties’ documents produced in legal cases, and the corresponding socio-legal data.

b)     Refining and developing LA technologies, taking into account the peculiarities of the Italian legal system and language. In particular, we shall combine LA on English and Italian texts, using existing multilingual repositories, apply LA to annotated legal document, and combine LA methods with the logical representation of legal knowledge.

2)     To provide methodological analyses and guidelines for the efficient and ethical deployment of LA technologies. This includes: 

a)     Reviewing the capabilities and limitations of current LA technologies and identifying risks and mitigations. 

b)     Providing ethical and legal guidelines, specifying how to deploy LA for different purposes (classification, analysis, prediction, etc.), while complying with law and ethics and preventing any risks of adverse effects (biases, unfairness, etc.).

3)     To expand the understanding of the structure, logic, and dynamic of Italian law in its connection with EU law, using LA tools. This includes:

a)     The linguistic, conceptual, and logical structures of Italian legislation and case law, and of their evolution.

b)     The network of multiple connections between different legal sources, of the resulting emerging influences, constraints, commonalities, and differences, in a multilevel framework (also including EU law).

c)     The correlations between social factors and legal sources and decisions.

For further information please click here.

How regulating the ownership of data has been defined as “the most important political question of our era”. One important piece of that puzzle is represented by the access and use of publicly available data on privately owned websites. Normally, data transfer between business operators is accomplished using data structures suited for automated processing by computers. Very often, these transmissions are not human-readable at all. Many website provides for convenient XML feeds in order to connect its market place with the online distribution network. Sometimes, however, these mechanisms for data interchange are not available, mainly because of conflicting interests of the data owner.

In this event, data scraping is often the sole viable solution to interface to a third-party system. Web scraping systems simulate the human processing that occurs when viewing a webpage to automatically extract useful information. This automated process is carried out by bots, web crawlers or web spiders. 

Possible uses are online price change monitoring and price comparison, product review scraping (to watch the competition), website change detection, web data integration. All these functions are usually pursued by metasearch engine (or search aggregator), taking input from a user and querying search engines for results. Search engine data is then gathered, ranked, and presented to the users. 

The operator of the third-party system will often see screen scraping as unwanted, due to reasons of overload of bandwidth and server resources as well as loss of advertisement revenue and/or loss of control of the information content. This has caused an ongoing battle between website developers and scraping developers. From an ethical point of view there is no consensus on the topic and only a few academic articles are explicitly devoted to ethical issues surrounding this practice. Being ethics and the law distinct but complimentary, this “grey area” is mirrored by the legal framework as well.

The research project aims to focus on how the phenomenon has been addressed by different jurisdictions. At this stage, most of the countries around the globe does not have pieces of legislation addressing specifically web scraping practices. This means that courts have been forced to resolve those disputes using judicial frameworks designed for other purposes. While EU Member States normally resort to copyright protection or sui generis right for the creators of databases which do not qualify for copyright, non EU-countries normally tackle the issue from totally different perspectives and angles, applying data protection law, criminal law or unfair competition rules. With such different approaches, the degree of protection for proprietary content on commercial web sites is not settled and may vary significantly from country to country. Uncertainty does indeed exist in the caselaw and practical advise on the legality of web scraping is hard to come by. 

The expected outcome shall be the organization of an international conference aimed at collecting different experiences and scenarios around the data scraping issues and the publication of the related proceedings within a special issue of a peer review journal (i.e. the Journal of Market, Law and Innovation link). The aim shall not be just a map of old, new and developing case law touching on web scraping, but the identification of the different factors that play a role in governing the data scraping phenomenon and their impact on the case law itself. Understanding the factors to be considered, should help in detecting common pattern and possible gaps in protection, as well as arising possible issues of coordination among different pieces of legislation potentially involved. The analysis shall be used as a basis for answering the question whether a de facto ownership exist over data publicly available online, or they should considered to be in the public domain, drawing up an updated balance sheet of the benefits and efficacy provided by the sui generis database law in the EU. Another outcome shall consist in the identification of common trends towards acknowledging or ruling out the unlawfulness of such common practice. 

The overall aim shall be checking the state of IP protection for datasets and provide for possible improvements to existing legislation. 

Research outcomes shall be disseminated through further participation in international conference.

Il tema della sostenibilità non solo economica ma anche ambientale e sociale ha acquisito nel tempo una straordinaria centralità sia a livello locale, che globale. In questo ambito, la comunicazione ha una funzione fondamentale. Con una progressione iniziata già verso la fine degli anni 80’ del secolo scorso, ma che negli ultimi mesi ha acquisito una pervasività quasi totalizzante, il tema della sostenibilità ambientale è diventato un fattore comune alla stragrande maggioranza delle iniziative di comunicazione. Molti operatori lo trattano come un argomento da sfruttare e un tema da cavalcare. A ben vedere, tuttavia, si tratta di una questione fondamentale per le sorti stesse del pianeta, capace di incidere sensibilmente sulle scelte di consumo della popolazione e, nel lungo periodo, sulla stessa capacità della nostra società di transitare dal modello di consumo attuale, ad un’economia sostenibile e circolare. Un tema da trattare dunque con grande cautela.

Lo sforzo che tutti quanti (dai legislatori alle aziende, dagli Stati agli enti intermedi, dalle associazioni ai cittadini) siamo chiamati ad affrontare è cambiare il nostro modo di vivere e di consumare. Tale cambiamento passa inevitabilmente tramite alcuni spartiacque fondamentali:

a) una comunicazione commerciale veritiera, accurata, specifica, coerente, informativa, rilevante, trasparente e verificabile, che permetta al consumatore di porre in essere scelte di consumo realmente ecologiche e sostenibili, distinguendo le realtà imprenditoriali autenticamente impegnate in questa direzione, da quelle meramente dedite all’agganciamento pubblicitario del consumatore inconsapevole;

b) l’educazione del consumatore a saper riconoscere e comprendere il significato e la portata di marchi di certificazione e di qualità presenti sul packaging di prodotto;

c) la capacità di sfruttare le nuove tecnologie, specialmente di intelligenza artificiale, quale fattore coadiuvante per verificare la correttezza della comunicazione commerciale.

Sotto quest’ultimo profilo, in particolare, è noto che le nuove tecnologie, ed in particolare l’intelligenza artificiale, possono giocare un ruolo fondamentale nel supportare il pubblico e i privati verso una riconversione verde di servizi e attività produttive (v. Pagallo U., Ciani J., Durante M., The environmental challenges of AI in EU law: lessons learned from the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) with its drawbacks, Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, in corso di pubblicazione). È meno noto, invece, che l’intelligenza artificiale può altresì offrire un valido supporto nel contrasto al greenwashing. Poiché l’analisi dei dati aziendali concernenti le prestazioni ambientali è complesso e richiede tempo, sono già stati sviluppati sistemi intelligenti capaci di svolgere tale attività in tempo reale per verificare la correttezza delle asserzioni pubblicitarie correlate (cfr. ClimateBert, tecnologia sviluppata dalla Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures). Tali tecnologie, per poter essere sfruttate appieno, necessitano però che gli inserzionisti siano tenuti ad una accurata divulgazione dei dati rilevanti, con la conseguenza che, sul piano giuridico, le aziende dovrebbero essere tenute a precisi obblighi informativi in materia.