The second conference to be organised jointly by the Serbian National Internet Domain Name Registry Foundation (RNIDS) and Union University Faculty of Law was held online 3rd December under the slogan “Digital Revolution 4.0: through theory and practice”.
The conference was opened by Prof. Nebojša Šarkić, PhD, Dean of the Union University Faculty of Law, who gave an introduction to the topic of the event – the connection between law, information technologies and new and contemporary solutions. He referred to the fact that the introduction of new solutions brought with it certain difficulties from the legal and other aspects. The conference would therefore try to throw light on these difficulties and issues both from the theoretical and the practical standpoint.
Dejan Đukić, director of the RNIDS Foundation, spoke on a very current topic, that of the position of domain registries with respect to illegal content online. He stressed the significance of this subject given that illegal content on the Internet was expanding as the Internet itself grew at an incredible rate. The audience got to hear about an important set of regulations that were being worked on at the European level – the DSA (Digital Service Act) – whereby the law would seek to place responsibility for online content on domain registries. These moves have been protested by all relevant international organisations that are involved primarily in the technical aspects of running the Internet. Đukić highlighted the fact that, in most domain spaces, domain names could freely be registered without any prior checks conducted by the registry or any monitoring of content accessed using a particular domain name. He stated that in regard to uploading content to the Internet, relevant players were the uploaders themselves (those bearing responsibility for it), the hosting providers and ISPs. He explained how DNS worked and the role of various stakeholders, including national Internet domain registries, which he illustrated by showing a video recently created by CENTR which he said was a good summary of the attitude of European registries towards the issue of content. He said that without a warrant from the relevant authorities, domain names could not be deleted or suspended and explained that this was not an effective way to deal with illegal content. The person uploading the content needed to be identified and the content removed, because merely deleting the domain was no guarantee that the content would not remain accessible via a different domain name or via its IP address.
Continuing the conference, Prof. Mario Lukinović gave a very interesting talk primarily about the legal aspects of protecting brands, but also on brands in general. Prof. Saša Gajin, talked about the general and special legal regime in place for protecting personal data, with a particular focus on processing data gathered via video surveillance. Lawyer Vladimir Marenović talked about artificial intelligence and trademarks, starting his talk with an emphasis on the legal complexity of these topics. Lawyer Nenad Cvjetićanin talked about copyright and other related rights and their monetisation via digital music platforms. He particularly focused on the terms in place for earning on YouTube and how people do it. The talk by lawyer Dragan Milić touched on the concept of digital property and its legal aspects, with a special emphasis on the current draft Digital Property Act.
You can watch the recording of the conference here: