The COVID-19 pandemic is creating significant economic challenges for industries world-wide. The European venture capital industry and the start-up ecosystem it supports is no exception. Recent Trends Before the onset of the pandemic, European venture capital deal activity was very healthy. Whilst there was a downward trend in terms of deal count (attributable to late-stage … Read more
Gambling Commission Guidance The Gambling Commission has released new guidance acknowledging the increased challenges that businesses in the industry are facing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The guidance explicitly reminds licensees that: they are expected to follow Public Health guidance; they should assess their ability for continued compliance with their relevant licence conditions … Read more
On 12 March 2020, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, presented the 2020 Budget – the first since the UK exited the European Union (available here). The following announcements (some of which are new, but others build on previously announced measures) are likely to be of particular interest to the Technology, Media and Telecoms … Read more
5 March 2020 saw the European Commission (EC) announce an unprecedented agreement with short-stay accommodation titans Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia and TripAdvisor to share and publish data (on the number of nights booked and the number of guests staying) with the EC via Eurostat (the EU’s statistical office) (press release here). Eurostat will then aggregate the … Read more
In our latest Public Law blog post, Andrew Lidbetter, Nusrat Zar, Jasveer Randhawa and Claire Hall discuss the Committee on Standards in Public Life’s recently published report on artificial intelligence and its impact on public standards. They comment on the Committee’s recommendations for the governance and regulation of AI in the public sector, aimed at … Read more
In the latest episode of our Inside Tech podcast, Dorothy Livingston, Andrew Moir and Charlie Morgan discuss the UKJT legal statement on cryptoassets and smart contracts and a recent decision from the English court, which builds upon the conclusions of the legal statement. Read more
The High Court has held that cryptoassets (in this case Bitcoin) can be treated as property under English law. As such, the owner of a cryptoasset can, in appropriate circumstances, avail itself of the various proprietary remedies that a court is able to grant. The practical significance here was that an insurer that had paid … Read more
The UK Jurisdictional Taskforce (UKJT) published a Legal Statement on 18 November 2019 concluding that there is no bar under English law for cryptoassets to have the legal status of property and for smart contracts to be legally binding. The UKJT is one of 6 taskforces under the Law Tech Delivery Panel (LTDP), a government–backed … Read more
Last week, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport issued a Call for Views on the certification scheme currently anticipated by Regulation (EU) 2019/881 (the Cybersecurity Act) after Brexit. The closing date for responses has been extended to 15 October 2019. In the issued document, the UK Government proposes to maintain “a close relationship with the EU … Read more
