Latest blog articles

What was promised by the GDPR (Art. 80 and Rec. 142) is now a reality! 

This blog post is part of a collaborative education project on social media and platform governance undertaken by Prof. Nicolo Zingales (Fundação Getulio Vargas), Thales Bertaglia (Studio Europa/Institute of Data Science, UM) and Dr. Catalina Goanta (UM).

What does the term ‘MOCCA’ evoke in your mind, a kind of coffee or a specific brand? This Kat randomly asked this question to her friends currently at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition Munich. Most of them regarded ‘MOCCA’ as a kind of coffee instead of a specific brand except...

Over the last years, the business of influencer marketing has practically exploded. Companies have begun to realise the multiplying factor of having influencers promote their brand through original and entertaining content. However, in combination with this marketing trend, several legal issues have...

Patent aggregation is one of the critical paths to raise revenue and earn a return on investment in the ICT sector. It comprises all activities whereby firms build sets of related patents, so-called patent portfolios, and subsequently use these beyond manufacturing. Different kinds of entities...

Monographs and law review articles are legal sources that can be better studied and understood by dissecting (Lat. dissecare) or “cutting” them into seven pieces. Looking carefully at those pieces–as when dissecting organisms in biological sciences–can help researchers to work with sources...

Geographical indications (hereinafter GIs) are signs used to safeguard the existence of a link between a product and its place of origin, focusing on quality and tradition. 

For more than 40 years now, the harmonisation and unification of the European patent law have been discussed. So far, the only European legal instrument regulating substantive patent matters is a European Patent Convention (EPC) signed in 1973. The EPC, however, is outside the EU’s legislative and...

Survey on the Maastricht University Data Protection as a Corporate Social Responsibility (UM DPCSR) Icons Version 1.0 to facilitate users’ understanding of how their data is used.

Maastricht University is proud of its international character, and I am too. It is the most international university in (the small country) the Netherlands. Its teaching and research programs touch upon many European and global issues. Given this profile, travelling by staff and students was common...