When the Bavarian Academy of Sciences convenes its members and selected guests for its annual session in the pre-Christmas season, this event traditionally takes on a very solemn character. In the exclusive setting of the Hercules Hall in the Munich Residence, the proceedings do not only revolve around the 260-year history of the non-university research institution. With the quantum technology research of the Leibniz Computing Center, the Walther Meißner Institute for Low Temperature Research as part of Bavaria's high-tech agenda, and the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt), founded in 2018, the Academy is also playing a leading role on topics that matter for the future. "The academy looks back on a venerable history and at the same time pursues research on major issues concerning the future", the Bavarian Science Minister Bernd Sibler summarized this year in his welcoming address to the members of the Academy and the invited guests.
This December, the academic lecture - traditionally one of the highlights of the agenda - was dedicated to digital transformation. Professor Josef Drexl, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition and a member of the Academy since 2010, spoke about the legal challenges arising from data-driven business models.
Digitization is not only fundamentally changing the economy and society. New technological developments also present challenges to existing law. "The liberal and democratic society faces the major task of regaining its own values in the face of technological, economic and social change to rethink and reorganize the relationship between the state, the economy and citizens", Josef Drexl set as a basic thesis in the center of his talk.
Against the backdrop of three examples – the protests against the recent EU copyright reform, the discussion about the introduction of data ownership and the challenges competition law is confronted with in the digital sector – he showed that the existing instruments of market regulation are often no longer suitable to solve the modern problems of the digital economy without taking into account the fundamental rights of citizens, in particular the right to data protection.
In his lecture, the Director at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition also made clear that currently all countries in the world have to make a decision on the status of their citizens' fundamental rights, not least with regard to the functioning of democracy in the future. In this context, he clearly rejected the one-dimensional characterization of data protection as an obstacle to digital innovation that would impair Europe’s competitiveness especially in comparison to the USA and China. "It would be wrong to see the protection of personal data as a one-sided obstacle to innovation. It sets the standards how to deal with data in the digital age. At the same time, it creates the necessary incentives for digital innovations that are needed to make data protection technically possible”, said Josef Drexl in the Munich Residence.
The complete academic lecture can be found here
You can listen to the lecture in the podcast