NAVIGATING THE (LEGAL) CHALLENGES OF THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ERA - Intellectual Property, Competition Law and Corporate Law

Artificial Intelligence (AI) constitutes one of the most transformative technologies of the present era. Its capacity to generate novel content, process vast quantities of data, and progressively enhance performance through autonomous learning is reshaping markets, governance structures, and social practices alike. As AI systems increasingly permeate corporate decision-making, consumer markets, research, education, and cultural production, they offer unprecedented opportunities for innovation while simultaneously raising fundamental regulatory, ethical, and legal challenges. The European Union has assumed a pioneering role in this field, seeking to construct a comprehensive regulatory architecture for digital technologies. Not only the EU has recently issued the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), which introduces a risk-based framework for AI development and deployment, but such Regulation had been preceded by the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) to address platform responsibility and market concentration. Together, these instruments signal an ambitious attempt to ensure that the development of AI and other digital technologies occurs in a manner consistent with fundamental rights, democratic values, and the principles preserving fair competition in the internal market. The present volume assembles contributions from a distinguished group of scholars, which attempt to investigate how law and policy are responding to the multifaceted disruptions brought about by AI. As the challenges posed by AI are manifold even just with regard to law, this book has decided to restrict the perimeter to the area which can be broadly defined as commercial law: meaning a variety of issues involving at various level individuals, namely authors and inventors, and companies in and of themselves as well as in their interactions with competitors acting in the (not only digital) market. The book will begin with intellectual property issues, which involves both authors and companies, to then move to industrial property ones, concerning more specifically companies but also consumers, to then turn to competition law and eventually conclude with corporate law.