Spring in central Vienna (Dog included).

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NSFW

This week’s song is “Last two Lovers” from “Bonaparte”. After several years of silence, the band will give a few concerts in Berlin and also one in Klagenfurt this summer. As I learned from Wikipedia, the style is called “Visual Trash Punk”, but, frankly speaking, I don’t know what this is - but I like the Lo-Fi sound.

And the music video is - just precisely - how one would expect this to be: Nirvana, Billie Eilish and Soap and Skin - all united.

Retrospect

Women in Law

The Women in Law Conference held a very relevant and very well attended Workshop on “Women´s Health: From the Gender Data Gap to Data Mining” in our seminar room.

I was very proud that Klaudia from the department was among the speakers and I learned a lot: for example, that Malta is the European country in which women have the highest expactation of healthy years of life, that endometriosis is a disease still unknown to one third of the population, that there was hardly any data on menstruation in Austria available before the report on menstruation health 2024 and on the consequences that the average health data subject is a healthy, wealthy white man.

BBMRI-Podcast

The BBMRI-Podcast on AI and Biobanking was published this week.

Brigitte Kromp

Brigitte Kromp, one of the pioneers in the Austrian Open Access movement, was celebrated with a big party in UNIVIE’s Sky-Lounge.

I know her well because of her - again pioneering - work to represent universities and libraries in negotiations with major publishers on AI-clauses in licencing contracts - a tremendously complex and important copyright topic. She’s an outstandingly competent and nice expert and person so that it was no wonder that more than 100 people showed up to see her on a Friday afternoon, including several vice-rectors.

Brussels

As I was in Brussels most parts of this week, I visited (as a tourist) the European Parliament, in particular the info hub and the hemicycle.

Some impressions: It’s difficult to get in. You need to register online first with lots of personal data to be provided, you need to understand which different kinds of tours are available, book a free slot, identify yourself either with an ID card or a passport, driving licence doesn’t suffice, no exceptions, then pass a security guard like at an airport. Once you are in, you get a small audio/video device and can visit, inter alia, an exhibition with some explanations and the (in my case: empty) plenary hall that is remarkably ‘functional’. But everyone was very friendly. And the tours have a Facebook-Site, an Instagram-Profile and a hashtag: #visitep with one single (rather strange) entry on Bluesky:

Brussels is (as always), sorry to say, stressful and even somehow dysfunctional. Construction works everywhere, spreading dust everywhere, garbage in every corner as everybody puts their trash simply on the street (how can it be that this never changes?), poverty all around, homeless people sleeping on the stairs to metro stations with hundreds needing to step over them, urine smell in every single tunnel (and elsewhere), drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution at every train station, EU-staff warning you that you shouldn’t wear an entry-badge outside the EU-buildings as this identifies you as a robbery target, and so on.

But many intense discussions with dear colleagues on current research in my field were worth the trip.

Berlin

I interrupted Brussels for a trip to Berlin for Datenschutzkongress on Wednesday - which is an event really worth a journey that was so kind to have me as the day 2 moderator again.

Elke Schneider and her team did -again - an excellent job in organising this.

© Handelsblatt / Dietmar Gust Fotografie

There’s some coverage on LinkedIn (here, here, here, here, here) with more images, also with old friends from Hannover (Prof. Dr. Fabian Schmieder, Jonathan Stoklas and Dr. Nils Haag).

© Fabian Schmieder

It was a kind of “TikTok for adults. But smart” conference, each presentation had 20 minutes so that the day provided a very large amount of input and diverse views to digest. I was, in particular, impressed by a statement given in full public by someone who knows about such things by profession that Signal “calls home”.

On the trivia side I learned that nothing identifies you as efficiently as a stubborn old man as wearing a tie nowadays. As the New Your Times put it in 2023 already: “Neckties have been out of fashion for so long that even articles about neckties being out of fashion have gone out of fashion.” Ties are extinguished, I am more or less the only one still wearing them at formal occasions. Not even corporate lawyers have them any longer, the new uniform is (again and still) a grey or blue suit with open shirt and, mostly, sneakers that absolutely need to be white. The style reminds me of the business uniform Microsoft staff had to wear at CeBIT 2008.

The list of topics discussed during the day reflects somehow the changes in the role of data protection, data protection officers and data protection lawyers. There is more and more about Data Act, EHDS, Cyber Resilience Act and, of course, AI Act on the agenda. I was in particular intrigued by the cybersecurity related presentations and also delivered a speech on this with a rant on the lack of resilience in the public sector and the importance of information warfare. One of the examples I chose was the fact that the European Network Security Agency ENISA sees the need to clarify that they have nothing to do with the power outage in Portugal/Spain

and a Tweet by Alex Jones spreading the absurdity that Macron, Starmer and Merz were consuming cocaine together

needed to be denied on Tagesschau.

Prospect

Günther Winkler Memorial

One of Austria’s leading figures in public law, Günher Winkler, passed away in 2024. Winkler was not only outstandingly influential, not to the least because of assistants such as Christoph Grabenwarter, Peter Kostelka, Jörg Haider, etc., in Austrian constitutional law, but is also known as the mastermind behind the building Juridicum.

On Monday, May 19th, there is a memorial symposium at Juridicum to honor him in both roles.

Free entry, registration required.

#arsboni

Two seessions are ahead of us next week.

On Tuesday, Claudia Garád from Wikimedia/Wikipedia will help us to understand the impact of Trump and the current (legal) attacks on free knowledge. Garád is CEO of Wikimedia Austria.

On Wednesday, Sabine Matejka, judge and former president auf Austria’s Judges Association, will be in the Vienna Legal Literacy Project’s Podcast “Recht freundlich” that I have the honor to support technically.

Look and Feel

Karl Schnetzinger Exhibition

Karl Schnetzinger is an painter I deeply admire. His work has been accompanying me for 30 years now and still I find something new in his images every day. He is currently exhibiting at “Kunst im Raum - Galerie im ersten Stock” in Mödling and I had the privilege to attend the opening.

© Birgit Forgó-Feldner

The exhibition is open until May 25 and really worth a visit. There is so much (new) light in his pictures.

Freiheit de Luxe

It must be an annoying part of an artist’s life to do all the promotional stuff that is needed today for selling a book or an album or a personality. Much admired Sophie Hunger is currently in this process for her book “Walzer für niemand”. Some of these events are rather bad (such as the really, excuse my French, “boring” interview in “Willkommen Österreich” (“Bist du eine, die gern gut essen geht”?), enriched with a “medley” of her music that sounds as if it was made by a deaf randomizer, some of them are OK (like this one where she outperforms Harald Schmidt, 13 years ago), some are outstandingly nice. This precious episode of Freiheit de Luxe falls in the last category.

It’s a feminist, political, sensitive talk about art, politics and - interestingly - law. Hunger - like many non-lawyers, I am afraid - is much more optimistic than many legal professionals on how the law can make the world a better place. Jagoda Marinić has an interview style that works very well here.

I will read the book now

and want to recommend - again and again - to listen to her, in particular when things get rough.

Daisy

© Birgit Forgó-Feldner

likes the grass growing everywhere now.

Have a wonderful week!

Kind regards

Nikolaus (Forgó)

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