Title: REPLY ANGELOS YANNOPOULOS:

Reply Angelos Yannopoulos:

Introductory remarks – perspective of this reply

This reply is written from a mixed perspective. The background of the author is in engineering, but the two main papers in this deliverable come from the area of legal philosophy and legal theory, which makes a purely engineering reply nonsensical. Thus, this author will at times “philosophise about legal theory”, without claiming to actually contribute expert legal philosophy. Rather, this text is just a “thinking man’s” response to the stimulating discussion of the document’s first two papers. As it happens, though, this specific (hopefully) “thinking man” has a technical background in the technological area whose legal and social implications are the topic of this deliverable. Two weaknesses of this text must be stressed up front: first, this author’s background does not allow him to always use well-tuned legal terminology, nor make references to other work, research and theory from the main area of this deliverable’s scope; secondly, the first part of this reply aims to ring a warning bell by highlighting an important problem that has been glossed over by the main papers of this document – as a result, this text plays the role of devil’s advocate and therefore makes no effort to be optimistic or politically correct.