Public Administration and Law Review

Artificial Intelligence Regulation and Intellectual Property Governance: The EU AI Act, the DSM Copyright Directive, and Ukraine’s Two-Stage Harmonisation Path

2025-12-31T18:11:19+02:00

The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence is reshaping how intellectual outputs are created, disseminated, and enforced, while exposing intellectual property systems to new risks related to training data, automated infringement, and platform power. At the same time, emerging regulatory models increasingly treat AI not only as a technology, but also as a governance object linked to fundamental rights and market integrity. This article analyses how the European Union’s AI Act and the Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive jointly reframe intellectual property governance, and how Ukraine’s two-stage regulatory roadmap operationalises European alignment under conditions of accelerated digital transformation. The study applies doctrinal legal analysis, comparative analysis of EU instruments, and structured policy mapping of national implementation measures. It also integrates selected international statistics on IP system scale and enforcement pressure to contextualise governance choices. The findings show that the AI Act’s risk-based architecture strengthens IP governance indirectly through transparency and provider obligations, while the DSM Directive supplies the core legal logic for text and data mining boundaries and rights reservations. Ukraine’s roadmap prioritises pre-regulatory capacity building through soft-law instruments, sandboxes, human-rights impact methodologies, and labelling tools, followed by adoption of a national AI law aligned with EU requirements. Empirical indicators of institutional readiness suggest that staged implementation can support governance credibility when coupled with interoperable complaint-handling mechanisms and evidence-oriented documentation. Future studies should evaluate enforcement outcomes of AI transparency duties, measure compliance costs for rights holders and AI developers, and test the effectiveness of machine-readable rights reservation and dataset summary mechanisms in cross-border disputes.

Blockchain Enabled Governance of Intellectual Property: Evidentiary Integrity, Licensing Automation, and Enforcement Design

2025-12-31T18:10:41+02:00

Intellectual property governance faces pressure from platform fragmentation, growing volumes of digital works, and persistent counterfeiting. Blockchain is proposed as infrastructure for evidentiary certainty and transactional transparency, but its legal value depends on governance and doctrinal fit. This article examines how blockchain can strengthen intellectual property protection and rights management across copyright, patents, and trademarks, and identifies conditions under which blockchain records and smart contract licensing can be relied upon. The study applies doctrinal analysis and comparative review of international guidance and public sector practice, supported by desk research of empirical and statistical reports. Use cases are systematized along the intellectual property lifecycle, and legal design requirements are derived for evidence, licensing, and enforcement. Findings show that blockchain is most effective for timestamped integrity records, auditable chains of title, registry synchronization, and conditional automation of licensing performance. However, blockchain does not establish originality, inventiveness, or authorship identity without trusted attestations and off chain documentation. Smart contracts can reduce transaction costs but may intensify legal risk when code diverges from intent, requiring transparent terms, remedies, and human readable disclosures, especially where NFTs create confusion about rights transfer. Future work should test interoperability models between intellectual property offices and private registries, evaluate evidentiary standards in litigation, assess privacy trade offs and data minimization, and develop sector specific governance for licensing metadata, audits, and correction of erroneous on chain records, and examine compliance with consumer protection, data protection, and cross border enforcement cooperation mechanisms.

Trade Secret Protection in Corporate Information Flows: From “Reasonable Steps” to Evidence-Ready Digital Governance

2025-12-31T18:13:34+02:00

Corporate information flows have become the primary environment in which economically valuable knowledge is created, refined, exchanged, and stored, increasingly via cloud collaboration and multi-platform work practices. As a result, many high-value intangibles are protected less by registration and more by sustained confidentiality governance that can be proven in dispute settings. This article develops an evidence-oriented governance model for protecting trade secrets in corporate information flows by translating legal protectability criteria into lifecycle controls, role responsibilities, and remedy-ready documentation. The study applies doctrinal analysis of trade secret standards under TRIPS and the EU Trade Secrets Directive, complemented by a structured review of governance-oriented guidance on “reasonable steps” and by synthesis with contemporary cybersecurity governance frameworks. We then map legal elements to operational controls, define an evidence readiness pack, and contextualize the model with recent threat and breach-cost statistics. The results show that trade secret enforceability depends on continuity of controls across the information lifecycle, not on isolated legal declarations. The strongest operational posture combines: legal routing and asset tiering, least-privilege access and controlled sharing pathways, third-party boundary controls, and incident-time legal hold and reproducible proof artifacts. Empirical indicators underscore scale pressure: the global average cost of a data breach reached USD 4.88 million in 2024, while compromised credentials remained a major initial access vector in recent breach datasets. Future research should validate sector-specific indicator sets against incident datasets, test which evidence artifacts most influence remedy outcomes, and examine how AI-enabled workflows reshape confidentiality boundaries and “reasonable steps” expectations.

Hybrid Governance of Intellectual Property in the Digital Age: Aligning Law, Platforms, AI, and Blockchain for Effective Protection

2025-12-31T18:11:51+02:00

Accelerated digitalisation is reshaping how intellectual property is created, exploited, and protected, while exposing the limits of classical doctrines, especially territoriality and conventional enforcement models. Platform markets, data-intensive business models, AI-enabled replication, and distributed technologies amplify cross-border circulation of protected subject matter and increase the evidentiary and cybersecurity burdens placed on rights holders and institutions. The study aims to develop a governance-oriented model of IP protection in the digital environment that integrates legal harmonisation, platform accountability, cybersecurity safeguards, and the conditional use of emerging technologies such as blockchain, smart contracts, and AI-enabled detection. The article applies formal-legal and comparative analysis of European and international instruments, complemented by system-structural mapping of the IP lifecycle to connect platform and AI vulnerabilities with governance controls such as authentication, auditability, interoperability, and remedies.Secondary statistics are used to contextualise scale and enforcement pressure. The results show that the most destabilising effect of digitisation is institutional: disputes increasingly depend on evidence quality, platform procedures, and security posture rather than on doctrinal entitlement alone. Blockchain contributes most reliably when treated as evidentiary and administrative infrastructure, because timestamping and hashing support integrity markers but do not prove authorship or lawful entitlement without identity, provenance, and reproducible verification.NFTs are not rights-transfer mechanisms absent explicit licensing or assignment terms. Effective digital-age IP protection requires a hybrid governance model combining procedural clarity, institution-building, cybersecurity maturity, and carefully scoped technology deployment. Future studies should test admissibility pathways for blockchain-supported evidence, evaluate interoperability designs for registries and platforms, and measure error and remedy performance in automated enforcement pipelines.

Information Security and Long-Term Digital Preservation in Public Governance: Regulatory Alignment, Archival Integrity, and Technology Choices

2025-12-31T18:12:26+02:00

Digital transformation has turned information into a strategic resource of public governance, where administrative legitimacy and service continuity depend on secure electronic document management and resilient state information infrastructures. The central challenge is not only operational uptime, but also the legal validity, integrity, and evidentiary sustainability of electronic records across their lifecycle. The file emphasises that information security in public administration must be treated as a multidimensional governance phenomenon that integrates legal regulation, institutional arrangements, organisational procedures, technical safeguards, and the human factor. The objective is to substantiate a governance framework that strengthens information security and long-term digital preservation of official e-documents by aligning legal requirements with standards-based controls and technology architecture choices. The study uses integrated qualitative analysis combining formal-legal systematisation of e-document circulation requirements with comparative mapping to international standards and EU-aligned instruments. It also applies threat-informed reasoning to connect governance prescriptions with dominant incident patterns, and criteria-based evaluation of preservation architectures focused on evidentiary integrity, interoperability, and long-horizon validation. The results identify a comprehensive threat set for public e-document ecosystems, including theft, interception, modification, unauthorised use, disruption, destruction, concealment of socially significant information, and unlawful handling of personal data. These risks arise from mixed failure modes, such as external intrusion, insider misuse, governance gaps, and weak coordination, so effective protection requires combined procedural and technical controls, especially identity and access management, cryptography, monitoring, and documented custody rules. The file further shows that long-term preservation is a distinct capability problem because evidentiary value must survive cryptographic change and tool turnover; blockchain can support registry integrity, yet it is unsuitable as a long-horizon archival substrate beyond ten years due to legal and technical risks. Public-sector record protection should be implemented as a unified security and preservation governance system grounded in auditable procedures and interoperable repositories. Future work should test models for renewing long-term validation, evaluate interoperability performance of repository architectures, and assess hybrid designs linking registry event integrity to archival preservation with reproducible verification.

Psychological Mechanisms Linking Corruption and Academic Integrity in Universities: A Multi-Level Behavioural Governance Framework

2025-12-31T18:16:44+02:00

Universities operate as learning communities, labour markets, and public institutions, therefore integrity failures rarely remain limited to individual behaviour. Corruption in higher education includes bribery for admission or grades, favouritism and nepotism, conflicts of interest, procurement fraud, and informal exchanges, while academic integrity concerns fairness and honesty in assessment, research, and professional formation. These phenomena share enabling conditions such as weak transparency, discretionary power without oversight, normalised rationalisations, and low perceived likelihood of consequences, which makes them mutually reinforcing rather than separate problems. The study formulates a behavioural governance explanation of how corruption and academic dishonesty interact through psychological mechanisms and institutional vulnerabilities. An integrative conceptual synthesis maps psychological mechanisms to core university risk domains, including assessment, admissions, supervision, hiring, procurement, and research evaluation. It then organises risk and protective factors across individual, peer, organisational, and system levels to derive implementable and auditable governance levers. The analysis identifies a shared behavioural architecture built from moral cognition, perceived descriptive norms, and opportunity structures. Moral disengagement lowers self-sanctions and legitimises wrongdoing through justifications that reframe bribery, favouritism, plagiarism, or cheating as necessary responses to pressure and perceived unfairness. Norm beliefs operate as accelerators because expectations that misconduct is widespread and rewarded increase willingness to violate rules. Sector indicators strengthen the risk rationale: 41% of respondents globally perceive their national education sector as corrupt or extremely corrupt, and more than 60% of university students report cheating in some form. Future studies should test the framework with mixed methods, quantify how norm-correction and procedural justice interventions affect misconduct rates, and evaluate how governance maturity moderates outcomes across institutional and cultural contexts.

Rebalancing Welfare for Better Living: How State Social Policy Shapes Quality of Life Through International Experience

2025-12-31T18:13:00+02:00

Quality of life is increasingly used as a benchmark of state performance because societies evaluate governments through health, security, dignity, and opportunity, not only through growth indicators. The analysed text conceptualises social policy as a resilience infrastructure that stabilises households during shocks and invests in long-term capabilities through services and inclusion measures. In this framing, quality of life combines objective conditions, such as income, housing, and access to care, with subjective evaluations, including perceived security and life satisfaction. The policy challenge is that comparable fiscal effort can produce different outcomes when governance capacity, targeting accuracy, and service quality diverge. The objective is to assess how state social policy shapes quality of life and to clarify the main pathways through which transfers and services affect living standards, opportunity, and social cohesion. The study applies comparative synthesis and uses descriptive indicators from international datasets to contextualise welfare effort, coverage, and outcomes. It also incorporates an illustrative national case that uses counterfactual estimation to show how poverty would change without social benefits, supporting a mechanism-based interpretation of impact. Results indicate four interlinked channels: income security, access to essential services, opportunity formation, and cohesion. Global data show that slightly more than half of the world’s population is covered by at least one social protection benefit, implying large inclusion gaps. In high-income welfare systems, public social spending averages around one-fifth of GDP, but levels vary substantially. The national illustration demonstrates that social benefits can shift poverty and extreme poverty rates markedly, and that removing them would substantially worsen deprivation. Social policy improves quality of life most reliably when protection and services are coordinated and when opportunity-oriented measures complement cash transfers. Future research should estimate causal effects of policy design, examine trust and administrative capacity as mediators, and compare long-run outcomes across welfare regimes and crisis periods.

EU Data Governance, AI Ethics, and Responsible Digitalisation in Higher Education: A Compliance–Capability Framework for Universities

2025-12-31T18:16:11+02:00

Higher education institutions function as complex data ecosystems that simultaneously act as data holders, data users, and data intermediaries across teaching, research, and administration. This complexity makes EU data governance and responsible AI directly relevant to universities because compliance increasingly depends on organisational capability linked to fundamental rights protection, cybersecurity resilience, and market integrity. Sector scale amplifies risk because routine administrative errors, biased automated decisions, or weak access control can produce cumulative harm and erode institutional trust. The objective of this abstract is to formulate a compliance–capability framework that aligns EU data governance instruments with AI ethics and responsible digitalisation requirements and translates them into implementable institutional mechanisms. The study applies qualitative policy and legal analysis through doctrinal mapping of the EU regulatory stack relevant to universities, including the GDPR, the Data Governance Act, the Data Act, and the AI Act. It synthesises trustworthy AI ethics frameworks and integrates descriptive indicators on cross-border mobility, digital skills, and cyber risk to support risk-based governance design. Criteria-based institutional design reasoning is used to connect legal duties to governance roles, evidence artefacts, and monitoring indicators across the data and AI lifecycle. Results show that universities face overlapping duties because a single workflow may combine personal data processing, research data sharing, learning analytics, and AI-supported decision support. The GDPR remains foundational, while the Data Governance Act structures trusted reuse, the Data Act addresses fair access, and the AI Act introduces risk-based transparency, oversight, and AI literacy expectations. Further research should test interoperability models for research data sharing and measure how maturity in training and oversight reduces rights violations and incident rates.

Operational Intellectual Property Governance for EU Game Developers: A Reputation-Oriented, Evidence-Based Model for Cross-Border Enforcement

2025-12-31T18:34:41+02:00

EU game developers increasingly operate in platform-mediated markets where distribution, community management, merchandising, and monetisation are inseparable from governance. In this environment, intellectual property is not only a legal perimeter but also an asset, a consumer trust signal, and an organisational capability that must be demonstrated through repeatable controls and measurable outcomes. The risk context is structural rather than episodic, as counterfeit and pirated trade is estimated at about USD 467 billion in 2021, around 2.3% of global imports, which intensifies cross-border brand abuse pressures. The aim of this study is to design an evidence-based operational model for EU game studios that embeds IP governance into reputation and compliance scoring, links legal requirements to measurable indicators, and enables scalable enforcement through platform routing and standardised evidence packs. The study applies qualitative doctrinal and policy analysis combined with operational design reasoning. It maps enforcement baselines to monitoring, takedown, litigation readiness, and confidentiality preservation, then builds an indicator architecture from asset and rights inventories to prevention, detection, and response metrics. Scoring combines an ordinal maturity rubric for governance indicators with normalised quantitative metrics to control for scale effects and to preserve cross-jurisdiction comparability. The model translates abstract reputation drivers into auditable IP signals and shows that IP becomes reputationally meaningful when measured as stable, trackable performance. It delivers a core indicator dictionary that reduces subjectivity by specifying definitions and evidence expectations, strengthening enforcement readiness and due diligence credibility. The framework also provides a time-sequenced incident response playbook that aligns evidence preservation, platform routing, and communication actions to support trust recovery after IP crises. Future studies should validate the scoring system against real incident outcomes, test calibration choices across jurisdictions, and assess whether improved evidence readiness measurably reduces recurrence and accelerates takedown cycle times.