The Algorithms of the Digital Economy between Intellectual Property and Workers' Rights

July 6, 2021

The complex relationship between legal rules and economics has been known for some time.

“Already in 1933 Sinzheimer underlined the close link between labor law and economic health; and he observed how the worldwide storm of that period, with an 'economic cemetery of structural unemployment', affected labor law in a more violent way than the other branches of law ”. Indeed, it is an area in which the changes to the rules of the game have enormous cascading effects on the lives of masses of workers: a legal change to wages or working hours would have (and had) disruptive effects.

The theme of this focus is the phenomenon of "black boxes", partly due to the popular "feedback system" that many digital platforms use to collect data on user satisfaction with the goods or services rendered: given that an algorithm, to certain elementary conditions, it is an intellectual work, the claim to know its precise functioning can be frustrated by the refusal of the company that owns the algorithm to make some parts of it public. Under these conditions, various labor law principles appear inapplicable and obsolete.