Volume 9, Issue 3 - Special Issue: 14th Annual AsLEA Conference on August 16 and 17, 2018 in Singapore at the Singapore Academy of Law

This paper argues that the “necessity of protection” should be seriously considered when evaluating the effect of misrepresentation, but a substantial criterion or a formal standard with rebuttable and substantial exception is recommended. The weakness of insured is a key characteristic in insurance law. This feature leads to the typical idea that the insured should deserve more protection in insurance contract. However, the necessity of protection may vary in different types of insurance and occasions. Thus, many jurisdictions use consumer or business insurance, sophisticated or unsophisticated insured and similar standard to differentiate the levels of protection for insured. For misrepresentation, one of the most important issue in insurance law, many jurisdictions also use this criterion in designing misrepresentation’s elements and consequences. This paper aims to find justification for this standard theoretically and empirically for Taiwan. The paper starts with the general discussion for distinguishing consumer insurance and business insurance. Then, the focus will be moved on to misrepresentation, especially about the distinction between consumer insurance and business insurance, and its effect on misrepresentation’s elements and consequences. Afterwards, this paper argues the inefficiency of the bright-rule for evaluating the necessity of protection and the distinction between business insurance and consumer insurance. Empirical evidence is also provided to assess the effects of elements in Taiwan. Finally, the study proposes that a substantial criterion or a bright-line rule which can be rebutted by substantial evidence may be a more proper and efficient model.

This article examines the effects of compensation system in the dispute resolution of securities false statement. Firstly, this paper develops an evolutionary game model to analyze the evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) of the dispute resolution. Then, we analyze the factor which influence the choice of the parties from an economics perspective. Expected compensation and expected systemic risk are more influential to the decision of the parties by derivation. Moreover, we test the theoretical deduction with statistics description of the private securities litigation in China. In conclusion, the irrational expectation of the litigation income, which influences the strategy selection of the parties and results in more lawsuits.

It is an undeniable fact that artificial intelligence has been developed up until the point that it requires a very minimum human involvement. In other words, the current development has brought an Autonomous Intelligent System (AIS) into reality. On one hand, an AIS plays a significant role in creating easier life for human being. On the other hand, however, AIS’ existence creates too much challenge for the current legal framework. In the realm of Copyright law, the very fundamental question is based on the fact that AIS can create copyrightable works on its own. It can create songs, music, paintings, or even a cook-book. In such kind of circumstances, scholars have a thought-provoking debate on whether or not AIS shall be given Copyright. It is the purpose of my research to take a look into Indonesia’s current Copyright Act to analyse (i) to what extent Indonesia’s Copyright Act can be utilised to accommodate AIS and (ii) the aspects of Copyright Act need to be improved in order to accommodate AIS in the Indonesia’s Copyright Act. In order to address the research objectives, I use normative approach by way of literature study. The temporary data gathered from my literature study is then analysed qualitatively in order to reach desirable conclusion. This study finds that (i) there is a very minimum provision with regard to AIS in the Indonesia’s Copyright Act. There have been stipulations to determine who shall be entitled to hold copyright upon a creation. However, there has not been any stipulations allowing the possibility for AIS to be regarded as copyright holder; and therefore (ii) the re-design of Indonesia’s Copyright Act need to accommodate the issues of (a) copyrightability of AIS’ work, (b) the moral rights and economic rights given to AIS, as well as (c) the duration of protection if AIS is to be regarded as a copyright holder.

This article explores the board independence of listed companies in the US and China – an ongoing and important issue of corporate governance concerning the true independence of independent directors from management in both countries. It aims to identify what elements have an impact on board independence and examine how these influence the independence of independent directors. Four elements, independence from management; dependence on shareholders; access to information; and incentive to monitor, may have a substantial influence on board independence and align with the in-fact independence of independent directors. This article examines how and why these four elements have an impact on the effectiveness of the role of independent directors in monitoring top management and lead to independent directors failing to be truly independent of management. To support this argument, this article also investigates the efficiency and effectiveness of independent directors serving as a governance mechanism in terms of board independence in Chinese listed companies. The aim was therefore to scrutinise whether independent directors in Chinese listed companies are truly independent from management. Based on statistics calculated on data collected from CSMAR, there appears to be little evidence that independent directors serve as a governance mechanism in monitoring top management in Chinese listed companies, which thus shows that independent directors are not independent in China. The implications arising from this article are that solutions addressing the four elements that have an impact on board independence will enable independent directors to become truly independent.

Most economic theories on patent pools focus exclusively on patent owners’ licensing practices in explaining why patent owners voluntarily form a patent pool. Such an approach ignores the “property” root of patents. Judge Posner emphasized the importance of using economic theories on physical properties to analyze intellectual properties. Led by this spirit, I applied the evolutionary theory of property rights, formulated by Chicago School economist Harold Demsetz, to analyze the formation of patent pools. Demsetz’s theory posits that a transition in property rights structures results from interacting parties’ efforts to maximize utilities in face of changes in external factors that bear on the parties’ benefit-cost calculation. Later studies by various property rights economists have found that the existence of externalities, the cost of enforcing the right to exclude, and the economy of scale can respectively change the benefit-cost calculation of property owners/users, and drive property rights structures towards either privatization or deprivatization. I argued that the formation of patent pools can be understood as deprivatization of patents – a transition from a private property system to a commons system – in response to three phenomena in the patent system: complementary patents, high costs of enforcing patent rights, and excessive patent fragmentation. When transaction costs of patent pooling are outweighed by its benefits, we can expect to see more patent pools being established.