Digital sandboxes for growth – Newspaper Kommersant No. 190 (7391) of 10/13/2022

The White House proposes to significantly change the law on experimental legal regimes in the field of digital innovation (EPR, “regulatory sandboxes”) – this is a tool that allows businesses to implement new technologies in practice. Thus, it is planned to introduce into the law a norm that would require experiment participants to agree in advance on who owns the rights to the results of using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, as well as to insure civil liability for causing harm to life, health or property of citizens and companies. Experts call the changes sensitive and talk about the need to strike a balance that promotes the safe testing of new technologies.

The Ministry of Economy published on regulation.gov.ru a draft amendment to the federal law on experimental legal regimes (EPR, “digital sandboxes”). The EPR law itself allows the government to give companies participating in experiments in a certain territory the right to temporarily deviate from existing legislation in order to introduce innovative technologies. The proposed changes, as conceived by the developers, are designed to improve the mechanisms for using EPR and take into account a number of presidential instructions to regulate the circulation of intellectual property created with the participation of AI.

One of these innovations is the possibility of including in the EPR program the requirement for state registration by participants in the experiment of the results of intellectual activity obtained using AI technologies. Now the law does not have a clear answer to whom they should belong – to the software developer, the owner of the databases that are processed by AI, or the user of AI technology, the Ministry of Economy explained, the requirement from the participants to agree on the registration of such rights even before the experiment will avoid subsequent legal conflicts.

The Ministry of Economy also proposes to extend to cases of “use of solutions created with the use of AI technologies”, the opportunity to require participants in experiments to insure civil liability for harm to life, health or property of individuals and legal entities. As explained in the ministry, the increased requirements are due to new risks posed by testing AI technologies. As an example, the ministry cites an ongoing experiment in the operation of highly automated vehicles, where AI technologies are directly used: “The owner of such a vehicle, in addition to the OSAGO contract, is obliged to insure and maintain the risk of liability for obligations arising from causing harm to life, health or property of other persons, in the amount of 10 million rubles. for each robotic machine.

The draft law also contains a number of requirements providing for the mitigation of excessive rigidity in the selection of EPR participants. Thus, the Ministry of Economy proposes to remove restrictions on the possibility of special regulation of legal relations that have arisen in connection with the proposed introduction of goods, works and services with limited use into circulation. The current regulations prohibit this, which creates risks for the establishment of some EPRs, including those related to the sale of prescription drugs, individual batches of agricultural plants, breeding products (material).

In particular, in the field of electronic commerce in prescription drugs, the Ministry of Economy proposes a rather original move: since now a direct experiment on its organization within the framework of the EPR is impossible, since “regulatory sandboxes” do not allow work with high risks to the life and health of citizens, the ministry wants to conduct an experiment to study these risks and minimize them, and, based on its results, to discuss the launch of such trading within the framework of the EPR.

Another of the “liberal” proposals is to retain in the law the requirement to provide a certificate of no criminal record only for the initiator of the EPR. Now this document is required from all top managers of all companies participating in the experiment. The number of such certificates in practice can exceed several dozen, depending on the number of initiators of the experiment, which “delays the procedure for establishing an EPR,” the department complains.

“Of course, such changes are sensitive, since the regulation of EPR should be aimed primarily at expanding the areas of development, testing and implementation of digital innovations. Therefore, it is necessary to maintain a sound balance that will contribute to the safe testing of new technologies for the convenience of the lives of citizens in our country,” says Dmitry Ter-Stepanov, deputy head of the ANO Tsifrovaya ekonomika. According to him, the project takes into account many of the proposals previously made by the business community and will be discussed at the next meeting of the profile working group of the ANO.

Venera Petrova, Oleg Sapozhkov