Professor Guido Noto La Diega

Law

Contact

Personal statement

An award-winning Italy-born naturalised British law academic with a passion for the law of emerging technologies, Professor Guido Noto La Diega (they/he) is a Professor of Law, Technology and Innovation and Programme Leader of the LLM/MSc Law, Technology, and Innovation at the University of Strathclyde's School of Law in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, where they mentor an excellent team carrying out pioneering research at the intersection of law, technology, and innovation.

Appointed directly by the Principal of the University through the Global Talent Acquisition Programme, Noto La Diega brings to Strathclyde an internationally recognised expertise is in the European, Italian, and British legal and regulatory approaches to Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, cloud computing, robotics, and blockchain. Their work is animated by the conviction that the law should steer innovation in a socially just, inclusive, and sustainable direction.

Holder of a PhD (Unipa), a postdoc (QMUL), and an HEA Fellowship, Noto La Diega is the author of the groundbreaking open-access book Internet of Things and the Law and of several articles in leading international journals such as the European Intellectual Property Review and European Journal of Law & Technology; they also appeared in mainstream popular press such as Vogue, Sky News, CNET, Il Sole 24 Ore, ABC, and Wired. Noto La Diega’s works – published in English and Italian, and translated into Chinese, Russian, and Korean – have been cited by the EU Court of Justice's Advocate General, the House of Lords, the UK Intellectual Property Office, the World Economic Forum, the European Parliament, and the Council of Europe, amongst others. As a member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on AI and Data in Education and Training, Noto La Diega contributed to the EU Guidelines on AI in Education.

Noto La Diega has a strong bidding record, having been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Horizon Europe, the German Research Foundation, The Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Society of Legal Scholars, the British and Irish Law Education and Technology Association, the Modern Law Review, and Santander. They are currently leading the half-a-million-pound international project “From Smart Technologies to Smart Laws” (AHRC-DFG). They have 14 years’ academic experience in the UK, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Brazil, and the US, and they have delivered keynote speeches and presented their research in prestigious venues including the WTO Public Forum in Geneva, the Computers, Privacy & Data Protection Conference in Brussels, and the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference in New York.

Outside of Strathclyde, Noto La Diega is a Martin-Flynn Global Law Professor in the School of Law at the University of Connecticut; Fellow of the Nexa Center for Internet and Society; Expert of the European Data Protection Board; Research Associate at the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies; Scotland Advisory Council Member of the Open Rights Group; Advisory Board Member of the Gender Equality Special Interest Group at the European Law Institute; Steering Committee Member at the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO – Academic Research Programme); External Expert of the European Data Protection Board; and Research Grants Committee Member at the Society of Legal Scholars, the oldest and largest society of law academics in the UK and Ireland.

.

Alongside research, teaching, and consultancy, Noto La Diega is a qualified lawyer called to the Bar of Italy in 2013 (non-practising), an LGBTQ+ rights advocate, as well as a Trustee of the award-winning charity Scottish Families Affected by Alcohol & Drugs.

Back to staff profile

Publications

General Court (Role in IP Cases)
Noto La Diega Guido
Elgar Encyclopedia of Intellectual Property Law (2025) (2025)
Publishing contract
Noto La Diega Guido
Elgar Encyclopedia of Intellectual Property Law (2025) (2025)
Idea (concept of)
Noto La Diega Guido
Elgar Encyclopedia of Intellectual Property Law (2025) (2025)
Giving surveillance capitalism a makeover : wearable technology in the fashion industry and the challenges for privacy and Data Protection law
Clubbs Coldron Benjamin, Noto La Diega Guido, Phipps-Rufus Tania, Stolte Tabea
The Oxford Handbook of Fashion Law (2025) (2025)
When the internet gets under our skin : reassessing consumer law and policy in a society of cyborgs
Clubbs Coldron Benjamin, Noto La Diega Guido, Twigg-Flesner Christian, Busch Christoph, Stolte Tabea, de Vries Marc-Oliver
Journal of Consumer Policy (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-024-09581-y
Ending smart data enclosures : the European approach to the regulation of the Internet of Things between access and Intellectual Property
Noto La Diega Guido
The Cambridge Handbook of Emerging Issues at the Intersection of Commercial Law and Technology (2024) (2024)

More publications

Back to staff profile

Projects

MegaSkills Project - Ethics Advisory Board
Noto La Diega, Guido (Principal Investigator)
01-Jan-2024 - 31-Jan-2026
MEGASKILLS. MEthodology of Psycho-pedagogical, Big Data and Commercial Video GAmes procedures for the European SKILLS Agenda Implementation
Noto La Diega, Guido (Principal Investigator)
Ethical use of commercial videogame data to develop soft skills. HORIZON-CL2-2022-TRANSFORMATIONS-01-07 “Conditions for the successful development of skills matched to needs (RIA)”) led by Dr Iker Martínez de Soria Sánchez (Tecnalia) and Dr Flavio Escribano (GeCon.es Foundation)
01-Jan-2023 - 30-Jan-2025
AHRC-DFG-funded project "From Smart Technologies to Smart Consumer Laws: Comparative Perspectives from Germany and the United Kingdom"
Noto La Diega, Guido (Principal Investigator)
The rapidly growing ‘Internet of Things’ – a network of connected objects such as cars, wearables, smart speakers, thermostats, and other household appliances – poses a range of issues for consumer laws that were drafted before hyperconnectivity became commonplace. Researchers from the University of Stirling – working with colleagues at the Universities of Warwick, Osnabrück and Bonn – will seek to identify emerging consumer issues in the UK and Germany related to smart technology and assess how their consumer laws cover these issues.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the German Research Foundation, 'From Smart Technologies to Smart Consumer Laws: Comparative Perspectives from Germany and the United Kingdom' will scope the potential for mutual learning between the two legal systems and recommend changes to the current regulations. Ultimately, the project will explore how consumers of smart technology can be empowered through law reform and legal design.

The UK Principal Investigator Prof. Guido Noto La Diega commented: “We are interested in the extent to which users are legally protected in this interconnected age under existing consumer laws, and whether legislation needs to be reviewed in line with technological developments. We argue that law reform needs to be paired with efforts from private stakeholders that should adopt novel legal design approaches to compliance. Our project is innovative – in terms of addressing a gap in existing literature and in its methods – and the collaboration with our counterparts in Germany is of the utmost importance, as both countries are leading the way in the regulation of the ‘internet of things’ and their approaches – although significantly different – constitute best practice. It is imperative that we share our knowledge to ensure consumer laws become as smart as the technologies that are shaping our lives.”

The study, which involves Professor Christoph Busch from the University of Osnabrück, Professor Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider of the University of Bonn and the University of Warwick's Professor Christian Twigg-Flesner, will consider four key themes, across three use cases – smart home, wearables and connected cars:

(1) THINGS AS A SERVICE
The emergence of smart technology challenges the traditional goods-services foundation on which consumer laws are built. The researchers will explore whether existing consumer laws are fit for purpose in today’s socio-technical setting, increasingly shaped by long-term contracts and data-drive monetisation models.

(2) REGULATION BY BRICKING
Smart products are often linked to sellers or suppliers who can remotely and automatically discontinue functionalities and downgrade or ‘brick’ a device – meaning that products become obsolete because tech companies no longer provide upgrades and fixes for older models. The contracts and number of actors involved can also add complexity to regulation.

(3) LIABILITY IN THE CLOUD OF THINGS
The automated interaction between multiple connected devices raises pressing issues around product liability. The study will consider whether existing liability rules provide protection for those using smart technology.

(4) INTERNET OF PERSONALISED THINGS
Smart technology empowers tech companies to enhance their profiling and targeting of consumers with precision and efficacy – resulting in the personalisation of products, prices and/or terms of service. At the same time, technology can be applied to enable a more targeted use of consumer protection technologies. The team will consider what personalisation of this kind means for the concept of the ‘average customer’.

Check out our blog: https://smartconsumerlaw.wordpress.com/
X: @ProjectStsl
01-Jan-2022 - 31-Jan-2025
Scottish Law and Innovation Network (SCOTLIN)
Noto La Diega, Guido (Principal Investigator)
Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Network co-led by Professor Guido Noto La Diega, Associate Professor Rossana Ducato and Professor Martin Kretschmer
01-Jan-2021 - 30-Jan-2023
Zooming in on Privacy and Copyright Issues in Remote Teaching
Noto La Diega, Guido (Principal Investigator)
Project funded by the British and Irish Law Education and Technology Association (BILETA)
The survey was co-designed by the investigators, with Dr Guido Salza, a sociologist, taking the most practice role. Teachers from all academic disciplines were recruited on a voluntary basis in 38 institutions based in three different countries: the United Kingdom (17; 4 nations), Italy (12), and the Netherlands (9). Despite the common European framework, these countries offered an appreciable variety of contextual characteristics in terms of public expenditure, graduation rates, teaching staff, and student-teacher ratios that could generate a richer picture in our data. Moreover, all HE institutions in these three countries experienced several months of online instructions during the pandemic.
The survey aimed at exploring if interviewed HE teachers experienced or were aware of potential copyright and privacy issues in their online teaching activities. It should be stressed that data collection was subject to stringent practical temporal and financial constraints. Therefore, we cannot make claims that our results reflect the overall position of the relevant HE teacher populations. Nonetheless, this exploratory study lays the groundwork for more extensive empirical work. The key issues identified within the limitations of our sample lead to potential hypotheses that can form the basis for and which can guide further research and analysis. More specifically, for the first time, we make information available information about teachers’ copyright awareness in the use of e-learning platforms during the pandemic.
We adopted the following strategy to improve the dependability of our sampling. We assumed that individual universities play the most important role in selecting among e-learning services and allocating resources to instruct staff and students. Indeed fact, political institutions are only loosely involved in the practical organisation of e-learning, and teachers’ degrees of freedom ultimately depend on the basket of services procured or purchased on the market by each university. For this reason, any uncontrolled dissemination of the survey among teachers would have increased selection bias and possibly recorded only individual experiences limited to a few institutional arrangements.
In an attempt to account for relevant university-level characteristics, a list of 40 HE institutions for each country in the study was carefully compiled to meet a number of criteria. First, we prioritised institutions that offer a wide range of teaching subjects to observe differences in teachers’ copyright awareness across disciplines. Second, we built a balanced sample between research-intensive, teaching-intensive, and mixed institutions. Third, we targeted small, medium, and large institutions.
In April 2021, the selected universities were contacted through their deans and encouraged with a letter of presentation explaining the aims of the study’s aim. Thirty-eight institutions responded positively. After the clearance from the appointed office, we circulated an invitation for teachers to participate in our survey. Individual teacher data collection took place from 6 May 2021 to 6 July 2021. We collected a total of 215 responses. One hundred eighty respondents fully completed the survey, while 194 completed the questionnaire at least in its fundamental parts. Twenty-one did not get through the background information and thus were excluded from the sample.
01-Jan-2021 - 01-Jan-2022
Are we owned? A Multidisciplinary and Comparative Conversation on Intellectual Property in the Algorithmic Society
Noto La Diega, Guido (Principal Investigator)
Modern Law Review-funded conference
01-Jan-2021 - 31-Jan-2021

More projects

Back to staff profile

Contact

Professor Guido Noto La Diega
Law

Email: guido.notoladiega@strath.ac.uk
Tel: 444 8427