NEWSLETTER-2017

381 MISCELLANEOUS Industry 4.0 and Its Impact in the Legal World* Att. Ali Sami Er The internet has a huge impact on people’s lives. As people have learned to cope with this great power, it has become inevitable for the internet to exercise influence over objects. Consequently, the greatest benefit of the internet nowadays is not communicating with people, but rather, making objects communicate with each other and people. In this article, we examine legal effects of these new developments. Development Industry 4.0, one of the ten main projects announced by the Ger- man Federal Ministry of Education and Research in 2011, was first discussed at Hannover Messe 2011, and the “Industry 4.0 Strategy Document,” which was prepared under the leadership of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering. The Industry 4.0 Plat- form (www.plattform-i40.de ) was also established to define the basic standards of the Industry 4.0. Industry 1.0, being the First Industrial Revolution, is defined as the mechanization, the Second Industrial Revolution is the serializa- tion, and the Third Industrial Revolution is the automation of the pro- duction 1 . On our way to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, i.e. Industry 4.0, inter-networking of things and shortening time-to-market are aimed. Because the key point of reaching a high profit rate is the fast release of the product to the market after the design and R&D phase. Industry 4.0, which allows the West to survive the East’s cheap labor and mass production, focuses on individualized production and incorporates the whole chain, including idea, development, production, end-user distribution and recycling processes. Instead of machines that * Article of June 2017 1 Please see: http://cdn.endustri40.com/file/ab05aaa7695b45c5a6477b6fc06f3645/ End%C3%BCstri_4.0_Yolunda.pdf(access date: 29.06.2017).