I learn from Michael Geist’s blog that in the New Yorker this week, Jeffrey Toobin has an excellent piece on the Google Books project and the litigation it has spawned. It is well informed, and balanced, both qualities which have been sadly lacking on all sides of the debates about the project. Of his several good points, three stand out; though one of them might not be true on this side of the Atlantic. Read the rest of this entry »

As the Defamation Bill, 2006 brings an Irish Press Council ever closer, Owen Gibson writes in today’s Media Guardian that the United Kingdom’s Press Complaints Commission is again coming under scrutiny. Last week, News of the World journalist Clive Goodman was sentenced to four months in prison for unlawfully accessing the Prince of Wales’s voicemail; and Andy Coulson, the newspaper’s editor, resigned. As Gibson writes:

many in the industry were wondering whether the repercussions would stop there or if it would prove a watershed moment for press regulation in the UK. The pressure is mounting on the Press Complaints Commission to find out whether the actions of Goodman and his private investigator accomplice, who had a six-figure annual “research” contract with the News of the World, were merely the tip of the iceberg.

More to the point, for an Irish audience, would a Press Council here be able to do anything if a similar matter were to arise in Ireland? Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Tubridy, RTE’s king of fogey fluff, had an uncharacteristically substantial discussion of privacy this morning (it should be available here in due course; scroll to about 45/50 minutes in). It is almost 15 years since Charles Haughey resigned as Taoiseach (Prime Minister): as the RTE obituary puts it:

In February 1992, former Justice Minister Sean Doherty delivered the coup de grace when he insisted that Haughey had been aware of the telephone tappings of two political journalists ten years previously. ‘Anybody else that says otherwise or tries to abandon him or herself from that situation is not telling the truth,’ said Doherty.

Not even the great survivor could weather such a damning disclosure, and Haughey was duly forced to resign as Taoiseach.

The tapping had led to a leading case on privacy: Kennedy v Ireland [1987] IR 587; and to the enactment of the Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages (Regulation) Act, 1993 (see also ss98 and 110 of the Postal and Telecommunications Act, 1983).*

This morning’s discussion on Tubridy featured Kevin Rafter, Political Editor of the Sunday Tribune, and blogger, dealing with the politics of Doherty’s revalations and Haughey’s resignation, and Donncha O’Connell, Dean of the Faculty of Law, UCG, dealing with the right to privacy.

It was a fascinating discussion; I particularly enjoyed Donncha’s sophisticated analysis of the right to privacy and the challenges it faces from contemprorary government; and the whole thing will be well worth catching again when RTE -eventualy – put it on their website.

Update 1: It never rains but it pours. Less than an hour after the Tubridy interview, Today with Pat Kenny gets in on the act (probably on the basis of that well-known moral principle: Anything you can do, I can do better), with an absorbing interview with Billy Hawkes, the Data Protection Commissioner. (The interview will appear here later in the week, and be available for a week; scroll to about 45/50 minutes in). Listen, learn, enjoy.

Update 2: It’s so much pouring as a monsoon. Damien Mulley, in one of his posts today, points out that the Flux show on RTE Radio1 tonight, entitled “We’ve got your picture; now what’s your name?”, will consider what happens in a community when a tragedy there brings the national media to their doorsteps. (As usual, an audio stream of the show will appear on the show’s site in due course).

*Update 3 (07 January 2007): Thanks to those who emailed me to point out that the earlier reference was garbled and inaccurate. Apologies to all, and in particular to those who tried to follow an inaccurate link.

Read all about it here.

As Daithí puts it: Going on a data? Use protection (with further links).

With apologies for ending the title with a preposition, it poses a question which has been on my mind since I wrote here last week about the case in which a gaelic footballer from Carlow is suing his local newspaper, the Carlow Nationalist, for invasion of privacy. They had published photographs of him playing a gaelic match, in one of which his private parts were exposed. In my earlier post, I argued that, whilst this humiliated him, it did not invade his privacy. Yesterday, the High Court disagreed. According to an article in today’s Irish Times:

Mr Justice Declan Budd said yesterday he proposed to award damages to Richard Sinnott on the basis of his finding that there was a negligent intrusion on the player’s right to privacy arising from the publication of the photograph in which his private parts were accidentally exposed on the sportsfield.

Either the High Court is wrong, or I am. Read the rest of this entry »

The Contender. It’s a rather good movie from 2000. It is on RTE1 television tonight. For all its manipulation of the viewers’ emotions, it manages to stay just short of sentimentality, and in so doing creates a parable for our times, not merely in the way in which the film-makers intended, but also in relation to an Irish political controversy that is now more than a year old but which raised significant issues of principle still relevant today. Read the rest of this entry »

I have agreed to give a paper at a forthcoming conference on the 70th anniversary of the Irish Constitution. The main focus of the session in which my paper will be given is unenumerated rights in the Constitution; and the main focus of my paper will be on speech rights. Other papers in the session are likely to focus on unenumerated rights generally and on privacy in particular. Against this background, I think the theme my of paper will be that unenumerated rights which the courts have spelled out of things mentioned on the face of the constitution are capable of being pernicious, illegitimately preventing the proper development of the text itself. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been blogging since about the end of last September – first in a very private offline way just to get the hang of it; then online but behind a firewall, just to get the hang of the wordpress platform. I had always intended that the draft posts composed in these trials would be available as an archive when the blog went fully live. But I reckoned without the great god of blogging, who sent two scourges upon me. The combined result is that I’ve lost about 25% of the draft or shadow posts; and whilst I have reconstructed some of them, I’ve decided to bit the bullet and just simply go live now without any further backfilling.

The world has lost my thoughts on: various aspects of funding and policy in the Irish university sector; conferences I attended in the last few months on privacy, defamation and broadcasting; some cases on freedom of expression, privacy, restitution and copyright; and some random musings about life, the universe and everything. I’m sure the world will survive. But since these are themes which interest me, I’m sure that I will return to these issues in the future, so the world will get my ideas on them whether it wants them or not. So, as of now, the offline drafting is over; the firewall is down; the passwords are gone. Ready or not, here I come.

Hello, world!