Marking exams, grading papers, and evaluating assessments are the bane of academics’ lives (even worse, in my view, than the ever multiplying waves of administrative paperwork that seem to be taking over the university). During the early summer annual exam marking season, Mary Beard and Ferdinand von Prondzynski had some interesting observations about the process; now, just in time for the late summer repeat exam marking season, Peter Black enters the fray; and all of their observations remind me of the classic guide to grading exams which I commend to all hard-pressed examiners out there. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve written about this report twice already. The first occasion was when a committee chaired by Ms Justice Susan Denham of the Supreme Court was established to consider the necessity for a new Irish Court of Appeal (this was in part a response to an article on the point which Judge Denham had written the previous year in the [2006] 1 Judicial Institute Studies Journal 1 (pdf)). The second occasion when the Government received the committee’s report. In the most recent installment of this slow-moving story, the report was published last week – only three months after it was submitted to government – and to generally favourable reviews in the media (see Belfast Telegraph | Irish Independent here and here | Irish Times | RTÉ). Read the rest of this entry »

Given my views about mobile phones in class, I’m grateful to John Naughton for his post about this YouTube clip:

The current issue of the European Human Rights Law Review ([2009] 3 EHRLR | table of contents (pdf) | hat tip ECHR blog) contains a wonderful piece by my colleague Dr Ewa Komorek entitled “Is Media Pluralism a Human Right? The European Court of Human Rights, the Council of Europe and the Issue of Media Pluralism” [2009] 3 EHRLR 395.

Here is the abstract (with added links):

The need for pluralist media stopped being purely a national concern a long time ago and thus it has for decades been subject to scrutiny by the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights. Media pluralism has always come to their agenda as a prerequisite for freedom of expression guarded by Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights. It is important to distinguish the two ‘faces’ of media pluralism: internal (which may also be called content pluralism or diversity) and external (or structural). This article focuses on television broadcasting and argues that while the Court of Human Rights has essentially been successful in safeguarding internal pluralism, the protection of structural pluralism proved more difficult to achieve by means of the Court’s case law. This prompted the Council of Europe to step in and attempt to fill the gap with regulatory proposals. The conclusion is that although there is still a need for a binding ex ante action at the European level aimed at safeguarding pluralism in this ever concentrating sector, the efforts of the Council of Europe and the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights are vital for awareness raising and stimulating debate.

In Ewa’s view, therefore, media pluralism should be given a far stronger voice in European debates than it currently enjoys, and one way to achieve this would be to strength its status as a right not only in the Council of Europe but also in the EU. For example, Article 11(2) of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights provides that “the freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected”, and Ewa’s compelling analysis of the cognate Article 10 can go a long way towards giving full effect to this provision. But this is not the only interesting piece in the journal. Indeed, this issue is a veritable Aladdin’s Cave of fascinating articles: Read the rest of this entry »

I have written several times on this blog about open access journals, and I have re-posted some of the wickedly funny cartoons served up daily by Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD). Open access journals are the focus of PhD’s cartoon yesterday (it’s too big to repost here, but click through and enjoy – then come back here for the rest of this post!) (update: I’m not the only one who has used this cartoon as a jumping off point to discuss the future of online scientific publications – Lukas Ahrenberg does too). In one of those rare cases of serendipity which the universe’s roll of the dice can throw up, Quinn Norton has an excellent introductory piece on open access in yesterday’s Irish Times; here are some extracts (with added links):

Open Access leads the way in promoting academic research

WIRED : Scholars are embracing the internet to bypass publishers and speed the process of research

… In the mid-1990s Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College in the US, got on the internet and learned how to make web pages. Like many in academia, he decided to post his papers. He was delighted with the response. “I was just playing with a new tool (html) and started receiving correspondences from philosophers,” he says. “I wrote for impact, and I was finally getting impact.”

He and others began to see the web as a way to bypass the publishers and speed the process of research. … The idea became the Open Access movement. A meeting in 2002 produced the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which defined Open Access as “Free availability on the public internet . . . without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.” Read the rest of this entry »

Roll up, roll up, for the next great online copyright bout. In the red corner, weighing in at almost 153 years old, is the venerable National Portrait Gallery, an institutional heavyweight if ever there was one. In the blue corner, weighing in at just over 8 years old, is the upstart Wikipedia, a sprightly bantamweight which has bulked up considerably in recent years and now packs a hefty punch. The fight is over whether Wikipedia has infringed the Gallery’s copyright in recently-created digital images of portraits which are out of copyright. A piece on this by TechnoLlama (Andres Guadamuz) – including the choice of image, though its subject has previously appeared on this blog – is too good to pass up (links in original):

National Portrait Gallery copyright row

Several news sites have reported an interesting copyright case involving the Wikimedia Foundation and the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Britain. The NPG undertook a £1 million GBP digitisation exercise, and placed high-definition versions of their pictures in a database locked with technological protection measures. Derrick Coetzee, a volunteer for the Wikimedia Foundation, accessed the database, circumvented the protection, and uploaded 3,300 NPG pictures to Wikimedia Commons. The original portraits are in the public domain, so it would be a fair assumption that pictures of the originals would not have copyright either. However, the NPG disagreed, and sent a cease-and-desist letter to Mr Coatzee alleging copyright infringement, database right infringement, circumvention of technological protection measures, and breach of contract. This is an interesting legal issue for many reasons, chiefly because the legal status of pictures of public domain paintings is not clear in UK copyright law.

… To conclude, this is an interesting legal case for many reasons. … I believe that the NPG would have a difficult time in court, with the exception of the contractual case, but as I said, many of the legal issues are completely open in the UK. In a selfish way, I wish the case would be litigated, as it would provide us with some interesting precedent in the case of originality of copies of public domain works, and also on the issue of browse-wrap agreements.

Read the rest of this fascinating entry here (for full value, click through the two links at the end [one of which has now been updated], and read the debate in the comments to Andres’ post). The Register has some background, and – inevitably – there’s now a wikipedia page about the controversy; of the torrent of online news and comment, I’ve found the following most useful: BBC | Boing Boing | Creative Commons | David Gerard | Edward Winkleman |Guardian | IP Osgoode | ORG | Roger Pearse.

I think this one could go the full fifteen rounds, and I shall watch every punch with great interest.

I’m sorry I’m coming to this too late to attend the gig, but I’ve only just seen this piece by Lorna Siggins in today’s Irish Times (with added links):

RTÉ denies censorship of Afri advert over Rossport reference

RTÉ has denied that it has refused to broadcast an advertisement for a social event in Dublin tonight that includes a reference to the Mayo village of Rossport.

Justice and peace non-governmental organisation Afri said RTÉ is censoring its attempt to publicise the event, although it is willing to pay for the 20-second advertisement. An advert for the event was carried on the 98FM radio station yesterday.

Health and safety concerns about original plans by Shell EP Ireland for a high-pressure onshore pipeline led to the jailing of five men known as the Rossport Five for 94 days in 2005.

Over two months ago, RTÉ said it had “difficulties” with the wording of an advertisement for the Afri famine walk because of the reference to Rossport.

MidWest Radio had also declined to accept an advertisement for the famine walk from Afri, saying it had to consult the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) on a reference to the Rossport Five. It said it informed the BCI of its decision, which it said the commission supported.

The commission said it gave no formal direction to MidWest. However, it had advised it – when the famine walk was already over – that its decision was a “reasonable interpretation” of the guidelines on political advertising under the 1988 Radio and Television Act [here and here].

RTÉ said that, as with the previous advertisement inquiry, it had asked Afri to clear it with the commission to ensure it complied with the 1988 Act’s guidelines on political advertising.

The advert promotes an Afri gig entitled That’s Gas… in the Sugar Club in Dublin. The wording refers to the title, venue and time, and lists Paula Meehan, Dermot Bolger, Jinx Lennon, members of Kila, Donal O’Kelly, Sorcha Fox, Pom Boyd, Gina Moxley, Vincent McGrath and Pat O’Donnell of Rossport as participants.

Afri described RTÉ’s decision as “a blatant attempt at censorship”. “This is another worrying insight into how our national broadcaster works and how large corporations can use their power to silence voices raised on behalf of justice and human rights,” Joe Murray of Afri said.

As this blog has noted in the past, Irish law does indeed ban political advertising; the current Broadcasting Bill does not purport to change this position; but it remains to be seen whether it can survive challenge in the European Court of Human Rights. In the meantime, there will be absurdly wide definitions of “political” by overly cautious broadcasters, and perfectly innocuous advertisments will continue to be unnecessarily banned.

I can’t make up my mind whether wordle is a pretty annoying gimmick or a useful analytical tool which produces pretty results. The image on the left is a wordle anaylsis of the interesting decision of the House of Lords in Shogun Finance v Hudson [2004] 1 AC 1101, [2003] UKHL 62 (19 November 2003) produced by Michael Bromby on Digitial Directions. Michael has produced wordles for each of the speeches in the House of Lords and their conclusions will have have far-reaching consequences not only for the Law of Contract but also in circumstances of identity theft.

In the case itself, Durlabh Patel sought to buy a Mitsubishi Shogun SWB from a dealer on hire purchase. The effect of the hire purchase agreement was that the hire purchase company, Mitsubishi Finance stood in the place of the dealer, and so was effectively the seller of the car. To encourage the sale, Patel produced his driving licence, and Finance did a credit check on him; when that was satisfactory, Finance agreed to the hire purchase and instructed the dealer to let Patel have the car. Patel then sold the car on to Norman Hudson. So far, so uncontroversial; it happens all the time; and the car seller would then pay off the outstanding remainder of the hire purchase price, and buy a new car. But this time it was different. The purchaser was in fact a crook who had stolen Patel’s driving licence, and after the sale to Hudson, the crook absconded with the purchase money (a sizeable sum, though probably not enough for a new life in Rio), leaving Finance and Hudson to sort out the mess.

In these kinds of cases, the basic question is who should bear the loss created by the absconding crook: here, either Finance have lost not also the money loaned to the fake Patel but also the car now in Hudson’s possession, or he has to return the car or its value to Finance; either way, one or the other is out of pocket. Read the rest of this entry »