Eoin – Page 18 – Cearta.ie

How to amend the Copyright Bill so that format-shifting and backing-up do not infringe copyright

Posted on 3 October, 20184 September, 2019 by Eoin

As I explained in my previous post, as the law currently stands, format-shifting and backing-up can infringe copyright. But there is no good reason why this must be so. And the Copyright and Other Intellectual Property Law Provisions Bill 2018 currently pending before the Seanad provides a golden opportunity to put things right.

The main legislation relating to copyright at Irish law is the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000 (also here). It is the Principal Act for the purposes of the Copyright and Other Intellectual Property Law Provisions Bill 2018. The aim of that Bill, as described in its long title is to amend the Principal Act

… to take account of certain recommendations for amendments to that Act contained in the Report of the Copyright Review Committee entitled “Modernising Copyright” published by that Committee in October 2013 and also to take account of certain exceptions to copyright permitted by Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 20011 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society; …

Senators David Norris, Victor Boyhan, Fintan Warfield, Ivana Bacik, Kevin Humphreys, Ged Nash, and Aodhán Ó Ríordáin have proposed amendments to the Bill to permit format-shifting and backing-up.…

Copyright law must be made fit for the digital age: the Seanad must adopt amendments to the Copyright Bill so that consumers do not unknowingly infringe copyright

Posted on 3 October, 20183 October, 2018 by Eoin

Have you ever transferred music from one device to another? Have you copied music from a CD to your phone to listen to it on the way to work? Have you copied a DVD to a tablet to watch it on a long journey? If so, you have probably infringed copyright, almost certainly without realizing it.

Have you every backed-up the data on your phone, or your laptop? Of course, most of us don’t back-up as often as we should; but, if you do, then you have probably infringed copyright, again almost certainly without realizing it.

Moving data from one format or device to another is known as format-shifting, and both it and backing-up mean that you are making copies of the relevant content or data. Making those copies is an infringement of copyright, unless you have the permission of the copyright owner (which usually you won’t have), or you can rely on a copyright exception provided by copyright legislation (which right now, in Ireland, you can’t).

There is no good reason why format-shifting or backing-up should be an infringement of copyright. And there are many good reasons why it should not. In particular, the fact that you didn’t realize that format-shifting or backing-up are infringements of copyright demonstrates that consumers assume that format-shifting and backing-up are perfectly normal behaviour.…

Reputation as Property

Posted on 31 August, 2018 by Eoin

This is a call for papers for a conference on Reputation as Property: Perspectives from Tort and Property, to be held on 18-19 January 2019 in Trinity College Dublin:

How can tort law account for the harm of defamation? One answer to this question is to argue that our reputation is or is like property. While this analogy may make sense to tort law theorists, particularly those seeking to give an internal account of tort law, it may not make sense to property theorists. In addition, it is not clear whether this approach fits with the case law. Whether or not thinking about reputation as property makes sense raises the question of whether tort law theory understands property differently than property theory does. It also raises the question of whether the theory of the tort of defamation fits the case law. In what ways does it make sense to think about reputation as property, and in what ways does it not?

In this workshop, organised in association with the Private Law Group at Trinity College Dublin, we seek to bring together property and torts scholars to discuss both theoretical and doctrinal approaches to the question of whether reputation is property or not.

…

Fore! Wayward golf winnings, restitution of mistaken payments, and interceptive subtraction

Posted on 22 August, 201822 March, 2021 by Eoin

Last month, English golfer Tommy Fleetwood came twelfth in The Open golf championship. Earlier this month, Thomas Fleetwood had the St£120,000 (US$154,480, €133,000) winnings deposited in his bank account. There doesn’t seem anything exceptional in that story, so let’s try again. Last month, British golfer Tommy Fleetwood came twelfth in The Open golf championship. Earlier this month, Florida golfer Thomas Fleetwood had the St£120,000 winnings deposited in his bank account. That’s right – golf’s authorities lodged the winnings to the bank account of the wrong golfer. One of Thomas’s golf friends posted a picture of the lodgement record on twitter. And Thomas duly repaid the wayward deposit. But he would not have been able to keep it anyway, had he been minded to. As I have said before on this site, you can’t keep the proceeds of a bank error in your favour; and, if you do, you probably won’t be able to get out of jail free (see also here, here, here, here, and here). So, Thomas would have had to give back the winnings to golf’s authorities; and they in turn will no doubt pay them on to Tommy, if they have not already done so.…

CAO points for law, 2018 – Updated

Posted on 20 August, 201830 August, 2018 by Eoin

On 20 August 2018, the Central Applications Office (the CAO) issued the first round of offers of places in Ireland’s higher education institutions. It seems that CAO applications to Trinity fell by 8%, which was almost double the national 4.5% decrease, in part because Brexit has had an impact on course choices and applications. However, demand for law courses is generally up by an average of 3% overall. In the table below, I set out the points for law courses in the first round in the second-last column.

Update: On 30 August 2018, the Central Applications Office (the CAO) issued the second round of offers of places in Ireland’s higher education institutions. This round saw significant falls in points for some courses in Dublin and Cork, which may be due to the housing crisis in the high levels of rents and low levels of rental property supplies in those cities. In the table below, I set out the points for law courses in the second round in the last column.

Code	Course College	First Round	Second Round

Level 8 Courses

AL851	Business & Law Athlone Institute of Technology	300
AL853	Accounting & Law Athlone Institute of Technology	377
CW708	Law-LLB Institute of Technology, Carlow	298
CW938	Business with Law Institute of Technology, Carlow	281
CK301	Law (Pathways) University College Cork	495
CK302	Law & French University College Cork	542
CK304	Law & Irish University College Cork	507
CK307	Law & Business University College Cork	542
DB514	Business Studies (Law) Dublin Business School	252	200
DB568	Law Dublin Business School	244	203
DC230	Economics, Politics & Law Dublin City University	400
DC232	Law & Society (BCL) Dublin City University	455
DC292	Arts (Joint Hons) Law Dublin City University	351
DT321	Business & Law Dublin Institute of Technology	463
DT532	Law (LLB) Dublin Institute of Technology	430	419
GC403	Law (Dublin) Griffith College	253	218
TR004	Law Trinity College Dublin	533
TR017	Law & Business Trinity College Dublin	577
TR018	Law & French Trinity College Dublin	567	566*
TR019	Law & German Trinity College Dublin	509
TR020	Law & Political Science Trinity College Dublin	578
DN600	Law University College Dublin	522	521*
DN610	Business & Law University College Dublin	531*
GY250	Corp Law National University of Ireland, Galway	409
GY251	Civil Law National University of Ireland, Galway	451
LY208	Law Letterkenny Institute of Technology	270
LC223	Law & Taxation Limerick Institute of Technology	307
LM020	Law & Accounting University of Limerick	440
LM029	Law Plus University of Limerick	477
MH501	LLB Law Maynooth University	451
MH502	Law Maynooth University	420
WD140	Laws Waterford Institute of Technology	290

Level 6 & 7 Courses

CW926	Business with Law Institute of Technology, Carlow	208
LY207	LY207 Law – with Criminal Justice or Spanish or Irish Letterkenny Institute of Technology	160

* Not all candidates on this point score were offered places.…

Germany’s wifi laws

Posted on 31 July, 20181 August, 2018 by Eoin

Germany wifi (German flag detail and wifi icon via Wikipedia) In the early days of this blog, I wrote three posts on whether there is a criminal or civil legal liability for using other people’s wifi without permission.

I was reminded of these posts yesterday, when Edmund Heaphy (a student in Trinity, and a journalist at Quartz) contacted me about the following story:

The unique legal concept that led to Germany’s weird wifi laws

Germany is about to get a lot more free wifi. One of the country’s highest courts has upheld a 2017 law designed to put an end to the effect of a peculiar legal concept known as Störerhaftung as it applies to public wifi networks. …

Whilst the decision of the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice) is very welcome, German lawyers have told the World Intellectual Property Review that more clarity is needed. As Mateusz Rachubka points out o the 1709 Blog, the 2017 legislation is a result of the decision of the CJEU in Case C-484/14 Tobias McFadden v Sony Music Entertainment Germany GmbH, which held that the eCommerce Directive (Directive 2000/31/EC; OJ 2000 L 178, p. 1) precluded a rights-owner seeking damages from an access provider whose open network was used by a third party to upload or download material that infringed copyright, but did not preclude the rights-owner seeking an injunction requiring the access provider to terminate or prevent a copyright infringement.…

Blocking injunctions in the Irish and UK courts after Sony v UPC and Cartier v BT – Part I – Jurisdiction

Posted on 26 July, 20189 June, 2021 by Eoin

Sony, Sky, Cartier (logos via sony.ie sky.com cartier.co.uk) In today’s Irish Times, Mark Paul reports that “three global music labels are limbering up to seek a High Court order against Sky Ireland to force it to implement a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy against its broadband customers who download music from pirate sites”. In Sony Music Entertainment Ireland Ltd v UPC Communications Ireland Ltd [2016] IECA 231 (28 July 2016) [hereafter: Sony v UPC] the Court of Appeal held that the courts could indeed make just such an order, and that the costs of implementing it were to be borne 80% by the internet service provider, and 20% by the copyright rights-owner (subject to a cap). No doubt, the three labels involved in the action reported in the Irish Times – Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music and Universal Music – will rely on this case in their action. However, since it was decided, the UK Supreme Court has handed down its decision in Cartier International AG v British Telecommunications plc [2018] 1 WLR 3259, [2018] UKSC 28 (13 June 2018) [hereafter: Cartier v BT], and it stands in stark contrast with Sony v UPC. The structure of both cases is exactly the same: a holder of intellectual property rights seeks an injunction against an online intermediary to prevent infringement of the rights-holder’s rights on the intermediary’s platform, and the intermediary seeks an order that the rights-holder should bear (some at least of the) costs of implementing the injunction.…

Cliff Richard v BBC – Part II – Media speech and publication in the public interest

Posted on 23 July, 201827 July, 2018 by Eoin

The record man said
‘Don’t let it go to your head, I’m gonna make you a star’
… So mama please don’t worry about me, I’m nearly famous now.

Sir Cliff Richard OBE in Greenwich 2017 (via Flickr) (element) 1. Introduction
The words above are in the first verse of “I’m Nearly Famous”, the title track of an album released in 1976 by Sir Cliff Richard [Sir Cliff], pictured left rocking Greenwich, UK, in 2017. Six weeks earlier, the South Yorkshire Police [SYP] had admitted that their tip off to the BBC that he was being investigated in respect of allegations of historic sex abuse infringed his privacy (see, eg, Richard v BBC [2017] EWHC 1648 (Ch) (26 May 2017)). On foot of that tip off, the British Broadcasting Corporation [the BBC] gave those allegations and the search of Sir Cliff’s property in Sunningdale, Berkshire prominent and extensive television coverage. Last week, in Richard v BBC [2018] EWHC 1837 (Ch) (18 July 2018) Mann J held that that the BBC’s broadcasts also infringed Sir Cliff’s privacy, and awarded him £210,000 damages. In a previous post, I have considered Mann J’s analysis that Sir Cliff had a reasonable expectation of privacy under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights [the ECHR] in respect of the police investigation.…