cearta.ie – Page 19 – the Irish for rights

Plain Pack With Shamrock And Kangroo Australia and Ireland were the first two countries in the world to introduce legislation to require standardized packing of tobacco products. As Olivia Kelly reports in the Irish Times that the Minister of State for Health Promotion, Catherine Byrne TD launched a landmark Report on the State of Tobacco Control in Ireland to mark World No Tobacco Day yesterday, I’m delighted to announce that a seminar on this topic will be held from 2:00pm to 4:00pm on Tuesday 12 June 2018 in the Neill Lecture Theatre in the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin.

The main speaker will be Prof Matthew Rimmer (QUT); I will respond to his presentation; the seminar will be chaired by Prof Shane Allwright (TCD); and there will be plenty of time for questions and answers.

Prof Matthew Rimmer Matthew Rimmer (pictured right) is Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation in the Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He has recently edited a special issue of the QUT Law Review on the plain packaging of tobacco products worldwide. At the seminar, he will talk about the Australian plain packaging legislation, and the failed challenges to it in the Australian courts, on foot of an investment treaty between Australia and Hong Kong, and before the World Trade Organisation.…

On world IP day, a note of caution: the EU Copyright Directive is failing

26 April, 201826 April, 2018

| 3 Comments

| Copyright

Today is World Intellectual Property Day. On a day to celebrate the role that intellectual property rights play in encouraging innovation and creativity, we should take care that IP law does not achieve the opposite result. I blogged yesterday about the press publishers’ right in Article 11 of the proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Today, I’m staying with the proposed Directive, and with another open letter (pdf, via here) that I’ve signed articulating some of its shortcomings. In this letter, academics from 25 leading Intellectual Property research centres in Europe express grave concerns at the legislative direction of the proposed copyright Directive, and in particular with Articles 3, 11 and 13:

the proposed exception for text-and-data-mining in Article 3 will not achieve its goal to stimulate innovation and research if restricted to certain organisations,
the proposals for a new publishers’ right under Article 11 will favour incumbent press publishing interests rather than innovative quality journalism [I blogged about this yesterday], and
the proposals for Article 13 threaten the user participation benefits of the e-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC) which shared the responsibility for enforcement between rightholders and service providers [I blogged about this at an earlier stage in the process].

…

169 European academics warn against the press publishers’ right proposed by the EU Commission

25 April, 201826 April, 2018

| 3 Comments

| Copyright

In a statement published this morning, 169 academics working in a variety of fields from all over Europe give a final warning against the EU Commission’s ill-conceived plans for the introduction of a new intellectual property right in news.

Here are some extracts from the statement:

Statement from EU Academics on Proposed Press Publishers’ Right

We, the undersigned 169 scholars working in the fields of intellectual property, internet law, human rights law and journalism studies at universities all over Europe write to oppose the proposed press publishers’ right.

Article 11 of the proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, as it currently stands following negotiations in the EU Council and Parliament, is a bad piece of legislation. … The proposal would likely impede the free flow of information that is of vital importance to democracy. This is because it would create very broad rights of ownership in news and other information. … This proliferation of different rights for established players would make it more expensive for other people to use news content. … The proposed right would provide no protection against ‘fake news’. … There is no sound economic case for the introduction of such a right.

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Can you get out of the purchase of a house, if you find out later that someone had been murdered in it?

11 April, 20181 March, 2019

| No Comments

| Contract

Get directions 16 Stillwell Dr, Wakefield WF2 6RL, UK The question in the title was provoked by Ciara Kenny‘s House Hunter column in today’s Irish Times, where she ask Would you buy a house someone had been murdered in? I don’t think I would. And if I did, I’d be stuck with it, since the answer to the question in the title to this post is that you can’tget out of the purchase of a house, if you find out later that someone had been murdered in it. Ciara’s column is a diary of her travails trying to purchase a house in Dublin in today’s crazy property market (as she put it on twitter: it’s an effing nightmare). From today’s column:

Every old house has its secrets. Last summer, a gorgeous house came up for sale which we spent weeks deliberating over. But we couldn’t shake a bad feeling we had about the surrounding streets. So when bidding climbed above what we were willing to pay, we were relieved for once. … [Later, my partner found] a decade-old RTÉ news report about a man stabbed to death by a burglar on the stairs. … I don’t think I would be able to shake the image of that poor man’s violent death every time I walked upstairs.

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Standardised tobacco packaging comes ever closer in Ireland

22 February, 201811 June, 2018

| 3 Comments

| Tobacco Control

The Irish Independent this morning reports that the first of the plain cigarette packets have hit shelves around the country:

Tobacco products bearing the new standardised packaging are now available in some Irish retail outlets. From September, all cigarettes and all other tobacco products will have to be sold in plain or standardised packaging by law.

The Department of Health have issued a press release in which the Minister of State for Health Promotion and the National Drugs Strategy, Catherine Byrne, welcomed the news that products using the new plain packaging can now be found in some outlets:

Gone are the familiar colours and logos of the various brands and instead all cigarette boxes will be in the same plain neutral colour [pictured above left], bringing into sharp focus the health warnings on the packets. … Our aim is to decrease the appeal of tobacco products, to increase the effectiveness of health warnings and to reduce the chances of consumers being misled about the harmful effects of smoking. This packaging makes it plain that cigarettes are bad for your health. … Standardised packaging is just one of a number of measures outlined in Tobacco Free Ireland (pdf), the ultimate aim of which is to encourage and help smokers to quit and to prevent young people from starting to smoke.

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From Mute to Dysaguria

16 February, 201819 August, 2019

| 1 Comment

| Dysaguria, Privacy

Pictured left is Alexander Skarsgård (imdb | wikipedia) in the new Duncan Jones (imdb | wikipedia | blog) movie Mute (imdb | Netflix).

Skarsgård plays Leo, a mute bartender searching for girlfriend who has inexplicably disappeared in Berlin in 2052. In an interview in last Sunday’s Observer, he takes up the story:

… [Leo’s] search takes him deep into a neon-saturated underworld, populated by gangsters and a pair of anarchic American field surgeons (Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux) … “It’s very dystopian, but not that far-fetched unfortunately, because it’s a society run by corporations,” says Skarsgård. “You subscribe to a corporation and then they will provide everything for you – housing, healthcare, food – but they basically own you. …”. …

So we could be looking at the future then? Skarsgård looks a little traumatised and then sighs: “Hopefully not.”

I’m looking forward to the movie; but I’m not sure I agree that the best adjective to describe it is “dystopian”. It is entirely appropriate when a state goes bad; but it is not a good adjective to describe “a society run by corporations”. In fact, we don’t have a word for when a corporate society goes bad, so I’ve suggested “dysaguria”, as a noun meaning “frightening company”, and “dysagurian” as the adjective to describe that frightening company and the associated society run by frightening companies (see here | here | here).…

Legal reforms and practical responses are necessary to protect freedom of speech

13 November, 201724 November, 2017

| No Comments

| Freedom of Expression

Yesterday’s Sunday Independent (front page pictured left) was something of a bumper issue for freedom of speech. The Editorial argued that it’s time to level the media playing field, and called on the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment to take into account the challenges facing all of the media, not just radio and tv stations, in its deliberations on the future of the television licence fee. And there were three other interesting columns in the print edition that were published online last night. Fergal Quinn argued that, with a referendum looming, the media should champion free speech, and we must learn to tolerate open debate. Eilish O’Hanlon argued that no-one should need to beg the Government’s permission to express an unpopular opinion. And Ruth Dudley Edwards praised Conor Cruise O’Brien as a revisionist who cared about truth and as a patriot who kept free speech alive.

Last week, the Long Room Hub in Trinity College Dublin and the Heyman Center for the Humanities in Columbia University, New York co-hosted a series of events in Dublin and New York on the challenges fake news poses to modern society. In yesterday’s Sunday Independent, Breda Heffernan reported on one of the Dublin events that fake news is a dark menace to truth, democracy and discourse.…