Skip to content

cearta.ie

the Irish for rights

Menu
  • About
  • Privacy Policy
  • Disclaimer
  • Contact
  • Research

Neither a pretty face nor a beautiful game — of football pitches, data protection impact assessments, artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and closed-circuit television surveillance

9 June, 202011 June, 2020
| No Comments
| Data Protection

CCTV at a chinese playing pitchI read this morning that, in a wide-ranging letter to Congress on racial justice reform, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna wrote that IBM will no longer offer “general purpose facial recognition or analysis software”. Of course, “general purpose” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. But let’s see where it goes. [Update]: two days later, Amazon followed with a one-year moratorium on police use of their facial recognition technology, to give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules. Again, let’s see where this goes.[End update]

These developments reminded me of a recent local story about Dublin City Council. Not content with seeking to post freeze-frame closed-circuit television (CCTV) images of people dumping their rubbish in litter black-spots, in the hope of shaming them or others into desisting from doing so in the future, now they want CCTV cameras with facial-recognition capabilities. Nearly three months ago (in the world just before lockdown) Sean Finnan reported in the Dublin Inquirer [with added links]:

Council Installed Cameras with Facial Recognition on Football Pitch

Before the refurbishment of the football pitch at Bluebell Road in the west of the city, it was an anti-social blackspot, says Michael O’Shea, chairman of Inchicore Athletic FC.

…

Read More »

Principles for legislators on the implementation of new technologies

3 June, 20203 June, 2020
| No Comments
| Data Protection

Covid-19 Tracing App


A few weeks ago, I was proud to be a signatory to an open letter (available here and here), from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), Digital Rights Ireland (DRI), and several scientists, data protection experts, and academics, warning that experts and the public need to see details of the Government’s planned contact tracing app. By way of follow-up, ICCL, DRI and others have drafted principles for legislators on the implementation of new technologies. These principles seek to frame positive engagement with Government and legislators on the implementation of technologies developed in-house or in partnership with third parties, such as Covid-19 contact-tracing apps. The principles (pdf; via here) are set out below; and, once again, I am proud to be a signatory.



Principles for legislators on the implementation of new technologies

The Irish Government and Irish legislators must not abandon their legal responsibilities to ensure any tech solution deployed as part of public policies is developed with human rights at the front and centre, and has robust privacy protections.

In a democracy, any technology developed by a government or in partnership with third parties, will need to have the trust and consent of the population to work effectively.…

Read More »

Happy birthday, GDPR

25 May, 202028 September, 2020
| No Comments
| GDPR

Happy birthday GDPR

Article 99(2) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation) provides:

It shall apply from 25 May 2018.


Bonus (1): From the Discworld & Terry Pratchett Wiki:

Glorious Revolution

Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard-Boiled Egg!

Terry Pratchett memorial lilacThe People’s Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May is depicted in Night Watch. … A few streets around Treacle Mine Road were barricaded at first. Soon more people started barricading streets, barricades were moved forward and merged together, covering at least a quarter of the city – including the food industry. The resulting area was called The People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road. …

Following Terry’s announcement about Alzheimer, calls have been made to wear lilac on the 25th of May as a tribute, and to raise money for Alzheimer research. …

May 25th is also national Geek Pride Day and Towel Day, a day in honour of Douglas Adams. This has led to some fans having to choose between the two, until someone came up with the lilac towel [additional link; possible source].…

Read More »

Welcome to the Irish Blawgosphere: Tom O’Malley on Sentencing, Crime and Justice

11 May, 202011 May, 2020
| No Comments
| Irish law

Tom O'Malley, NUIGA few weeks ago, Tom O’Malley (academic, barrister, law commissioner; pictured right) started a new and important blog, called Sentencing, Crime and Justice. His logic and timing are impeccable:

A New Blog: here we go….

… when a man is under lockdown and knowing that it may be years before he gets busy again (at the bar at least) or that he might even be swept into oblivion at any moment by the Corona virus, he should take advantage of his leisure to start a blog. It will deal mainly with criminal law, sentencing and criminal procedure though it may occasionally stray into other areas of law as well.

Céad míle fáilte romhat, Tom, chuig an Blawg O’Sphere!…

Read More »

Irish copyright law must enable digital deposit (updated and corrected)

1 May, 202011 December, 2020
| No Comments
| Copyright, Digital deposit

Helen Shenton; via tcd.ie (element)In an earlier post, I took Frank McNally’s Irishman’s Diary from the weekend as the starting point to explore the modern constitutional relevance of the leading copyright case of Donaldson v Becket (1774) 2 Bro PC (2d) 129, 1 ER 837, [1774] EngR 47 (22 February 1774) (pdf); (1774) 4 Burr 2408, 98 ER 257 (pdf). It is one of the most famous cases in the history of copyright law; and McNally’s point was that one of the counsel for the successful party hailed originally from Co Roscommon. Before getting to my discussion of the case, I noted that the column had been illustrated with a picture of a young reader in the Long Room of Trinity College Dublin’s Old Library. The column and image also moved my Trinity colleague Helen Shenton (pictured left), our Librarian and College Archivist, to respond, in her case by way of a Letter to the Editor:

Digital black hole in our national memory

Sir, – Frank McNally’s amusing observations about Ireland’s long chequered relationship with copyright history (An Irishman’s Diary, April 25th) was illustrated by a photograph of the gallery of the beautiful Long Room in the Library at Trinity College Dublin.

…

Read More »

HSE app: experts and public need to see details

30 April, 20203 June, 2020
| 2 Comments
| Data Protection

Covid-19 Tracing App

I am proud to be a signatory to the letter below, from the ICCL website:

Covid-19 is a threat to us all. Ireland’s health services are developing a Covid Tracker Ireland App, which has both contact-tracing and symptom-reporting elements.

We, the undersigned civil societies, scientists, and academics believe that more consideration needs to be given to the production of an app solution. The Ada Lovelace Institute’s assessments of contact-tracing apps warn of insufficient evidence saying the ‘technical limitations, barriers to effective deployment and social impacts demand more consideration’.

If Ireland decides to use an app we must ensure that it respects legality and human rights norms. Failing to do so will undermine the public trust required for it to have public health benefits. In developing the app, the Health Service Executive (HSE) and the Department of Health should:

  1. Embrace transparency and promote trust. To better protect privacy and personal data, the European Data Protection Board advises that source code cannot be concealed and must be shared publicly and regularly audited by external experts. It is vital that the public trusts the solutions of our government.
  2. Design for privacy and data protection. Protection of citizens’ public data must be considered in the basic design.
…

Read More »

On World Intellectual Property Day, the modern Irish constitutional relevance of an Irish angle on Donaldson v Beckett (1774)

26 April, 202029 April, 2020
| 1 Comment
| Copyright

Today is World Intellectual Property Day. In 2000, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) designated 26 April – the day on which the WIPO Convention came into force in 1970 – as World IP Day to increase general understanding of IP and to celebrate “the role that intellectual property (IP) rights play in encouraging innovation and creativity”. I’ve marked it in the past (here and here) on this blog. To join in this year’s celebrations, Frank McNally’s Irishman’s Diary in yesterday’s Irish Times considered “Ireland’s chequered history of copyright law“. It is illustrated with a picture of a young reader in the Long Room of Trinity College Dublin’s Old Library (sadly, the young reader does not appear in the cropped version of the photograph in the print edition); and the column ends with an account of the dispute over St Columba’s copying of St Finian’s copy of the Vulgate of St Jerome (though not mentioned in the column, these elements of the story are connected, since a highlight of the Old Library is the Book of Kells, written in the scriptoria of Columba’s monasteries in Kells and Iona).

Apart from these obvious tropes, the centrepiece of McNally’s Diary is a genuinely interesting story about Roscommon-born, but London-based, writer and lawyer Arthur Murphy (1727–1805) (pictured above left).…

Read More »

Coronavirus and copyright – or, the copyright concerns of the widespread move to online instruction – updated

15 March, 202023 March, 2020
| 6 Comments
| Copyright, CRC12 / CRC13

Update: this post has been updated to discuss the Irish Copyright Licencing Agency’s applicable licences.


Coronavirus CopyrightI work in Trinity College Dublin, which announced on Tuesday that education would be delivered online from next Monday. The National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education has put together a very useful spreadsheet of links to useful online teaching resources. But, in our race to go online in time to deliver classes to our students, we must not forget that copyright law continues to apply. In that regard, I’m delighted to note that recent reforms to Irish copyright law will make all of our lives easier. The Copyright and Other Intellectual Property Law Provisions Act 2019 (also here) [COIPLPA] amended the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000 (also here) [CRRA] in various significant ways, in particular relating to online educational uses of copyright material.

Section 50 CRRA provides for an exception of fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, section 53 provides for an exception for acts done for the purposes of instruction or examination, and section 57 provides for an exception for reprographic copying by educational establishments. Article 5(3)(a) of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society (OJ L 167, 22.6.2001, p.…

Read More »

Posts navigation

Previous 1 2 3 … 172 Next

Welcome

Me in a hat

Hi there! Thanks for dropping by. I’m Eoin O’Dell, and this is my blog: Cearta.ie – the Irish for rights.


“Cearta” really is the Irish word for rights, so the title provides a good sense of the scope of this blog.

In general, I write here about private law, free speech, and cyber law; and, in particular, I write about Irish law and education policy.


Academic links
Academia.edu
ORCID
SSRN
TARA

Subscribe

  • RSS Feed
  • RSS Feed
  • Subscribe via Email
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

Recent posts

  • Three reflections on the role of policy in the law of restitution for unjust enrichment – updated
  • The Zong, In Our Time
  • The truth, pure and simple, as a defence to defamation claims after Depp v NGN
  • Still kicking the can on defamation reform after four years
  • Defamation, the Galapagos Islands Division of the law of torts
  • Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-anam dilís
  • Striking the balance of the constitutional protections of free speech and good name in Irish defamation cases

Archives by month

Categories by topic

Recent tweets

Tweets by @cearta

Licence

Creative Commons License

This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. I am happy for you to reuse and adapt my content, provided that you attribute it to me, and do not use it commercially. Thanks. Eoin

Credit where it’s due

Some of those whose technical advice and help have proven invaluable in keeping this show on the road include Dermot Frost, Karlin Lillington, Daithí Mac Síthigh, and
Antoin Ó Lachtnáin. I’m grateful to them; please don’t blame them :)

Thanks to Blacknight for hosting.

Feeds and Admin

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

© cearta.ie 2021. Powered by WordPress