cearta.ie – Page 2 – the Irish for rights

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:

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.

Design for privacy and data protection. Protection of citizens’ public data must be considered in the basic design.

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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).…

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

15 March, 202023 March, 2020

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| Copyright, CRC12 / CRC13

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

I 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.…

The legal perils of hot coffee – from the Circuit Civil Court in Dublin to the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg

20 January, 2020

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| Tort

Without my first cup of coffee, I don’t function in the mornings. So, it’s not a surprise that some recent headlines about coffee caught my eye: Woman who was scalded when coffee spilled in her lap at drive-throughr awarded €30k damages (The Independent); Woman awarded €30,000 after takeaway coffee spill causes burns (The Irish Times); Woman (29) awarded €30k after she was scalded by coffee spill at McDonald’s drive-thru (The Journal.ie); Unable to have ‘intimate relations’ for 8 months: Woman, 29, receives €30k award after coffee spill (The Examiner); €30,000 for woman who could not have sex after McDonald’s scald horror (The Herald). All of the reports begin in the same way:

A 29-year-old woman, whose thighs and genitals were scalded when coffee was spilled in her lap at a McDonald’s drive-through takeaway in Clondalkin, Co Dublin, has been awarded €30,000 damages in the Circuit Civil Court.

Ciara Corboy, of Oatfield Avenue, Clondalkin, told Judge Francis Comerford that in November 2017 while being handed a large Americano at the drive-through restaurant at The Mill Shopping Centre, Clondalkin, a lid that had not been properly secured to the cup had come off causing her to be scalded in her thighs, groin and private parts.

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The Irish Government’s proposed Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill has a surprising omission

11 January, 202013 January, 2020

| 1 Comment

| Cyberlaw

Last October and November, I sketched the evolution of the government’s proposals for a digital safety commissioner. Following a consultation process last Spring, and missing the deadline of the end of the year by a few weeks, they have published their proposals for the general scheme of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill. In its current form, important elements are dangerously vague, and there is an unpardonable oversight in the drafting – like the famous mint, there is a hole in the middle of the Bill; unlike the mint, the hole isn’t meant to be there; and I will return to this point in the last paragraph below.

The Irish proposal is the newest in a long line of recent initiatives, at state and international level, that seek to regulate online content in various ways. For example, the EU has revised the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMS II) to regulate the audiovisual sector, it is promoting a code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online, and it has controversially expanded the reach of copyright online. The UK has proposed widespread regulation of online harms, the new government has promised to develop legislation to improve internet safety for all, and a draft Online Harm Reduction Bill is to be introduced as a Private Members Bill in the House of Lords.…

Damages for Data Protection Breaches – II – Why Murphy v Callinan is wrong

13 December, 2019

| 4 Comments

| Data Protection

In my previous post in this series, I argued (yet again) that Collins v FBD Insurance plc [2013] IEHC 137 (14 March 2013) was wrongly decided. It precludes a claim for damages for distress for breach of data protection rights, pursuant to section 7 of the Data Protection Act, 1988 (also here) [hereafter: section 7 DPA88]. Building on a case in which the Workplace Relations Commission ordered a company, whose CEO hacked into an employee’s phone and downloaded intimate photos of her from it, to pay her a total of €94,708 damages, I argued that, if the surreptitious download had occurred outside an employment relationship, the complainant should be able to recover damages for distress for breach of her data protection rights, pursuant to section 7 DPA88. However, when the Supreme Court was presented with an opportunity to depart from Collins, it did not take it. Instead, in Murphy v Callinan [2018] IESC 59 (30 November 2018) Baker J (Clarke CJ and Dunne J concurring) approved and applied Collins. In my previous post, I argued that Collins was wrong as a matter of domestic law, and of European law, and that Google Inc v Vidal-Hall [2016] QB 1003, [2015] EWCA Civ 311 (27 March 2015) and Case C–362/14 Schrems v Data Protection Commissioner (ECLI:EU:C:2015:650; CJEU, 6 October 2015) illustrated the EU law points and undercut the reasoning in Collins.…

Man wins ‘fleeting defamation’ case and is awarded €500 – should the law of defamation really concern itself with such a trifle?

12 December, 20194 March, 2020

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| 2016-17 Reform, Defamation

The latin maxim “de minimis non curat lex” is usually translated as “the law does not concern itself with trifles”, meaning the courts will not consider trifling matters. Christmas may be the time for trifles (like the Christmas trifle pictured left), but the Courts are not the place for them. I was reminded of the maxim today when I read the headline that a “Man wins ‘fleeting defamation’ case against Luas and is awarded €500“. The judge is reported (here and here) to have found that:

there was a “fleeting defamation” … but, “having regard to the fact it was almost immediately expunged”, he could not find any lasting damage to his reputation or good name. In the circumstances, he awarded nominal damages of €500 [plus costs] … There was a “momentary defamation” which was almost immediately corrected such that people in the vicinity could not have reasonably formed any lasting adverse opinion of the plaintiff, …

Given the trifling sum of nominal damages, the plaintiff is lucky to have received his costs. Even more so, in my view, is he lucky to have been successful at all. I don’t think that the law of defamation should be concerned with such trifles.…