Naked Law

Sun heats up New Delhi data security fears

Financial services organisations who send their customers' data to India will not have welcomed the recent story in The Sun about Karan Bahree, who apparently offered to sell to a journalist the personal data of thousands of UK residents.  The precise details are disputed (and Bahree has now been sacked by his employers), but apparently he was able to obtain personal details from call centre operators who were willing to sell the data.  The Sun reported that high street banks including Barclays, the Woolwich, HSBC and Lloyds TSB were affected.

UK businesses holding personal data are subject to the Data Protection Act; often, when a UK business uses a call centre in India, the call centre acts as a subcontractor and a "data processor", subject to the terms of its contract with the UK business; the UK business is still the "data controller" and as such remains liable for any breaches of the Act.  I suspect that in many instances, the financial services organisations who were implicated in The Sun's sting will be checking the agreements with their Indian sub-contractors for the terms dealing with data security ...

Getting EURid of sunrise squatters

The creation of .EU domains by the European Commission in April 2006 has created bitterness amongst many business owners. The regulatory body EURid has revealed that up to 40% of the 1 million domains already registered could have gone to squatters, therefore denying legitimate companies access to their .EU names. These squatters apparently used the so-called ‘sunrise’ period to purchase the domains by providing inaccurate information to pass the eligibility criteria.

EURid, the non-profit Belgian company selected to regulate .EU has said that it will confiscate any domains acquired in that manner. Controversially however, EURid has said that an individual or company who makes a profit from selling on their domain can keep their profit, even if it was registered in contravention to the EURid guidelines, if the transaction occurs before the squatter is discovered.

Meanwhile the Czech Arbitration Court charged with hearing .EU disputes, has been ruling in favour of trade mark owners who have fallen victim to squatters. Most recently a company was stripped of its domain by the Court who then gave it to a UK firm. As the primary business of the squatter was in the US, it failed to meet the requirements of being an EU-based entity.

Slimmer pickings for squatters

Tesco's successful infringement action against Elogicom's use of domain names such as "tescodiets.co.uk" to direct traffic to Tesco's web site (Tesco Stores Ltd v Elogicom) illustrates how agile Courts need to be to address each new ingenious mechanism for use of well known trade marks on the internet.

In this case Tesco had agreed through TradeDoubler to pay a commission for traffic directed to the Tesco web site through some innocuous domains, which had no reference to Tesco's name in them.  Elogicom apparently then obtained a number of domains which included the Tesco name and used these to redirect traffic to the Tesco site -- exactly the sort of thing that people typing in those domains would have hoped for, so hardly a source of confusion for the punter.  What Tesco objected to was that they, Tesco, were being asked to pay commission on such redirections.  Quite a nice little earner if Elogicom could pull it off -- using a trade mark owner's name to attract custom to the trade mark owner's web site and take a small cut along the way!  Commission apparently increased from about £70 per month to about £27,000 per month.  The judge was having none of it: Summary judgement all round.

A good result for trade mark owners: we have seen an increasing trend for "infringers" to use domain names to redirect users to the trade mark owners own web site -- either directly or through parking sites.  Food for thought as well,  should trade mark owners register their trade marks to cover a "service" analogous to that identified by the judge as "[Elogicom's] own service to the public, in the form of providing a pathway through the internet to Tesco websites", something which was (sort of) covered by Tesco's registrations.

It ain't no re-use

An article in today's online Guardian caught our eye. It refers to the superb travel time maps which have been created by an organisation called MySociety, and suggests that Ordnance Survey's charges for data use are prohibitively high for similar maps to be made available online by a charity.  Ordnance Survey are subject to the 2005 Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations, which place restrictions on the terms of use and charges which can be applied to "content" generated by various public sector bodies. The Regulations include a formal complaints procedure, and it will be interesting to see over time how the Regulations impact on the terms and costs of content provided by organisations such as the OS.

Is UK right to copy Aussie copyright?

Australia are about to change their copyright laws to allow people to rip music to their iPods and MP3 players by introducing new fair use exemptions, including an exemption for private use (see Rip it up (and start again?)). Are we about to do the same in the UK?

Under current UK law consumers who rip music they have bought from CDs to their iPods or MP3 players would infringe copyright. However, Peter Jamieson, Chairman of the UK record companies' trade association, the British Phonographic Industry, told the House of Commons Select Committee for Culture, Media Sport Inquiry into New Media and the Creative Industries on 6 June:

"We believe that we now need to make a clear and public distinction between copying for your own use and copying for dissemination to third parties and make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs for their own private use in order to move the music from format to format we will not pursue them."

The question now is whether or not there will be an explicit change in the law to reflect this or whether there will simply be a change in the nature of the licence on the CD. Instead of the wording "all rights reserved" perhaps we will start to see on the CD inlay a limited licence to copy to other formats for personal use.