Filed under: law | Tags: binyman mohammed, false advertising, irony, master of the rolls, MI5, neuberger, proscribing groups, terrorism, terrorism act 2000
The Terrorism Act 2000 allows the government to proscribe groups which:
commits or participates in acts of terrorism, prepares for, promotes or encourages terrorism or is otherwise concerned in terrorism”.
The reason I mention this is that I last heard it being used by Alan Johnson as a nuclear option against Islam4UK, the attention seeking publicity whore of a personal quest for fame that wanted to protest the killing of Muslims by British soldiers by marching with fake coffins through the place where British soldiers were marching with real coffins and so proving that you don’t need to be big, a real group or even serious about doing it to be terrifically inappropriate.
I’ve always regarded the implications of proscribing a group under the 2000 Act as ludicrously excessive – it makes it a custodial, terrorist related offence to not report seeing someone displaying the group’s logo, even if it’s being displayed ironically. It also makes it possible to go to jail for a terrorist offence if you own an ironic t-shirt. It’s just false advertising to me – these are just not what you think of when you hear “terrorist offences” and yet the Terrorism Act is what you’d be charged under.
However, the recent judgement in the trial of R (Binyam Mohammed) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and particularly Lord Neuberger’s comments at paragraph 168, which are currently unpublished, but to quote Jonathan Sumption were something like:
- that the Security Service does not in fact operate in a culture that respects human rights or abjures participation in coercive interrogation techniques;
- that this was in particular true of Witness B whose conduct was in this respect characteristic of the service as a whole (‘it appears likely that there were others’);
- that officials of the Service deliberately misled the Intelligence and Security Committee on this point;
- that this reflects a culture of suppression in its dealings with the Committee, the Foreign Secretary and indirectly the Court, which penetrates the service to such a degree as to under any UK government assurances based on the Service’s information and advice; and
- that the Service has an interest in suppressing information which is shared, not by the Foreign Secretary himself (whose good faith is accepted), but by the Foreign Office for which he is responsible.
So, bearing in mind point i, are we in a position where the Home Secretary may make it a crime to be a member of our intelligence services? Obviously not, even I’m not serious about the idea and I’m suggesting it on my blog. The thing is, he could.
NB: The inhuman treatment (David Miliband is at pains to point out that “inhuman treatment” isn’t quite as bad as “torture”, which is the sort of statement that makes you want to punch Foreign Secretaries in the face) Binyam Mohammed received includes “genital mutilation” – basically while Mohammed was in Morocco someone, presumably to make him answer questions, took a razor blade to his gentleman area. Speaking as a guy this is never acceptable and means that I, and half of the population of the world, sympathise with him on general principle. Great job, SyS.
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Filed under: law | Tags: assisted suicide, balances, battered wife syndrome, checks, evidence, gilderdale, Guardian, homicide, murder
I’m politically liberal, I believe in a small state and I believe in the right to autonomy. Therefore, you’d assume, I’d be one of those wondering “how could a bereaved mother [Kay Gilderdale] be put through the agony of a trial for attempted murder?”
In fact, I think one of the most vital things that the state should limit itself to doing is, when it finds one citizen attempting to end the life of another, to come along and ask in a comically plummy voice, “what’s going on here then?”
I was reading Gilderdale’s trial was horrific but necessary to retain a vital principle – Madeline Bunting in today’s Guardian and thought that she was really spot on. I have my own issues with assisted suicide but I think her observations are vitally important too, particularly in that it’s important not to subtly (or not) encourage people to end their own lives. I’d hope you wouldn’t tell a man on a bridge to jump, so you wouldn’t do it to an elderly relative either.
I think calls that the Gilderdale trial was a mistake are entirely wrong. I think that we need to be careful to watch who we put on trial but if someone is connected with the suspicious, non-natural death of a human being (let’s hypothetically say my death) they should damn well have to explain what they were doing. People who try to end others’ lives are not the sort of people we need to keep out of court. I don’t like the idea of accepting things which let you kill people – I don’t think it ends well.
I think if you kill someone in self defence you should have to show that it was self defence, if you were provoked you should have to show that you were provoked. Self defence lets you get away with murder, we really need to be careful with that. I think if someone claims they killed someone to end their suffering they should equally have to show that they did it to end their suffering and regardless, because every single murder victim in history was going to die eventually anyway, if they were actually OK with living in suffering that should never ever be a defence.
The problem with all of homicide defences based on the victim’s conduct (self defence, battered wife syndrome, assisted suicide etc) is that it is very hard to get the victim’s side of things afterwards. It’s hard to say you didn’t hit your wife after your murder, for example, and it’s also hard to say you didn’t consent to your death. If someone wishes to escape responsibility on the basis that you wanted to die and they were only carrying out your wishes I would humbly want someone to check that out.
We don’t have a legal right to die, we have an absolute certainty to it. What we do have is a right to life. If someone dies, potentially in very violent circumstances, it is a big deal and we should accept that. There are many reason that a carer might kill their patient, or even a mother might kill her daughter which have nothing to do with dignity or choice or love or anything else that is good.
I would hate for my murderer to get off because I was sick. Don’t just take their word for it.
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Welcoming speech
Welcome everyone to Blawg Review #248, this week hosted at scotslawstudent.com. Today is the 251st anniversary of celebrated Scottish poet Robert Burns’ birth, which took place on this day in 1759. Burns was a prolific poet who wrote his best work in Scots, which is not the same as English, and he also recorded traditional Scottish music and spread it to a much wider audience than ever before. He’s why you probably sang Auld Lang Syne on New Year’s Eve no matter where you live.
Robert Burns
The traditional way of marking the birthday is with haggis (an indigenous hill dwelling creature with legs shorter on one side than the other and hunted with a net), neaps (mashed turnips), tatties (potatoes, same), whisky (uisge beatha, “water of life” – a popular local health tonic), poetry (by Burns) and song (by the same). Bagpipes and other musical accompaniment is sometimes considered optional but very welcome.
Unfortunately, due to some technical limitations of internet technology, your host can only offer you a review of some of the best legal blog posts made this week.
Readers should feel free to follow tradition while you read this blawg review, however, luckily the transatlantic haggis trade has reopened just in time, as reported in today’s Guardian, so American Burns fans can now buy haggis openly instead of with their Cuban cigars.
The “great chieftan o’ the puddin-race” was one of earliest casualties of the BSE crisis of the 1980s-90s, banned on health grounds by the US authorities in 1989 because they feared its main ingredient ‑ minced sheep offal ‑ could prove lethal.
A Burns Supper is simply a typical formal meal with food in courses, drink, speeches, a very sharp knife and bagpipes. Like many cultural events it is most commonly seen outside of its country of origin, and particularly in the US.
Speaking of the US, something called the Supreme Court made up its mind on something called Citizens United v FEC this week, you may have heard about this. Sounds serious.
The law everywhere has trouble dealing with what a legal person, like companies, unions, charities, trusts and so on is, since it’s clearly not a person in the normal sense, and what rights and responsibilities of natural persons they should get. For example, people are allowed to give to political parties, should companies?
The Citizens United judgement provides the lion’s share of US legal blogging for this week because it reverses the previous position on US electoral donations. Both Liz Kurtz at the Legal Blog Watch and Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy provides a set of links providing a number of perspectives on the 5-4 decision.
Some “critics and dissenters immediately predicted it would alter elections in 2010 and beyond by unleashing a new flood of corporate and union money into a system already awash with special-interest funds” wrote Tony Mauro in The National Law Journal.
(Legal Blog Watch)
We, in Britain, also have a Supreme Court to oversee our legal system. Well, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and so on do. Scotland is, yet again, an edge case as Professor Neil Walker reported on Friday, basically because we might secede. Absolvitor, a good resource of Scottish facing legal issues, summarises the various avenues of appeal Scottish litigants possess:
As you know, the current position is that in civil cases, a right of appeal lies from the Inner House of the Court of Session to the Supreme Court. In criminal matters, the High Court of Justiciary (sitting in an appellate capacity) is the final court of appeal. Unless there is a “devolution matter” raised (usually a human rights point), in which case the Supreme Court will take a look. Happy so far? Good.
Needless to say Independence (with a big I) would change everything again. Do not be surprised if a lot of people get confused.
Selkirk Grace
One of Burns’ pithiest poems is the Selkirk Grace, dealing with misfortune and inequality (and thankfulness for not being in that situation) in society in four lines.
Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.
Sadly this remains the case today and with the recent earthquake in Haiti still constantly in the news the role of charity has been brought to the forefront.
Inksters is a Glasgow based firm of solicitors who have made great and innovative use of social networking and internet communications in general. I discovered the ARTL (Automated Registration of Title to Land) system for electronic property conveyancing through the @BrianInkster twitter feed.
Brian Inkster has made it clear that he possesses an active social conscience and he is not long returned from a Habitat for Humanity Global Village Challenge in Argentina. The firm’s Give Blog has been nominated for a Scotblogs Award and I’d encourage others to check that out.
Entrance of the haggis
For a main course I thought I would start with three blawg reviews aside from the venerable Blawg Review.
It is really very hard, I’ve discovered, to do a good review of the goings on in the legal sphere and CharonQC’s Herculean task of reviewing the events every day demands recognition. It’s been an eventful week in Britain, with terror alert increases, an Iraq war inquiry, a legal costs review, assisted suicide (including a proposal for legislative reform in Scotland), home defence criminality and more. CharonQC, with the help of roja, deals with it.
The facts of this case are well known. The case caused an outcry, prompting politicians to respond “robustly”. Many lawyers took the view that the self defence, reasonable and proportionate force, laws in this country are sufficient. Many, including me, felt that the trial judge was right to sentence Mr Hussain and his brother to prison. Chasing someone down the road and battering them so badly with a cricket bat that the bat broke and the victim suffered serious injury is not self defence. It may well be a completely understandable reaction, but no matter how one looks at it, it is retribution. It is vengeance. It is taking the law into your own hands.
(I happen to agree, I think self defence is a powerful defence which needs respected)
Also noteworthy is the 16th A Round Tuit which came out this week, dealing with a range of issues, from the overabundance of law students (eek) to the ongoing Google v China dispute through the medium of Conan O’Brien.
I may not be an avid late night TV watcher and I can hardly care less which network or host prevails in the ratings battle, but I’ve been closely following the fiasco NBC created when it tried to juggle one too many hosts and came up a time slot or two short. Why the sudden interest? In short, because this week late night was all about contracts and intellectual property and was on at a reasonable hour.
The Conglomerate Blog makes the leap between the Google v China dispute and Citizens United. Both show the role of the company in relation to public power. This makes a short essay that is worth checking out.
I would argue that Google’s threat to leave China because of government intrusion into its operations can be seen as a victory for those who advocate for corporate social responsibility. And the Citizens United decision obviously represents a victory for those who want to see corporations as not being creatures of the state, but rather as persons that can check government action. But these two victories pose thorny intellectual problems for the victors.
The Legal Underground does Weekly Law School Roundup #208 from Buenos Aires. He links to a set of exam tips “They all say it so it must be true” that have always served me well and I would highlight them to other students going through the same trials.
- Come into the exam with a good attitude, be calm and confident
- Read the call of the question first!
- Read slowly and carefully
- Spend time outlining your answers
- Answer the damn question! Make sure you understand what he is asking! Dont answer questions he isnt asking. FOLLOW DIRECTIONS!
Address To a Haggis
The most famous part of the Burns supper is where the Haggis is piped into the room, the Address to a Haggis is recited and it is sliced open. I think this provides as much of a chance to slew into lawyer branding as I’m ever going to have.
Keven O’Keefe at Lexblog.com provides 4 questions to let you define your personal brand.
- What differentiates you from everyone else who might have a similar background or set of experiences?
- What skills, abilities, knowledge and attitudes do you have (or are developing) that will make people want to work with, follow or ‘friend’ you — online or off?
- What value can you create for others as a friend, blogger, colleague, teammate, boss or subordinate?
- What will make you satisfied and fulfilled that you are indeed making a contribution?
I think I could handle this style of branding myself – this sounds a lot like simply evaluating your professional life and it’s a lot less strenuous and time consuming than the rest of social media can be.
Loyal toast
Unfortunately, although the time has come to toast the Monarch, I can’t find a legal blogger who talked about her in the last week. So it falls upon me – raise your glasses, good on you Queenie, keep up the good work.
Immortal memory
Burns was a serious ladies’ man, a poet, a writer and it’s probably safe to assume that he’d be the sort to let a TV camera turn his head. A worry which surrounds the legal profession is that judges and lawyers are also the sort to let cameras turn their heads. The issue of cameras in court has been discussed widely in blawgosphere but Ramblings of a Scottish Studentappeals to me for the Scottish, student perspective.
There are some concerns around TV cameras being routinely allowed into courts. Justice is supposed to be open, but there are times where sensitive issues are being dealt with and TV cameras in the court room may make these harder to conduct. Also, there is a fear that the legal profession (including judges) may be tempted to “act up” to the cameras.
Appreciation
Scott Greenfield gave the US facing Judge Kozinski perspective a little while ago. I think Scott Greenfield talks a lot of sense on his blawg and I’m a fan.
I agree with him on cameras in court I’d like to be able to watch it on TV to learn from but that’s not what court’s there for.
Toast to the Lassies
I feel terrible relegating an interesting post on mediation, how it can go wrong and Texas to this position of the supper. I really like ADR and I try to read and learn about it whenever I get the chance.
My limited experience of mediation shows that it needs a reasonable attempt on both sides for it to possibly work. Holly Hayes Bovio comments on ‘Bad Faith Mediation: Bad News for Mediators’ (Susan Schultz, Texas Mediator, Winter edition) and the implications this has on mediator confidentiality.
Ms. Schultz refers also to the subchapter of the Texas ADR Procedures Act devoted to “impartial third parties”. She asks, “How does the mediator build trust among the parties and maintain impartiality when the mediator is also tasked with reporting bad faith based on each party’s conduct? Making the mediator the watchdog for bad faith is not consistent with impartiality.”
Toast to the Laddies
One of the more inevitable outcomes of picking a side against homosexual liberties is that eventually someone will make you the butt of a joke. Legal Pad comments on an IP battle when a pro- proposition 8 group found out that their logo had been parodied by a pro marriage equality group.
The SF Gate’s Scavenger blog reports that the righteous forces of Yes on 8 are not amused that their stick-figure logo for straight families united against unstraight families has been parodied (or, hey, infringed) by the folks from across the aisle (political aisle, not the one a wedding party walks).
A pro-marriage-equality group parodied the ProtectMarriage.com logo for its Prop 8 Trial Tracker site (hope they’re following Dan Levine’s daily stream of insightful courtroom tweets). Prop8_yeson8_logo And, shockingly, the ProtectMarriage people turn out to be kinda upset about it. I know, who saw that coming? So we have a suit for infringement, blah blah. We present the logos of both sides for your consideration.
Other toasts and speeches
Law schools
Law schools have always had a real problem fitting into a role, from their first days they had to fit into a legal system where people learned about philosophy or classics at university and then going into practice to learn by doing from a working lawyer. In the early days nascent law schools needed to avoid stepping on too many legally trained toes. Over the last century or so this has developed into a situation where law has split into distinctly academic and “trench” law. This leaves law graduates (and undergrads just doing work experience, I’ve had this experience myself) realising that merely knowing Lord Atkin’s neighbourhood test doesn’t set you up to be a practising lawyer.
Wired GC quotes a new law graduate to show this reaction:
“I just graduated from law school; I know me, I wouldn’t hire me as my lawyer at this point.”
I recall when BabyBarista took his first case, a sanguine repeat offender who calmly accepted that he was not a greatly experienced lawyer. I imagine few others would.
Legal writing
Legal writing is a major issue for everyone ranging from the 1Ls, through the 3Ls (like me) and of course to practitioners. I imagine Justice Steven’s pen must still be smoking after his 90 page dissent in Citizens. It’s a specialised skill that I have a sadly fluctuating grasp of.
The (new) legal writer provides a set of references which helps people trying to write plainly, typesetting, and proof reading. I read this sort of thing all the time, I don’t think you can get enough advice for how you perform.
To that end UCL Practitioner suggests another 30 posts.
Events in Scotland
I mention Lord Atkin’s famous test from Donoghue v Stevenson because it gives me a good tie to a pair of websites dedicated to the snail in the ginger beer case. Paisley is a Scottish city and so the case was initially a delict action, only becoming a tort when it reached the House of Lords.
thepaisleysnail.com is a site dedicated purely to the “most famous case in the common law world” as an historical interest. It includes a talk from Lord Denning, known to administrative law students as “da man.”
The other, thepaisleysnail.blogspot.com/, is a teaching blog for mini trials. I find the concept of HMA v Goldilocks, heard at St Margaret’s Junior School in November, to be exactly the sort of thing that the law needs in a county where too often your first introduction to the criminal justice system (or any law at all) is at the wrong end of a Children’s Panel. I would have loved to have that in my primary school.
Post dinner singing
Often, once the speeches are out of the way in a Burns Supper, it devolves into a singathon which goes through all of his songs that at least one person present knows the words and/or tune of.
One reason that people can so readily repeat Burns’ work, even in the most glitzy of corporate events is that Burns’ copyright has lapsed and his works are now in the public domain. This is not always the case and the spectre of IP infringement and IP enforcement hovers over practically every user of the internet in one way or another.
ICANN, back at the turn of the century, created a quasi-arbitration process for dealing with cybersquatting. This UDRP was to deal with people who registered domain names which were confusingly similar to another’s trademark. This problem arises everywhere where there is a scarcity of names which correspond to multiple parties’ interests, even if there is no process in place to deal with it like with domain names. Twitter suffers from this scarcity in terms of account names. The principle concern is trade mark dilution although flat out bad faith deception is also possible. The Chicago IP Litigation Blog provides a guide to identifying and stopping peope who are masquerading as you:
- Claim Your Names
- Play Sherlock Holmes
- Get Your Name Back
- Take Action
- Use Your New Twitter Identity
Likelihood of confusion follows up with advice on the branding of, not whisky, but wine. He provides useful realist advice – for example “Your advice should not place undue weight on the so-called merits of the inevitable legal challenge to your client’s business. These are irrelevant unless your client is funded for extensive litigation” – that doesn’t just talk about what can be done but what probably should be done.
Also remind your client that copyright has its own penumbras and emanations, and can often be seen quacking very much like a twademark–consider the recent “60 Years Later” ruling granting a monopoly to J.D. Salinger on the concept of Holden Caulfield. If there’s any way copyright can be assserted against your client, which is likely considering that the work you refer to does have a copyright, it will be.
Vote of thanks
And this draws to a close an intense couple days of blog watching. It’s been very educational and I think it’s been a good week for scouring the blawgosphere. Thanks to Ed. of the Blawg Review for picking the Scots Law Student for this week. Thanks for reading, have a hearty Burns’ Night. Sláinte.
Filed under: law | Tags: benefits, Big Brother, cameras in court, court, judicial reform, litigation, modern, openness, technology, TV
Cameras in court is one of the prenennial issues that keeps coming back into the news. The primary argument seems to be that they are a necessary element to provide a democratic nation with open courts. Another, slightly dodgy, argument is that courts need to be modern.
The problem with that is defending a decision to be open solely on the basis of openness slightly misses the point. Openness is a noble principle for public bodies but it is not a particularly useful end in itself, if it was clothes and curtains would be illegal. The idea of making things open is that it will make things better through the increased amount of oversight rather than a direct connection of openness to quality. That’s putting the cart before the horse. Openness is a means, not an end.
Saying that you should modernise things because they can be modernised is an even worse situation for any system to be in and you end up with examples like the NHS hit and miss database systems (some are good, some are massive failures). The advantages of doing modernisation right are numerous but you do it for the advantages, not the modernisation.
The advantages that come from openness are huge, it’s necessary for people who are expected to obey the edicts of courts to generally trust that the people in the court are not going to put on a black cap and send them down for funsies and so justice needs to be seen to be done. Also openness is one of the biggest cures for corruption (up to a point, if you get to the point where “everyone knows” about corrupt officials openness is the least of your worries) and this is a good thing, you should be against corruption in any legal system.
That means that I don’t think promoters of the move really get to say that court TV will make the court system work better than it does now. We need openness in the court for several reasons but whether that is in the form of public rights of access or in published judicial decisions or in a live TV camera in every court is another matter entirely. Whether the rigmarole of setting up broadcast feeds from inside courtrooms (commentators from the US have found this creates a substantial delay) is worth the chance that,
- something will be done wrongly,
- someone will see,
- recognise the mistake and
- do something about it
or
- someone will not attempt to do something wrong that they would have done on the existing audio recording but will not because of the camera recording them,
is something that would require quite careful research to answer.
Things don’t get better just because you can watch them on TV nor is being able to watch it on TV what makes it good, just look at Big Brother.
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Filed under: law | Tags: assumption, copyright, flickr, image licensing, infringement, joel tenebaun, Justice, legal highs, MD5 sum, photographer, RIAA, rights, the independent
19-1-10: This has now been resolved – an apology was given and an invoice for £100 is working its way through the Independent’s offices. I think that’s a good resolution – image licensing is something that the newspaper does every day after all. Congratulations to PeteZab for sticking with it to the conclusion. A lot of commentators on the flickr thread had written his chances off.
Citizen journalism is a big deal these days, and uncharitably it has been linked to the recently reduced profitability of publishing companies behind the newspaper industry. Citizen journalists don’t really know what they should be paid and professional journalists know all too well. I really don’t know what I’d ask for if a photograph I own ended up in a newspaper – £10? £1000? It all depends on the details of the case. Apparently £150 is about what an English person should “expect”, but that’s a Man-Down-The-Pub’s-guess of a figure. I have no idea about Scottish people whatsoever.
One recent example of this was the Independent running a series of pictures of the recent (it’s only just away in my area) snow. They basically just hooked, to be hip and technical, a steam from Flickr.com using the Flickr API. This is, a) an easier way for websites to embed Web 2.0 content into their own sites and, b) (according to the Independent) apparently a hidden loophole in the pretty general rules on what constitutes publishing photographs. Does publishing count as copying the image from Flickr’s servers and putting it onto an Independent server or can it include embedding it into a commercial website and surrounding it with adverts? The Pirate Bay case law provides an international opinion.
It might not seem like a big deal – a newspaper puts a slideshow of pretty pictures on its website. Except that they just embedded the slideshow, they didn’t go out and get permission to use the photographs. When one photographer noticed one of his images, to which he had reserved all rights, being used in the stream he sent off a message to the newspaper asserting his rights. This is quite right and is how these things work, you need to assert your rights or the other party will never know you’re unhappy with their behaviour.
Dear Independent,
I notice you’re using one of my images without any acknowledgement (or permission) on your website, the link is as follows,
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/snow- in-the-uk-se…
The image is on my Flickr site at the following address and is marked as ©All rights reserved.
www.flickr.com/photos/petezab/4243266763/
I’m assuming this is an oversight; I am quite happy for you to use my image but this is, naturally, subject to the appropriate payment rate. I look forward to your response in due course.
This (I think quite reasonably) treats the issue as a transaction for image licensing, something a newspaper should be intimately familar with. Those pictures don’t get into the paper by magic. It’s not even refusing the paper retrospective permission to use the image with all the hassle that entails. Retrospective licensing is a very easy and clean way to resolve copyright infringement that never seems to be used by those suing individuals, for example RIAA v. Tenenbaum.
The reply from The Independent pretty much exemplifies why lots of people don’t like copyright these days. Here the big content company assumes that the smaller player waived his copyright by putting it online. The reverse would never be entertained – newspapers retain copyright over their online editions because that’s how copyright works and so it’s quite a clear double standard. I quite like copyright in principle but the imbalance in the scale of the players involved is one of the starkest in law.
Reply from The Independent, Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 5:46 PM
We took a stream from Flickr which is, as you know, a photo-sharing website. The legal assumption, therefore, is that you were not asserting your copyright in that arena. We did not take the photo from Flickr, nor present it as anything other than as it is shown there.
I do no consider, therefore, that any copyright has been breached or any payment due.
As you can see that was ten days ago and the photographer has not been paid or, indeed, any right to the photo has not been accepted. The assumption that copyright has been actively waived, instead of the probably safer (though more expensive) assumption that copyright has been passively retained, means that it pays for content that the creator notices they used (and only those with determination to fight through the bureaucracy) rather than content that they use.
My copyright experience – watermarking
More regular readers of the blog may have noticed that I have started putting the characters “4dd6465fc78a86d0987870f88dffcb9c” at the bottom of my posts, when I remember, this is because I was the victim of an RSS scraper blog which copied the entirety of my “Legal highs – Not suitable for human consumption” post including the title, which I was pretty proud of and even seemed to be reasonably original back then. It’s there so that my posts can be found by searching for this 128-bit number instead of the words which I’ve used (which are less identifying). It’s not related to my rights, it just means I can track infringements down and show they come from me. This is why people should consider watermarking images which they put online, it’s not so that you have copyright, it just helps in enforcing your copyright.
Hat tip to: Boing Boing
(Trivia: The code at the bottom of my posts is the MD5 checksum I generated from a copy of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which I thought would be a nice geeky touch.)
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Filed under: law | Tags: cell phone, electronsensitivity, evidence, frequency, headache, iBurst, mobile phone, personal injury, power, radiation, wavelength, wifi
Electrosensitivity is one of the newer injury complaints that’s been making the rounds worldwide. Generally it boils down to microwave or radio radiation triggering allergy type reactions and like all personal injury actions the aim is to remedy the damage. Unusually for personal injury cases if someone manages to win one of these it will change modern life.
There is such a case working its way through the courts in South Africa on this issue and the defence has possibly revealed the biggest card ever. The pursuers allege that they have been harmed by a radio tower owned by iBurst. iBurst say that this could not have happened, not just because of issues I’ll mention in a second, but because they’d turned the tower off a month and a half before the residents even got together to discuss their problems. I’m not a lawyer but I think that’s a pretty good defence. I really hope it won’t adversely affect their much more sensible planning based dispute with the mast’s operator.
I have no doubt that most of those complaining about electrosensitivity have suffered the effects they claim but I’ve always been sceptical that their electronic equipment is doing it to them. Electromagnetic radiation was ancient in Benjamin Franklin’s time.
The problem with electrosensitivity claims is that there’s just no solid evidence that the things that people complain about are actually capable of doing what they’re being accused of, even before considering if they are doing it. It’s either in the situation that cigarettes were in the 60s or homoeopathy is now and we might look back in the future and think we were silly for ever thinking it could have been the other way. Right now no one’s been able to show conclusive links.
We all know that radiation is bad for us, we know to avoid sitting in the sun too long, and to stay away from nuclear waste and the business end of X-Ray machines. It would follow that avoiding the microwave radiation in a mobile phone would be a critical survival tip too, right?
Not really, it all depends on whether or not mobile phones are harmful for us or not. It could well be like avoiding a house cat just because tigers and lions are dangerous. The effect radiation has on people comes down to power, like a lot of things in life, and to wavelength, like rather fewer things in life. If there’s not enough power in a signal at the right wavelength then the wave won’t do anything to you and I think that’s really where we are with WiFi and mobile phone, the most common complaints, electrosensitivity cases.
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Filed under: law | Tags: 15%, 17.5%, increase, input tax, january 1, new year, output tax, tax, VAT
I wish a very happy new year to any and all readers of the blog. You’re awesome.
You will almost certainly have heard that the VAT rate is returning to its pre-credit crunch level tomorrow — 17.5% from 15%. The people complaining most bitterly about this are the retailers who claim this unreasonable 1/40 th increase in prices will kill off any recovery and kill their businesses.
Don’t believe it. VAT can be a wonderful thing for businesses because of a thing called “input tax” — businesses rated for VAT don’t pay VAT themselves, in fact they get to claim back any that they’re charged and offset it against any VAT that they themselves charge (“output tax“). That means that if you pay more VAT than you charge you actually get a tax rebate. For example charities that produce “zero-rated” goods and services can end up getting a quite substantial amount of money from Her Majesty’s Revenue. Effectively it means that just about everything your company buys costs you 15% – 17.5% less than it would cost a normal person.
As far as businesses are concerned there is simply a little bit (2.5 pence in every pound) more money going to and from their accounts than when the tax rate was reduced from exactly what it’s now going back to. It may impact profitability but as far as cashflow is concerned it can be balanced out by an identical increase in the amount of rebate-able input tax — you’re charging an extra 2.5% on your goods, but you’re also claiming an extra 2.5% back on your purchases. The scales of commerce have not suddenly become unbalanced.
On the other hand if you’re not a VAT rated company, if your products are tax exempt or, heaven forbid, you’re just a consumer then you should be a bit annoyed because VAT hates you and you can’t claim anything back.
Filed under: Searched, law | Tags: constitution, constiutional reform, election, house of lords, Justice, law lords, reform, Searched, supreme court
Short story
They’re not, they’re appointed.
Long story
I’ve been noticing a number of Supreme Court related search queries in the blog stats and thought this was a good question to be searching for because the Supreme Court is a new and critical part of our constitutional framework. I’ve studied the House of Lords reasonably well for mooting etc but I’ve read very little on the Supreme Court because it’s just not yet bubbled down to me. Therefore, pinch of salt should follow.
The Supreme Court is a horizontal shift for the House of Lords. It doesn’t actually gain any new powers but the judges get new emails, a new building and court room and they lose their robes and wigs (which I think is a shame).
There are 12 Justices of the Supreme Court who have simply stopped being Law Lords and started being Justices of the Supreme court one day. It’s really probably the best way to get your bench of venerable and well experienced judges from one court to another.
I think that elected judges are a pretty dangerous situation. You don’t actually want the guy who can literally send you to jail trying to appeal to people who read the Daily Mail, you’re not going to measure up. You end up with situations like the US where judges need to differentiate themselves through how tough they are on criminals. It makes wonderful headlines but it’s not exactly Baron Hume. I think there are considerable problems with the appointment model, it appears to be self propagating etc, but it is a better curtailing measure against concentrated state power (a very New World ideal) than if they and the legislature were both chasing after the same votes from the same voters. I think you really want a little bit of heterogeneity in your government.
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Filed under: Tech, law | Tags: dispute resolution, glenn beck, Internet, UDRP, WIPO
He lodged a complaint with the WIPO under the UDRP against a domain name owner he said was violating his trademark (see what I did there). An American individual registered a domain name which linked his name with various criminal acts — however the site didn’t accuse him of doing the acts, they just wanted to know why he won’t come out and publicly deny the serious allegations, a satirical reference to Beck’s own interviewing style — Beck promptly took legal advice and this led to the WIPO hearing. The extra-legal Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy is not perfect, it’s been widely criticised from the very outset for issues of accountability and bias not least in that the initial source of the policy is the World Intellectual Property Organisation and asking the WIPO how you should deal with copyright disputes between trademark owners and domain name owners is a little bit like asking the KKK how you should deal with disputes between white people and black people.
On the other hand, this dispute is quite a reassuring note that in the case of fairly clear situations the process does work. The UDRP deals with trademark violation and this is not a trademark violation so the action can’t succeed and that’s what’s been decided, although on a different ground because the domain name was held to be similar enough to be confusing.
It’s the specific details of the dispute which are quite entertaining. The reason behind the registrant registering the specific domain name he did is because it’s an Internet meme. It’s not the registrant making false allegations of felonies by Glenn Beck, he’s just copying a joke that’s on FARK. The third pillar of the test requires the trademark owner to prove bad faith so this is a huge deal. The thing is that Internet memes are elements from a (primarily American) subculture and it’s impossible to assume that any particular WIPO panel sitting in Geneva will know a lolcat from a rickroll. This means that the respondent’s submission needed to include a potted history of the Internet meme in between naturally quite dry analysis of relevant precedent and procedural (as opposed to legal) argument. It’s inordinately awesome to read about Leroy Jenkins on letter headed paper.
Perhaps most hearteningly of all is the statement released by the registrant after the decision was made – in the statement he gives Beck control of the domain (despite the panel ruling in the registrant’s favour) and says that the only reason he even disputed the point was to defend the American Constitution’s protections of free speech from Beck. It’s a surprisingly powerful and elegant declaration of patriotism for a dispute that came out of an Internet in-joke.
Arstechnica have a good, factually oriented review of the dispute that’s worth a read.
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