A blog relating to Internet legal issues by Professor John Swinson, University of Queensland
Many people are aware of the use of cookies for tracking purposes. But that is old technology. Many advertisers use more sophisticated techniques for targeting advertisements, such as tracking pixels or audience matching or audience matched advertising.
In Australia, some advertising systems allow consumers to opt-out of audience matching targeting. This is not well-known or promoted. To opt-out, go here.
The High Court of Australia decided today that a newspaper with a Facebook page is responsible for defamatory comments posted by Facebook users on the newspaper's Facebook page.
"The appellants' attempt to portray themselves as passive and unwitting victims of Facebook's functionality has an air of unreality. Having taken action to secure the commercial benefit of the Facebook functionality, the appellants bear the legal consequences."
None of this is surprising. There are many prior cases in different areas that reach the same result. There was an Advertising Standards Board decision against VB that came to a similar conclusion in a different area of law, and also the ACCC v. Allergy Pathways case from about 10 years ago.
The next question is whether Facebook could be liable for defamation for user content.
Fairfax Media Publications v Voller [2021] HCA 27
And see Social Media Best Practice Guide from the ACA and the Diageo case from ASB.
What is interesting about the High Court decision is that it focuses on cases and texts from over 100 years ago, and looks at very few cases concerning the Internet or social media.
A recent report from the USA found that most of America’s popular streaming services and TV streaming gadgets such as Netflix, Roku and Disney+ failed to meet minimum requirements for privacy and security practices. The lone exception was Apple.
See Common Sense Media report
Reaching a different conclusion to an Australian Federal Court decision, a US District Court looking at the same facts decided that an AI machine cannot be an inventor on a patent.
See Bloomberg story: “The unequivocal statements from the Federal Circuit that ‘inventors much be natural persons’ and ‘only natural persons can be inventors’ supports the plain meaning of ‘individual’ in the Patent Act,” the judge ruled.
A recent Federal Court appeal considered the scope of the right to use photographs taken when marketing a house for sale. This decision is relevant to anyone who wishes to commercialise data that they obtain for one purpose for a different purpose.
The real estate agent engages a photographer to photograph a house that is for sale, with the intent to upload the photographs onto a real estate sales portal such a RealEstate.com.au or Domain.com.au to advertise the property for sale. The REA portal has terms that bind the real estate agent. These terms include the right to sublicense the photographs and the listing information to CoreLogic RP Data for their property information database.
The court found, in a 2-1 split judgment, that merely because the photographer allowed the photos to be uploaded to REA did not mean that the photographer agreed to REA's terms or agreed to allow the photographs to be sublicensed to CoreLogic RP Data.
In effect, the real estate agent is in breach of the REA contract by uploading the photos in these circumstances. The license from the photographer to the real estate agent to allow the upload to REA is, in effect, useless unless the agent also obtains terms from the photographer that match the REA license.
CoreLogic RP Data is now in breach of the photographer's copyright.
A strange result.
Finally, what is called direct registration of domain names is coming to Australia.
See https://www.auda.org.au/statement/australias-internet-domain-growing-get-ready-getyourau
This will allow registrations such as swinson.au and telstra.au, without the .com part of the domain name.
This arose out of the work of the 2017 Policy Review Panel, of which I chaired. See Paper and website.
The Federal Court of Australia has decided that a person who published allegedly defamatory tweets on Twitter does not receive the benefit of the journalists' privilege under the Evidence Act.
See Kumova v Davison [2021] FCA 753
This does not mean that a person who tweets can never be considered to be a journalist. In this case, looking at the Twitter feed as a whole, the defendant was not considered to be a journalist.
See this helpful note from Clayton Utz. Also Bennett & Co. Story in the AFR and The Age.
“The real problem is going to be, at what point is it still ethical to let the human drive,” Lunn said. “But before that, AI has to continue to learn from human drivers. Autonomy will have to make sure that we never have a trolley problem.”
Washington Post, 6 August 2021
The Federal Court handed down a judgment yesterday regarding defamation for anonymous online reviews of a dentist.
Nettle v Cruse [2021] FCA 935
https://www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Judgments/fca/single/2021/2021fca0935
"The publications in question here were excessive, scandalous and totally unjustified and unjustifiable. I have no hesitation in finding that they were malicious and calculated to cause maximum damage to Dr Nettle. The fact that Ms Cruse chose to publish such baseless and scandalous material about Dr Nettle either anonymously or in false names supports the inference that she well knew that it was false and misleading. That is perhaps confirmed by the fact that, when Dr Nettle eventually commenced this proceeding, Ms Cruse chose to disappear rather than front-up and defend her indefensible actions. Ms Cruse’s conduct towards Dr Nettle was, in all the circumstances, contumelious and disgraceful."
A good article on class action lawsuits in the United States that come after a ransomware attack:
"“Companies with good security sometimes have lapses,” Solove said. There isn’t a unified legal standard laying out what sort of security a company needs to have to protect it from liability if it loses its customers’ information or suffers a ransomware attack.
“It really isn’t clear what the standard of care is,” he said. “It’s tricky. All you have to do is fail on one thing.”
That means the potential for lawsuits will keep growing as ransomware attacks do. And if lawyers can reasonably show that a company made some kind of mistake in protecting its system, victims will have an avenue to sue."
I wrote a short article on the topic of cybersecurity lawsuits at the beginning of this year. See
Listen to this podcast where I discuss how damages should be assessed in privacy and cybersecurity lawsuits. The Lawyers Weekly Show host J...