Social media and First Amendment issues were debated in oral argument before the US Supreme Court in Packingham v. North Carolina.
See: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/packingham-v-north-carolina/
Issue: Whether, under the court’s First Amendment precedents, a law that makes it a felony for any person on the state's registry of former sex offenders to “access” a wide array of websites – including Facebook, YouTube, and nytimes.com – that enable communication, expression, and the exchange of information among their users, if the site is “know[n]” to allow minors to have accounts, is permissible, both on its face and as applied to petitioner, who was convicted based on a Facebook post in which he celebrated dismissal of a traffic ticket, declaring “God is Good!”
In oral argument on 27 February 2017, Justice Kennedy drew an analogy between social media and the public square. Justice Ginsburg said restricting access to social media would mean being cut off from a very large part of the marketplace of ideas. The First Amendment includes not only the right to speak, but the right to receive information.
A blog relating to Internet legal issues by Professor John Swinson, University of Queensland
Adsense HTML
It is hard to control where your ads will appear online
Advertisers are leaving YouTube, because their advertisements are being placed in close proximity to hate speech and other offensive material.
See NY Times story, Perils of Online Ads
See NY Times story, Perils of Online Ads
Book - The Last Days of Night
An interesting book, a novel, about a new lawyer in New York, Paul Cravath, who founded one of NY's best law firms, and his representation of Westinghouse against Edison in patent disputes. The Last Days of Night. It shows that patent disputes have been going on for 100 years whenever new technology suddenly blossoms.
GST Tax obligations for non-Australian offshore sellers
Recently, the Australian Taxation Office released a draft GST ruling (GSTR 2016/D1)
to
assist foreign suppliers of digital and other intangible products to
determine when they will be liable to Australian GST (an indirect tax like VAT) on supplies they
make to Australian consumers.
The
draft GST ruling explains what steps suppliers should take to collect
evidence to establish whether or not the recipient of a supply is an
Australian consumer.
Assaults on Privacy in the USA
A good article in Harvard Magazine titled "How surveillance changes people's behaviour: assaults on privacy in America." See article here.
EU ePrivacy
On 10 January 2017, the European Commission published a
Proposal for a Regulation could have significant implications for Internet-based services and technologies.
The Proposal seeks to revise the current EU ePrivacy Directive. It creates strict new rules
regarding confidentiality of electronic communications, including
content and metadata. In addition, the Proposal amends the current rules
on the use of cookies and similar technologies, and direct marketing.
The rules apply to EU and non-EU companies providing
services in the EU, and are backed up by significant enforcement
powers—fines of up to four percent of a company's global turnover.
The Proposal is the next major step in the EU's review of its data protection legal framework and follows the adoption of the
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in April 2016.
United States Copyright Office Releases Report on Software-Enabled Consumer Products
Yesterday, the
U.S. Copyright Office released a report titled "Software-Enabled
Consumer Products."
The report follows a year-long process, during which the Office studied how copyright law interacts with software-enabled consumer products, from cars, to refrigerators, to mobile phones, to thermostats and the like.
The report explores the various legal doctrines that apply to this subset of software, which is increasingly present in everyday life, including important copyright doctrines such as fair use, merger, scènes à faire, first sale, and the section 117 exemptions. The report focuses on specific issues raised in the public comments and hearings, including how copyright law affects licensing, resale, repair and tinkering, security research and interoperability.
The Copyright Office's report found that current legal doctrines support a wide range of legitimate uses of the embedded software in consumer products while also recognizing the importance of copyright protection to the creation and distribution of innovative products. The report does not recommend legislative changes at this time.
The full report and executive summary are available on the Copyright Office's website at http://copyright.gov/policy/software/.
The report follows a year-long process, during which the Office studied how copyright law interacts with software-enabled consumer products, from cars, to refrigerators, to mobile phones, to thermostats and the like.
The report explores the various legal doctrines that apply to this subset of software, which is increasingly present in everyday life, including important copyright doctrines such as fair use, merger, scènes à faire, first sale, and the section 117 exemptions. The report focuses on specific issues raised in the public comments and hearings, including how copyright law affects licensing, resale, repair and tinkering, security research and interoperability.
The Copyright Office's report found that current legal doctrines support a wide range of legitimate uses of the embedded software in consumer products while also recognizing the importance of copyright protection to the creation and distribution of innovative products. The report does not recommend legislative changes at this time.
The full report and executive summary are available on the Copyright Office's website at http://copyright.gov/policy/software/.
Apple Store Privacy Issues
Do you trust Apple Store employees when they take away your phone to fix it?
Staff in a Brisbane Apple Store reportedly lifted photos from some Apple customers' iPhones and took more than 100 close-up and explicit photos of female customers and staff without their knowledge.
This raises both privacy and copyright issues. It is also creepy.
See Brisbane Times
Staff in a Brisbane Apple Store reportedly lifted photos from some Apple customers' iPhones and took more than 100 close-up and explicit photos of female customers and staff without their knowledge.
This raises both privacy and copyright issues. It is also creepy.
See Brisbane Times
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