The PlanetRecruit Blog

A Meeting of Minds – The Law Society of Scotland’s Cloud Computing Event

By Warren Wander 

Warren Wander is the founder and Managing Director of LawWare Ltd and more recently has become CEO of LawCloud Ltd.

Warren has spent all his working life in the software development field and the last 15 years creating, developing & growing LawWare into one of Scotland's most modern suppliers of Practice, Case & Risk management software. 

There’s nothing better than marking real change with a landmark occasion to pinpoint that moment when a new innovation comes along that changes the way we do things and on Wednesday 9^th November 2011, The Law Society of Scotland hosted such an event at The Hollyrood Hotel in Edinburgh focusing on the Cloud Computing for law firms in Scotland.

The event was intended to be informative and to stimulate awareness of Cloud and around the Law Society of Scotland’s soon to be released Cloud Computing paper, a set of advisory notes for the profession and which is currently in draft form.

It is anticipated that The Law Society’s advice will be focused around a number of key areas including:

• Understanding arrangements with Cloud providers such as  SLA’s

          o   System availability, accessibility, licensing

• Provisions for your Data

          o   How safe it is, where is it stored, who owns it

• Compliance & assurances

          o   Are you unknowingly breaching any laws such as data protection

          o   What can go wrong and what happens if things do go wrong 

The Hargreaves Report and the Challenges of New Technologies

The recent Hargreaves report responds to the government’s instruction last autumn to look at whether current copyright laws are hindering innovation in this country. The short answer is, as Hargreaves succinctly puts it, “yes”; reform is needed (p1).

His reflection on the existing Digital Economy Act is that strong online enforcement should be carefully monitored. He suggests a tough approach on enforcement of copyright balanced with education.

In his 10 recommendations he advocates, among other things, that the UK align its laws more with EU laws to make full use of existing exceptions, such as for format shifting, non-commercial research, parodies and library archiving. His ambition is to create the “world’s first Digital Copyright Exchange”, allowing rights owners to sell licences in their work and to make market transactions faster.

Facial recognition software too creepy for Google

You know something's wrong with the potential application of some technology when Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, says the Cookie Monster won't build a giant database able to recognise and identify individual faces. It is well known that the company has, in the past, worked on such a system but now it will not be deployed.

Eric Schmidt, was speaking to an audience at Google’s 'Big Tent' gathering on the growth of the internet and the ramifications this may have for the privacy of the individual in a world increasingly dominated by huge databases containing information on billions of people.

Schmidt opined that facial recognition technology is one of the developments that has "most surprised" him and added that the “surprising accuracy of these systems is very concerning”.

Copyright and Linking, Post-Meltwater

Linking has always been a fundamental part of the internet. People think nothing of publishing a link to anything they please and would not consider it necessary to ask permission first. However, the courts have struggled to balance the interests of the public to freely link with the news industry’s economic interests to exploit their intellectual property rights. The decision in Meltwater has now tipped the balance in favour of the news media industry.

Background: The Meltwater Decision

Meltwater provide an electronic press cuttings service, notifying PR agencies whenever their clients are in the news. The question that arose in the case was whether Meltwater’s End User License authorised its customers to access the links to articles which they received.

The judge decided it did not, ruling that merely by clicking on the links provided by Meltwater, end users had infringed the original publisher’s content. She refused to accept that receiving a link and clicking on it was merely incidental copying, exempt from copyright infringement. Simply to receive the links would require each user to have their own license.

iPhone the spyPhone

Last quarter, Apple's profits rose by 95 per cent and revenues grew by 83 per cent on the same period a year ago. The latest figures show profits of US$6 billion on revenues of $24.7 billion.The iPhone remains immensely popular, with sales of 18.6 million units, more than double that achieved 12 months ago, whilst the company cannot make enough iPads to keep up with demand.

Great stuff by any standards, but the results are overshadowed by the remarkable revelation that the iPhone automatically (and secretly) records and stores exactly where a user is and then time-stamps the data. In other words, your iPhone is watching you, tracking you and keeping detailed records of where you are and when you are there. What's more, if/when users synchronise the iPhone to a Mac, the data is copied over to the computer and secretly archived there as well.

However, whilst the data is hidden away from the average user, it is stored in unencrypted form so that it could be read anyone (or any agency) who actually get their mitts on the device.

Good news for football fans: World Cup can be shown on free TV

A few weeks ago it was reported that the Premier League lost the first round of a dispute over the rights to broadcast football matches.

The General Court was advised that the Premier league’s territorial exclusivity agreements to broadcast football matches are contrary to European Union law. The final outcome is still pending, but if the court follows the advice, UK football fans will be able to use a decoder from any European country to watch league games rather than having to use an expensive Sky decoder.

Now, in a separate ruling, the General Court held that it is justified by law for member states to stipulate that the World Cup and European Championships, among other popular matches, are to be accessible by free-to-air television broadcasts.

Lock, Stock and 10 Smokin' Websites

1. Creative Commons use a clever Google Images search that finds images with CC attributions tagged to them. This allows you to find works of art, photos, illustrations (of just about anything) with a license that suits you.

Website: http://search.creativecommons.org/

License: Creative Commons (varies)

 

Copyright Registration

A unique aspect of copyright, when compared with other intellectual property rights, is that copyright law grants the author of a work certain rights by virtue of his or her creation of the work. In other words, copyright arises automatically on creation and lasts for an extensive period thereafter.

While active registration may not be required in this country, there are often advantages in doing so in jurisdictions such as the US, and in some countries registration is required.

The creator of a work automatically gets copyright protection for their lifetime and for 70 years after their death. For some, this extensive protection and lack of any formal registration requirement is a favourable aspect of the copyright regime, because it tends to promote the creation of new works.

Just don’t mention the torrents

It was never going to last. Earlier this week, Apple pulled an iPhone app from its app store after approving it only a week before. But why all the fuss over the harmless-sounding IS Drive app? Probably because it could be used to manage BitTorrent downloads, which some ruthless individuals apparently use to engage in illegal file-sharing.

Despite past refusals from Apple to approve similar apps, IS Drive (note the lack of the word ‘torrent’ in the title) appeared in the app store last week, labelled as a tool for managing downloads from image-hosting website ImageShack – a perfectly legal process. However, if so inclined, a user could adapt the app’s functions to manage illegal downloads via peer-to-peer file-sharing enabled by the BitTorrent protocol, entering the murky yet massive world of internet piracy.

Unsurprisingly, Apple weren’t impressed. Not only is this, well, illegal, but it could be argued that giving iPhone users the key to a universe of free music and film wouldn’t do iTunes any favours either.

Copyright Enforcement and Privacy Online: The Swiss Federal Court Weighs In

This month, the Swiss Federal Court ruled that Logistep, an anti-piracy company in Switzerland, must cease collecting the IP addresses of users sharing files on peer-to-peer networks. The Court held that the practice was in breach of privacy legislation, finding that IP addresses constitute personal information, and that the data was being collected without the owner’s knowledge or consent. 
 
Logistep had been collecting the IP addresses of those they believed to be sharing files unlawfully and forwarding these, along with information about when and what they were sharing, to copyright owners to be used as evidence in Court. 
 
This is not a new strategy, and has been employed on numerous occasions as a means of discouraging piracy. The information collected is generally used by rights holders, to apply to the Court for an order forcing ISPs to disclose details of the file-sharers’ identities. With these addresses in hand, law firms are instructed to send threatening letters, seeking settlement in cash to avoid further legal action for copyright infringement.