Posts by Andy J

Re: The Library of Congress already has this in hand

"I wonder why UK copyright still specifies TCD. I'd have expected it to have been changed to QUB a century ago although the old library would have run out of storage space long before the 1960s."

The reason Trinity College remained a Legal Deposit Library is that the UK and Ireland have a reciprocal arrangement (see section 198 of the Irish Copyright Act 2000 and section 13 of the UK Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003), whereby publishers in Ireland are required to supply a deposit copy to the British Library. However, I agree that it would be fair to include Queens Belfast as an LDL.

Re: Arrest Necessity

Would you care to be specific about which part of PACE was not followed? Section 24 provides that any constable can arrest a person who he reasonably suspects has committed or is about to commit a criminal offence and where the constable has reasonable grounds for believing the person's arrest is necessary. PACE provides for a number of Codes of Practice, the relevant one here being code G covering the statutory power of arrest by police officers. In paragraph 2.9 of the Code, there is an exhaustive list of the grounds on which arrest may be considered necessary. I'll pick out just a few which might just have been applicable in this case:

"(e) to allow the prompt and effective investigation of the offence or the conduct of the person in question ... when the suspect is found in possession of incriminating objects ...it is thought likely that the person may steal or destroy evidence ... there is a need to enter and search any premises occupied by the arrested person ... it is necessary to secure or preserve evidence in connection with a recordable offence."

Given that the alleged offence concerned the misue of computers, it goes without saying that the police would want to seize any computer or device likely to have been used to commit the alleged offence.

PACE also contains a system of checks and balances. Once the arresting officer had got his suspect back to the custody suite he would have to convince the custody sergeant that the grounds for arrest were justified. OK I admit this is a pretty low hurdle, but the custody sergeant has a statutory duty (section 37) to ensure these grounds are reasonable. The detained person can then ask to speak to a solicitor who would soon challenge any obvious abuse of the power of arrest.

Not saying that he should have been arrested, but I can't see any reason for thinking that PACE was not followed.

Re: Do machines have rights now?

Patent rights are for a fixed duration. In the UK and most other first world nations the standard term is 20 years from the priority date. There are special terms for some pharma products. The person or company which owns the AI device would be accepted as being the owner of the patent, just as currently a company would own the patent on an invention of one of its human employees. This would be the case even if the human employee died two days after coming up with the invention.

Re: Libel tourism

The issue which both the High Court and the Court of Appeal had to examine was not where the claimant (Wright) was based, but where the defendant was. This was due to section 9 of the Defamation Act 2013 which says: "9. Action against a person not domiciled in the UK or a Member State etc

(1) This section applies to an action for defamation against a person who is not domiciled—

(a) in the United Kingdom;

(b) in another Member State; or

(c) in a state which is for the time being a contracting party to the Lugano Convention.

(2) A court does not have jurisdiction to hear and determine an action to which this section applies unless the court is satisfied that, of all the places in which the statement complained of has been published, England and Wales is clearly the most appropriate place in which to bring an action in respect of the statement." As Roger Ver has virtually no connection with England and Wales or the EU, the outcome is unsurprising.

Re: Seven years

".. while GDPR exempts purely personal activity, it's not clear that postings to Facebook, with possible exposure to internet searches, qualify for that exemption."

The GDPR has an extremely long and comprehensive list of recitals which explain how the Regulation is supposed to operate. National courts are supposed to refer to the recitals where they feel the bare words of the Articles are unclear.

Recital 18 says: "This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity and thus with no connection to a professional or commercial activity. Personal or household activities could include correspondence and the holding of addresses, or social networking and online activity undertaken within the context of such activities." Personally I find the last sentence quite clear. Obviously the Dutch court didn't.

Re: Good idea, poor implementation?

" - the EPC is not an EU instrument. It has nothing to do with the EU.

Sure, but why should EU membership of signatory countries be a requirement then? That's the bit I don't understand."

Len, Apologies if I have misunderstood you, but I think you are confusing the EPC with the UPC, or at least the UP (that is, the Unified Patent package).

As Phil O'Sophical says, the EPC has nothing to do with the EU. It set up the European Patent Office (again not an EU body) to issue patents to which would be valid within any of 38 contracting States. The EPO has no enforcement jurisdiction. Once a valid patent has been awarded by the EPO, it is enforced via the national courts of the member states, applying their applicable national patent statutes and caselaw. The CJEU has no role in enfrorcing EPO patents.

The Unified Patent system is an EU initiative which aims to set up supra-national courts to hear disputes about European patents, including patents issued by the EPO to EU member states. As mentioned, the EU aspires to widen the membership of the UP to include all EPC signatories in due course, but because the ultimate court of appeal within the UPC setup is the CJEU, I'm not sure how palatable that would be to the non-EU members of the EPC, such as Switzerland, and soon the UK.

"By removing the requirement to put a date on copyrighted material, it becomes onerous to discover exactly when a such copyright expires."

Since every country in the world now bases the length of copyright protection on the lifetime of the author plus a specified number of years (typically 50, 70 or 100 years) after their death, putting the date when a work was created or published isn't much help in knowing when the copyright expires.

Re: Why does RTBF for a search engine even exist?

"What I don't understand is why this even is something Google has to do. "

The CJEU decided that Google was processing data, which makes them a data processor under EU data protection law. One of the things a data processor has to do is ensure that the retention of any personal data it is storing or processing is justified on the grounds of relevancy, accuracy, proportionality and it is not kept for longer than is necessary for the purpose it was originally obtained. The CJEU felt that in the case of the Google Spain case, Google failed on the relevancy and proportionality tests, and thus they were found to be retaining the data concerning Snr Gonzalez longer than was necessary for Google's purposes (ie indexing the internet). In theory, the CJEU judgment only applies to Google within the European Union, meaning that Google.com could continue to list the links to the sites containing the facts about Snr Gonzalez's past activities. In contrast the Canadian Supreme Court recently gave a judgment which required Google to delist certain links on a worldwide basis. That matter is still not resolved as Google is trying to find a way to get the decision reversed. https://www.wired.com/story/google-fights-canada-order-global-search-results/

Re: of copyright...

I'm afraid you really don't understand how copyright liability works, do you? The putative owner of the copyright (the secretbases site) is based in the UK and so is the corporate base of the Register. Even if the piece had been written by one the Register's US based journalists, the fact that they have a UK trading presence still means the UK is the jurisdiction where the 'harm' occurs. Ergo, any action for infringement would need to be carried on in the UK courts and under UK law. That is not to suggest that the Register has in fact done anything wrong. They claim to have permission to use the image and if true, then there is no problem.

Re: overhaul?

That issue is more complicated than your posting suggests. Various words and symbols relating to the Olympics are subject to wide protection in addition to any registered trade marks because of the 1995 Olympic Symols Protection Act (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1995/32/enacted). The specific Regulations (the version for England can be found here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2011/2898/contents/made) brought in for the 2012 London Games merely added extra details to the existing measures. The UK legislation is a reflection of obligations the country faces as a consequence of various international treaties.

Re: "Having faced down the totalitarian dangers of fascism and communism"

That's the Iberian peninsula; I don't think that modern day Portugese would be overly happy being called Hispanic, even though their nation was once part of the Roman territory of Hispania.

Re: two points i disagree on...

In the UK where a company owns the copyright in a work, the term of the copyright is still based on the lifetime of the employee who created it, so the problem you raised in your third paragraph would still be resolved.

In the US, so-called work-for-hire provisions mean that the employer is also the owner of the copyright in a work made by an employee, and currently the term is a fixed one, namely 95 years from publication, or 120 years from creation, whichever is the shorter. This again would be amenable to your suggestion.

General staff

Not quite correct. Officers of field rank (ie up to Lt Col) wear the cap badge of their corps or regiment, but members of the general staff (full colonele and above) wear the general staff badge. Many senior officers will continue to wear the beret of their previous regiment (eg maroon for the paras, sand coloured for the SAS etc). The only example of deviation from this dress code was, famously, Field Marshal Montgomery who wore the general staff badge and his tank corps badge together: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e4/Bernard_Law_Montgomery.jpg/250px-Bernard_Law_Montgomery.jpg