IMPACT®

US Court rejects privacy action against SWIFT

The controversy around SWIFT's practice of divulging individuals' banking and transaction data to US security and fiscal authorites has been extensively reported.  It has led to the intervention of European data protection authorites, and a decision by SWIFT to relocate its European client data processing to Switzerland.

I was therefore interested to see a report that a US district court has thrown out actions brought by two individuals alleging Swift had infringed their privacy rights. Given the apparently overwhelming weight of opinion in Europe against Swift's actions under european data protection laws, I wondered if here was a US court standing up for the rights of the US government to have its way in everybody else's jurisdiction.

Nothing that exciting - it sounds like the plaintiffs simply failed to make their case. The report suggests that among the facts they failed to establish were such arcane technicalities as :

-  Who they actually bank with;

-  Whether the Bank(s) concerned is/are are members of SWIFT;

-  Whether any of their personal data was actually disclosed.

The US Government seems to have been sufficiently worried by the case that it was considering invoking state secrecy privelege, but this hardly sounds necessary...  Did anyone in this case have a lawyer, or was the judge the only one to mention the "e word" - evidence ?

Second Life dispute settles

A dispute has settled between a Second Life user who made the most of a weakness in the virtual world's land auction system and Linden Labs, owners of Second Life, reports Technollama. The user had used the weakness to buy land in Second Life at below-market rates, leading to Second Life terminating the user's account and taking his virtual world assets. As part of the settlement, the user gets his account back, although the rest of the terms of settlement are confidential.

The settlement means that, aside from the unlawfulness of an arbitration clause in Second Life's terms & conditions, which was decided earlier in the dispute by the Court of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, there will remain no precedents on the legal position of a number of issues, including the status of virtual land. Overall, these look to be relatively minor issues for most users of Second Life, and the lack of legal precedents certainly doesn't seem to have held back businesses from establishing a presence there. See for example the latest Reuters report on the activities of businesses in Second Life.

FOIA cases: ICO backlog builds

Having spent most of last week in client meetings, here at IMPACT we've built up a backlog of legal stories that need covering. Not a backlog of the proportions faced by the Freedom of Information case reviewers at the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), however, as reported by the BBC Open Secrets blog. The ICO appears to be under-resourced when it comes to dealing with Freedom of Information cases, and by the sound of it, long term extra funding for the ICO is going to be needed to resolve the situation.

So long, farewell...

I have some news to share with you all.

After many years I'm leaving Freeth Cartwright LLP and IMPACT to take up a new role as head of IP & disputes within the in-house legal team at Experian. The company has been a client of the firm's with which I have worked very closely for over 13 years and it will be great to have the chance to develop things from a different perspective.

I leave here at the end of October and I'm having a couple of weeks off before starting my new role in the middle of November. Now that the end of the month is rapidly approaching, and I'm using up the last odd days of holiday, it feels like the last few weeks have just disappeared and it seems strange to be leaving the firm after so long. I started as a summer placement student in 1990 before my solicitor's exams and started as a trainee proper in 1991.

It has been a great place to work and I've loved being the person who wanted to do IP when the firm was so much smaller (I think that there were only about 13 or 14 partners when I started and now we have 70-ish) and ending up being the person that has been partner in charge of a great team of IP & IT lawyers working for a brilliant range of clients and doing a wide range of types of work.

When I was a trainee I wanted to get some experience of doing IP work and I was lucky enough that the firm secured me a secondment to the IP team at Lovells in London for part of my training. I shall always be grateful to David Latham at Lovells for the time that I spend working with him way back then (my son was only a few months old and he's off to university next year!).

I've become expert at some strange topics during my time here, including  slurry separators (Farmers Build -v- Carrier) and mortuary equipment. I've also been grateful to the support and encouragement of my partners that has let me develop this area of practice and to be able to indulge my interest in how IT shapes the ways lawyers practice. Starting this blog has been fascinating and enjoyable experience and once I've settled into my new role I suspect I'll be starting up a new one of my own.

One of the nice things about having been at one firm for a long time is that can build up stronger relationships with clients and colleagues. I love it when you can get to have some banter with clients and this is an example of a gem of an email that I got from one client when I told him my news that reflects this sort of thing:

"Sorry to hear that they've finally booted you out, but you had a good run, and we all know that you got away with it for a lot longer than you expected"

Anyway, I'd better wrap this post up now. If you want to find my contact details in the future then keep an eye on my page on LinkedIn because I'll be updating that as soon as I've started at Experian.

Finally, I'd like to thank all our readers and everyone else out there in the blogosphere for the encouragement and support that you've all given to this blog. There are too many to list you all - and I didn't want to this to turn into any more of a "luvvies.." speech than it already has done.

Cheers,

Andrew

PS - if you are in Nottingham on Friday, 26 October then I'm having a leaving bash at Via Fosse in the upstairs bar that overlooks the canal from 8pm - pop in and have a pint.

Class actions in IP

I spoke last week at a CLT conference on the subject of class actions. I've made a dedicated page on the blog with my talk, slides and a load of links if you're interested: Collective Actions.

New IP Service

Today sees the launch of a new IP service based in the USA. The EETimes on line had an interesting article about the site yesterday. It sounds like an exciting new venture. We wish SparkIP every success and look forward to seeing how the service develops. For some reason a link to SparkIP.com won't work but it the site is up and running.

European Patent Convention available online

The European Patent Office has made the European Patent Convention and related documents available as PDFs on its website. It comes into force on 13 December 2007. A summary and useful links can be found on the UK IPO European Patent Convention page.

The Convention will become part of UK law by virtue of the provisions of the Patent Act 2004.

ICO issues information sharing framework

The Information Commissioner's Office this week issued a Framework Code of Practice for Information Sharing. The Framework guides organisations on what they need to consider and do before sharing personal data with other organisations/persons.

We'll provide a summary of the Framework in a little while, but for now take a look at our August 2007 post on the draft Framework. A quick look suggests that the key parts of the draft Framework, as summarised in our earlier post, have become part of the actual Framework.

Cradle of democracy goes camera shy

At the risk of sounding like an episode of "Have I Got News For You", I have spotted an interesting report from CCTV News. This tells of a fine levied by the Hellenic Data Protection Authority on the Athens Police for misuse of traffic monitoring cameras.

Apparently, the offence committed by the police was to use traffic cameras to monitor a student demonstration  - in other words, using them to watch people instead of vehicles...

It also seems that the extensive surveillance system set up for the 2004 Athens Olympics is no longer in use, following action by the data protection authority.

Compare and contrast the Greek approach to watching its citizens with that of the UK - don't the Greeks know that they're courting disaster ?

Target ruling takes website accessibility up the commercial agenda

The Court for the Northern District of California has confirmed a previous ruling that Target.com is inaccessible to the blind, therefore violating federal and state anti-discrimination laws in the USA. What's more, the Court ruled that the case is a class action open to all "legally blind" individuals in the USA. Thanks to Out-law.com for reporting on this matter.

An initial glance through the 33 pages of the ruling suggests that the Court relied upon the plaintiff's evidence of his inability to use the Target.com, in practical terms. The Court doesn't seem to have relied on failure to comply with technical accessibility standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, as was the case with the the Australian Olympics Committee ruling (see our "Making websites open to all" post from August 2006). This practical consideration of accessibility reinforces the importance of using people to test website accessibility rather than simply relying on automated testing.