2 11 November 2000

News:

The European Union Advisory Board on Data Protection has backed the Commission’s proposal to introduce an opt-in approach to the use of commercial email, treating unsolicited electronic mail in the same way as automatic calling machines and facsimile machines.

The development of m-commerce in the UK and Europe could be severely damaged unless there is a rapid reform of UK and European Telecoms regulations reveals E-Commerce Law & Policy in this exclusive report.

The battle between copyright owners and their online foes shows no signs of letting up despite German media giant Bertelsmann’s controversial embrace of beleaguered file swapping site Napster. The Recording Industry Association of America’s court action against Napster is still proceeding,

Features:

Joined up government has long been a theme of the UK administration. There is certainly a need for a quick examination of what is going on inside the Department of Trade and Industry with regard to m-commerce.

Content protection and management company Irdeto Access has begun legal proceedings against an alleged counterfeiter accused of selling fake pay-TV smart cards over the Internet. The prosecution is one of the first under the amended UK Copyright Act.

The Council of Europe is expected to produce a revised draft of the cybercrime treaty which is aimed at producing international agreement to deal with crime on the web. The widespread disruption caused by the ‘Love Bug’ and the series of hacker attacks against major websites earlier this year gave greater urgency to the Council’s deliberations.

A recent report ‘Rough Justice’ by Syracuse University Law School which analyses the results of ICANN’s Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) has warned of the dangers of forum shopping, while giving overall backing to the effectiveness of the system.

Most of the agency and distributorship agreements currently in force make no reference to websites. Is it therefore open to agents and distributors to create websites for the purpose of fulfilling their contractual obligations? Alternatively will such websites result in an infraction of the rights retained by the principal or be a breach of the exclusivity (in terms of territory or customer group) given by a supplier to other distributors?

The draft Companies Act 1985 (Electronic Communications) Order 2000, when in force, gives companies the option of using email and the Internet to interact with the Registrar of Companies, shareholders and auditors. The Order is the first Statutory Instrument to be laid before Parliament under the Electronic Communications Act. The Order has still to be laid before the House of Lords.

Business method patents in the United States have become an integral part of the e-commerce world. The European Commission has launched a discussion paper as has the UK Patent Office to examine whether Europe needs to revise their Patent Rules to meet the challenge from across the Atlantic.

The ICANN uniform dispute resolution procedure is proving to be a very effective method for trade mark owners to recover domain names confusingly similar to their trade marks in circumstances where the domain name has been registered and used in bad faith and the registrant has no legitimate right or interest in the name. This is especially true in an international context where the decision of a national Court could be hard to enforce in another country. However, the ICANN procedure is not appropriate in all cases and the focus of this short article is instances where Court is the preferable or obvious option

The States of Jersey is updating its copyright and other intellectual property (‘IP’) laws as part of its strategy to attract e-commerce to the island.

Visa U.S.A. and BBBOnLine, a subsidiary of the US Better Business Bureau, have joined forces to build confidence in online commerce and develop plans to make e-commerce more secure and consumer-friendly, including a joint effort to promote safe online shopping for the Christmas holiday shopping season.

THE 19 MEMBER ICANN Board meeting in California in front of nine hundred people, with a further five hundred participating live online, selected just seven out of the 47 applicants to become registry operators for the new top level domains.

Reverse search directories, which enable a person to be identified from a phone number, are not legal ‘unless the data subject has given his/her consent to process his/her personal data for such new purposes’ according to the EU Advisory Body on Data Protection and Data Privacy.