3 2 February 2001

News:

E-Commerce Law & Policy has been nominated for the prestigious British & Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) Serial Publication of the Year Award.

Copyright owners celebrated two decisions this month which have strengthened substantially their control over online content.

British Banks have broadly supported the EU Commission Communication on e-commerce and financial services that was published on 9 February. Despite press reports that there was dissatisfaction with the speed that the Commission was moving to address the issues, the British Bankers Association (BBA) was upbeat; “The BBA welcomes this Communication and are generally supportive of its contents as they apply to retail consumers and investors,” a BBA spokesman said.

Features:

February has been a decisive month for e-commerce. The Napster judgement in the US, the passage of the Copyright Directive through the European Parliament, the OECD outpourings on tax, plus the Commission’s statement on financial services all mark significant milestones in the development of the legal and regulatory framework for e-commerce.

A comprehensive strategy designed to create a regulatory and supervisory environment to encourage the development of e-commerce in financial services and build consumer confidence has been launched by the European Commission as part of the Financial Services Action Plan, as foreseen in the Commission’s contribution to the Stockholm Summit.

For lovers of copyright, February 14 was a very appropriate day for the European Parliament (EP) to vote on the Copyright Directive.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released in early February a set of reports and technical papers on a broad range of tax issues relating to e-commerce. The reports and papers set out and, in many instances, invite public comment on the OECD’s proposals and thoughts on the way forward towards reaching international consensus on the tax treatment of e-commerce related activities.

The music industry breathed a collective sigh of relief this week when a US appeals court upheld last year’s decision against Napster.com, the internet music-sharing phenomenon that burst onto the scene in May 1999.

The question of which laws apply to business done online has been brought sharply into focus following the introduction of the Brussels Regulation in the EU, the Yahoo decision and the recent WIPO conference in Geneva. This article looks at how the governing law may be determined at the key stages of an online transaction.

The E-Commerce Directive 2000/31/EC (adopted on 8 June 2000) is a crucial part of the European Commission’s aim of establishing a regulatory framework for e-commerce to flourish in the E.U. Part 1 of this article examines the obligations imposed on Member States by the Directive. In next month’s issue, part 2 will investigate how the UK government is progressing with the task of implementing these obligations into national law.

Betting is in the news once again, with a mixed week for UK bookmakers. First, it looks as if Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown is set to axe betting tax, with the government taking seriously the mass exodus of bookmakers offshore. Secondly, following a landmark judgement against William Hill brought by the British Horseracing Board (the “BHB”) in relation to Hill’s use on its website of information about runners and riders, the bookies will now have to fork out additional cash to content owners, who own the data on various sports events, by paying sports’ controlling bodies for licences before they can tell punters what races or matches are available for them to bet on.

In the second of a three part series, a WIPO panelist, who has decided on more than twenty cases, examines the ICANN dispute resolution policy. In part one, in the January 2001 issue, we examined the origins of the policy and the burden of proof.