3 9 September 2001

News:

ree billion files were swapped using peer to peer music, film and software sites in August according to internet consultants Webnoize, The demise, albeit temporary, of Napster , has led those in search of free music downloads to a new breed of peer to peer sites, such as Gnutella FastTrack, Audiogalaxy, and iMesh.

The European Parliament, in a series of contradictory votes, has thrown the issue of the regulation of email marketing and text messaging back to the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs for further discussion. Parliament, meeting on September 6, at first rejected the opt-out amendment from the Committee to permit unsolicited emailing as long as the consumer was given the opportunity to opt out of mailings.

A decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has sent shockwaves through the internet business community in effectively upholding a patent claim covering a method of downloading products online. In Interactive Gift Express v. Compuserve Inc. and others, the appeal court found that the lower Southern New York district court had placed too narrow a construction on the Claimant’s (now known as E-Data, Corp.) patent directed to “a system for reproducing information in material objects at point of sale locations” in reaching a finding of non-infringement of the patent against a number of defendants.

Features:

Writing in the aftermath of the carnage in New York and Washington, the arcane arguments about opt-ins and opt-outs for unsolicited email in the European Parliament border on the surreal.

With five months to go before the implementation deadline set by the EU E-commerce Directive is reached, the Department of Trade and Industry has published a Consultation Paper which hints at the minimalist style of regulatory stance that is likely to be adopted by the UK Government.

Electronic signatures are now admissible in evidence. Advocates of public key infrastructure (PKI) technology make the bold claim that digital signatures are as legally effective as handwritten signatures and cannot be repudiated. Will this claim stand up in court?

Online gambling is a regulatory minefield with jurisdictions taking contradictory approaches to the issue. In this article we examine the impact of these regulations on online gambling.

The domain names stystem is rapidly evolving. Two new generic top level domains (gTLDs), .info and .biz, are in the process of being released to the public; WIPO has just published its Second Internet Domain Name Report; and a new report is questioning the fairness of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) adopted pursuant to the First WIPO Report.

Hit-Bit v. AOL offers a good example of the challenge confronting courts in Europe when crafting appropriate standards to govern liability for internet-related services, an effort that ultimately must conform to the recently-enacted European Parliament and Council Directive 2000/31/EC on certain legal aspects of information society services, the so-called E-Commerce Directive.1

The recent UK Appeal Court decision to refer the landmark British Horse Racing Board v William Hill database case to the European Court of Justice has thrown the whole area of database protection into confusion. In this article we examine the experience in the US after the Feist decision which permitted the copying of compiled facts.