5 4 April 2003

News:

American Airlines has won a temporary injunction against Farechase, which orders Farechase to halt “accessing, using or scraping” American Airline’s website AA.com without the written consent of American.

Marketers are concerned at the continuing lack of clarity in the DTI consultation document on the implementation of the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications which was published on 27 March 2003.

The European gaming sector may be facing “a Copernican revolution” following the opinion, given by Siegbert Alber, the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice, in the Gambelli case, that Italian legislation restricting sports betting is an unjustified obstruction to the freedom to provide services throughout the European Union.

Features:

The UK’s Department of Trade & Industry consultation on the implementation of the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications needs to be addressed by all marketers

In the same vein as the well-known Argos and Kodak price-error cases, this week it was reported that Amazon had to temporarily close their website as a result of pricing errors. This article examines the issues of online pricing errors.

“Preacher was a talkin’ there’s a sermon he gave,
He said every man’s conscience is vile and depraved,
You cannot depend on it to be your guide
When it’s you who must keep it satisfied.”1

Bob Dylan’s ‘Preacher’ may have been right to wonder how we can depend on a man’s conscience to judge, yet the legal position in England is that we have a jury acting as arbiter of what is and is not obscene predominantly under the legislation of a 46-year old statute forced to deal with rapid technological advancement in the display and publication of material.

This article analyses how the law has been adapted to cope with the influx of material produced by new technologies.

This article examines the EU’s amended Sales Promotion Regulation in the Internal Market and recent discussions surrounding these changes.

The evolution of wireless network and handset technology is set to offer individuals unprecedented access to a huge variety of content through mobile devices. This article considers to what extent such content might be regulated and who is likely to be charged with this responsibility.

On 27 March 2003, the Department of Trade and Industry published a consultation document on the implementation of the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (the “Directive”). This consultation is aimed at ‘anyone who direct markets by phone, fax, SMS or email’1, and is open until 19 June 2003. The consultation provides marketers with the opportunity to express their opinions about the proposed changes in legislation.