5 8 August 2003

News:

The United States Ninth Court of Appeals (Case No: 01-15899) upheld the appeal by Gary Kramen, the owner of sex.com, to hold VeriSign liable for the wrongful transfer of the domain name to an unauthorised party. The US Court of Appeals reversed the Federal Court’s order, recognizing that Kremen had a property right in his domain name sex.com.

In a landmark decision on July 17 the German Federal Supreme Court ruled that deep links to a newspaper from a service provider offering a daily e-mail update service were neither a breach of copyright nor an infringement of the newspaper’s database rights.

The Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) campaign against file swappers has begun to meet opoosition from both Internet Service Providers and politicians.

Features:

P2P services are challenging existing business models wherever they appear.

For the music industry, as e-commercelaw&policy has noted before, the failure to come up with an effective online business model has cost the industry dearly.

Distance Marketing

The Communications Act

Legal Deposit Libraries Bill

Copyright Directive

Site impaired

Law enforcement and e-crime

E-Commerce survey

Dates for your diary!

P2P file sharing poses some of the biggest threats and opportunities to the providers of digital products. The music industry has struggled, and continues to do so, to find a business model to take advantage of the opportunities while not being overwhelmed by the threats. This article looks at the issues raised by P2P which have been examined in a recent report by the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG).

Continuing a project begun in 1998, the Directorate-General for Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) of the European Commission issued on 22 July 2003, its latest proposal for a European Parliament and Council Regulation on the law applicable to non-contractual obligations, better known as the Rome II Directive (the draft Regulation). When and if promulgated, the draft Regulation would complement both the 1968 Brussels Convention on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters and the 1980 Rome Convention on the law applicable to contractual obligations. The latest version of the draft Regulation follows a consultation procedure in 2002 and a public hearing on 7 January, 2003, in which the draft Regulation was roundly criticized by various business interests, especially those representing media and technology companies.

This article highlights some of the main provisions of the draft Regulation and the broad lines of the criticisms made against it by the business community.

Directive 2002/65/EC concerning the distance marketing of consumer financial services (the “Directive”) was adopted by the European Commission in June 2002 and must be implemented by Member States by 9 October 2004. The Directive was discussed by the author in an article entitled, “Distance selling: Distance selling of financial services in the UK”, published in E-Commerce Law & Policy, Volume 4 Issue 9 Sept 2002.

In July 2003, the Government published a consultation paper on the implementation of the Directive (the “Consultation”).

The Communications Act 2003 finally received Royal Assent on 17 July 2003. Once fully in force later this year, the Act will provide the basis for regulation by Ofcom, a new “converged” regulator for media and telecommunications, and will introduce a newly liberalised environment for media ownership. This Article provides an overview of the key changes, and their implications for media and ecommerce businesses in the UK.

Using mobile phones to promote and sell goods and services is becoming increasingly popular as the number of mobile phone users in the UK increases. Present figures suggest that over 2/3 of the UK population own a mobile phone, presenting an enormous opportunity for businesses to develop their customer base and for individuals to purchase and use goods and services with ease and efficiency. However, regulation of this industry is developing hand in hand with its growth and therefore it is very important that businesses are aware of the sort of restrictions to which they will be subject when provides services over mobile phones.

This article will focus on four main areas of business that regulation may have an impact upon: the promotion of goods and services via SMS messaging, the sales of goods and services by exchange of SMS messages, making payments by mobile phone and the provision of location based services.