6 12 December 2004

News:

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is holding ‘confidential discussions’ with online supermarkets about their pricing policies. An OFT spokeswoman confirmed discussions are taking place but emphasised that they remained confidential.

The US Supreme Court has agreed to step into the battle between the music industry and p2p file sharing service providers with a 10 December decision to review the controversial US Court of Appeal copyright judgment in favour of p2p service provider Grockster.

Leading sports orgnaisations, rights users and advisors will attend a half-day Emergency Briefing on Thursday 27 January in London, organised by World Sports Law Report in association with leading City law firm Nicholson Graham & Jones, focusing on the significance of the European Court of Justice decision in BHB v William Hill.

Features:

One-stop-shop for all advertising complaints

Information Commissioner’s powers are insufficient to tackle “spam”

In further news

Dates for your diaries

Welcome to AOL is the greeting our customers hear every time they log onto AOL. When I joined AOL in London four years ago I was warmly welcomed by a legal team of only two lawyers who were more than happy to throw me in the deep end to start fire fighting. The legal team was small, the business was growing very quickly and there was a lot of work to do!

The effect of the surprise ruling of the ECJ in the BHB case remains unclear. But businesses which deal with databases should be reviewing the work they put in to creating, obtaining and collating data to assess whether and, if not, how they might come within the scope of the protection afforded to certain databases under the Database Directive.

FOIA comes fully into force in January. This article provides a timely reminder of the duties of the public sector under the new rules, the implications for the private sector, and how these new obligations might best be managed by the private sector to maintain confidentiality in key areas.

Following her article in our last issue, reviewing OFCOM’s performance over the last year, Natasha Hobday analyses OFCOM’s recently published “extremely ambitious” Strategic Review, the first major review of the market for some 20 years.

Four years ago, the four mobile operators and the new entrant, Hutchison (otherwise known as ‘3’) paid many millions of pounds to secure the licences to use frequency ranges in order to deliver 3G services. The mobile operators are now set to roll out 3G services to customers and this gives rise to a number of legal considerations. This article gives an overview of some of these legal considerations.

One of the success stories of the Internet has been in the holiday sector but in this regard, is the online sale of holiday and travel arrangements and packages an alternative sales medium, or are we witnessing changes more fundamental than that? Peter Stewart, Partner at Field Fisher Waterhouse, considers the market and the changes that are taking place online.

The debate over patenting of software continues to rumble along

EU Privacy Commissioners call proposed data retention directive unacceptable

EU Presidency Report on Spam

Member states slow to transpose EU telecoms laws

Case T-313/02, Meca-Medina and Majcen v Commission.

US - measures affecting the cross-border supply of gambling and betting services (WT/DS285/R) 10 November 2004

Martha Green v Associated Newspapers.