‘Google Tax’ Is Double-Edged Sword for Publishers

December 17, 2014 Christy Leos Leave a comment Copyright

Germany’s top publisher bows to Google in news licensing row (Re/Code, 5 Nov 2014) – Germany’s biggest news publisher, Axel Springer, has scrapped a bid to block Google from running snippets of articles from its newspapers, saying that the experiment had caused traffic to its sites to plunge. Springer said a two-week-old experiment to restrict access by Google to its news headlines had caused Web traffic to its publications to plunge, leading it to row back and let Google once again showcase Springer news stories in its search results. Chief Executive Mathias Doepfner said on Wednesday that his company would have “shot ourselves out of the market” if it had continued with its demands for the U.S. firm to pay licensing fees. Springer, which publishes Europe’s top-selling daily newspaper, Bild, said Google’s grip over online audiences was too great to resist, a double-edged compliment meant to ram home the publisher’s criticism of what it calls Google’s monopoly powers. Publishers in countries from Germany and France to Spain have pushed to pass new national copyright laws that force Google and other web aggregators to pay licensing fees – dubbed the Google Tax – when it publishes snippets of their news articles. Under German legislation that came into effect last year, publishers can prohibit search engines and similar services from using their news articles beyond headlines. Last week, Spain’s upper house passed a similar law giving publishers an “inalienable” right to levy such licensing fees on Google.

 

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Lawyer-Client Communications Become Target of British Intelligence Surveillance

December 16, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Privacy

British intelligence spies on lawyer-client communications, government admits (GigaOM, 6 Nov 2014) – After the Snowden leaks, British lawyers expressed fears that the government’s mass surveillance efforts could undermine the confidentiality of their conversations with clients, particularly when those clients were engaged in legal battles with the state. Those fears were well-founded. On Thursday the legal charity Reprieve, which provides assistance to people accused of terrorism, U.S. death row prisoners and so on, said it had succeeded in getting the U.K. government to admit that spy agencies tell their staff they may target and use lawyer-client communications “just like any other item of intelligence.” This is despite the fact that both English common law and the European Court of Human Rights protect legal professional privilege as a fundamental principle of justice. Reprieve noted that the government had previously claimed three times that it could not disclose the information it has now disclosed (PDF) in heavily redacted form. According to that information, the acceptability of spying on lawyer-client communications is largely backed up by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which was recently revised to allow surveillance of all sorts of online channels , as well as of phone calls and emails.

 

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Law Review Article Explores Social Media and Civil Discovery Ethics

December 12, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Legal News

McPeak on social media & civil discovery (Legal Theory Blog, 14 Nov 2014) – Agnieszka McPeak (University of Toledo College of Law) has posted Social Media Snooping and Its Ethical Bounds (Arizona State Law Journal, 2014 Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Social media has entered the mainstream as a go-to source for personal information about others, and many litigators have taken notice. Yet, despite the increased use of social media in informal civil discovery, little guidance exists as to the ethical duties – and limitations – that govern social media snooping. Even further, the peculiar challenges created by social media amplify ambiguities in the existing framework of ethics rules and highlight the need for additional guidance for the bench and bar. This article offers an in-depth analysis of the soundness and shortcomings of the existing legal ethics framework, including the 2013 revisions to the American Bar Association’s model rules, when dealing with novel issues surrounding informal social media discovery. It analyzes three predominant ethics issues that arise: (1) the duty to investigate facts on social media, (2) the no-contact rule and prohibitions against deception, and (3) the duty to preserve social media evidence. While the first two issues can be adequately addressed under the existing framework, the rules fall short in dealing with the third issue, preservation duties. Further, even though the existing ethics rules can suffice for the most part, non-binding, supplemental guidelines, or “best practices,” should be created to help practitioners and judges navigate the ethical issues created by new technology like social media.

 

 

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Software Companies Face Stricter Fines for Exporting Encryption Software

December 10, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Trade

Software companies now on notice that encryption exports may be treated more seriously: $750,000 fine against Intel subsidiary (Goodwin Procter, 15 Oct 2014) – On October 8, 2014, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced the issuance of a $750,000 penalty against Wind River Systems, an Intel subsidiary, for the unlawful exportation of encryption software products to foreign government end-users and to organizations on the BIS Entity List. Wind River Systems exported its software to China, Hong Kong, Russia, Israel, South Africa, and South Korea. BIS significantly mitigated what would have been a much larger fine because the company voluntarily disclosed the violations. We believe this to be the first penalty BIS has ever issued for the unlicensed export of encryption software that did not also involve comprehensively sanctioned countries ( e.g. , Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan or Syria). This suggests a fundamental change in BIS’s treatment of violations of the encryption regulations. Historically, BIS has resolved voluntarily disclosed violations of the encryption regulations with a warning letter but no material consequence, and has shown itself unlikely to pursue such violations that were not disclosed. This fine dramatically increases the compliance stakes for software companies – a message that BIS seemed intent upon making in its announcement. Encryption is ubiquitous in software products. Companies making these products should reexamine their product classifications, export eligibility, and internal policies and procedures regarding the export of software that uses or leverages encryption (even open source or third-party encryption libraries), particularly where a potential transaction on the horizon – e.g. , an acquisition, financing, or initial public offering – will increase the likelihood that violations of these laws will be identified.

 

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Amnesty International Releases Anti-Spying Software

December 9, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Privacy

Amnesty releases anti-spying program for activists (BBC, 19 Nov 2014) – Amnesty International has released a program that can spot spying software used by governments to monitor activists and political opponents. The Detekt software was needed as standard anti-virus programs often missed spying software, it said. Amnesty said many governments used sophisticated spying tools that could grab images from webcams or listen via microphones to monitor people. “These spying tools are marketed on their ability to get round your bog-standard anti-virus,” said Tanya O’Carroll, an adviser on technology and human rights at Amnesty International. The makers of spying software did extensive testing to ensure that the way they infected and lurked on a computer did not trigger security alerts, she added. Detekt has been developed over the past two years to spot the few telltale signs spying programs do leave. The intense scan it carries out on a hard drive means a computer cannot be used while Detekt is running. Four separate rights groups – Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy International and Digitale Gesellschaft – have worked together to create the spyware spotter, which is available free of charge. The first version of Detekt has been written to run on Windows computers because the people most often being monitored use that software, said Ms O’Carroll.

 

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Where to Find the Largest Free Collection of Law Reviews on the Web

December 5, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Tech for Lawyers

The largest free collection of law reviews on the Web (Law Sites, 24 Nov 2014) –  Law Review Commons is the largest open-access law review portal on the web. It provides access to more than 200 law reviews containing more than 150,000 articles. The oldest law reviews in its collection date back to 1852. The site currently includes law reviews from law schools such as Berkeley, Boston College, Cornell, Chicago, Pennsylvania, Villanova and Yale. Missing from the collection are several top-tier schools such as Harvard, Stanford and Columbia. A search function enables you to find articles on the site. The search is not full text, but rather searches fields such as title, abstract, subject, author, institution, document type and publication name. You can also browse and find law reviews in several ways. A master list arranges all law reviews by their law school. You can also browse law reviews alphabetically by title, by the subject they cover, or by specific works and authors within a subject area. The actual articles are in PDF format. One other feature of the site is a world map showing readership in real time. As articles are downloaded, the location of the downloader is shown on the map and a text box displays the reader’s location in the world and the title of the download.

 

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