WIPO appears to have resurrected negotiations over its broadcast treaty, which would grant broadcasters a new property right in content they transmit. This treaty has been contentious in the past for obligating signatories to provide a completely unnecessary, redundant and at the same time over-expansive right to guaranteeing broadcasters over the broadcasting of content. This may seriously impact on individuals, particularly as it will be applied to online retransmission:

Granting broadcasters and cablecasters exclusive rights to authorize retransmissions of broadcasts over the Internet will harm competition and innovation by allowing broadcasters and cablecasters to control the types of devices

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A court in Massachusetts last month refused to dismiss a case brought by the National Association of the Deaf against Netflix, claiming that Netflix is required by the Americans with Disabilities Act to provide closed-captioning on all its products, including streaming of broadcasts. Netflix was held to be a place of public accommodation within the meaning of the Act.

Does this strike you as a reasonable result? What would happen in Canada, under our various access statutes, one of the most extensive of which is the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act? Governments tend to have standards about . . . [more]

On July 12, 2012, a two-to-one majority dismissed the appeal, upholding the ruling that Portsmouth diocese is liable to pay for alleged wrongdoings of its clergy. This ruling according to many legal experts paves the way for similar claims and far reaching implications.

A recent US Court of Appeals decision has caused some concern in banking circles. Here is a blog description with a link to the case, Patco Construction v People’s Bank. Essentially the court held that the business customer’s losses from online fraud had been caused by negligent security practices at the bank, so the bank was liable for them.

As the blog entry (by a noted electronic security expert) points out, while consumers have traditionally been protected in dealings with their banks (so the banks have devised a number of security measures to protect against loss), business clients have . . . [more]

Well, the 2012 Summer Olympic Games will soon begin in London, England.

I am sure many of you are thinking: 100m sprint, marathon, water polo, rhythmic gymnastics, pentathlon maybe.

Is it just me? I hear Olympics, and my mind starts imagining protests over athletes being excluded, the odd bribe here and there, a little bit of trade-mark infringement, a few doping scandals, maybe demonstrators being kettled and baton charged, which all leads to: lawsuits!

There are lots of resources out there to understand the legal aspects of this summer’s London sportapalooza (and of sports in general):

• The most recent issue

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Here is a link to the decision in National Federation of Independent Business, et al., , v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al., . More thoughts to come. Justice Kennedy joined Justices Scalia, Alito and Thomas in voting against the law. Chief Justice Roberts is thus the key vote.

Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had the power to impose the exaction in Section 5000A under the taxing power, and that Section 5000A need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it.

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On June 15, our friends at Eagan published a brilliant and in some ways strange book that should be in every law library, since it is (as my headline says) the most important book on statutes this millennium: Reading Law, The Interpretation of Legal Texts. Its strangeness is due to the identity of its authors – the fiercely intelligent and challenging Justice Antonin Scalia the senior justice of the US Supreme Court , and the leading legal lexicographer of our time, Bryan Garner of LawProse in Texas. . . . [more]

This is a short update to previous Slaw posts on Arizona’s 2010 controversial new anti-immigration measures. After examining whether the law unconstitutionally invaded the federal government’s exclusive prerogative to set immigration policy, on Monday June 25, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down key provisions of Arizona’s immigration law as follows:

• Requiring people to carry their identification papers at all times in public places
• Making a crime of failure to apply for valid immigration papers
• Allowing police officers to arrest anyone they believe has committed a crime that would make them removable from the country
• Making it a crime for

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The United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois – Eastern Division released a decision on Friday in Apple, Inc. et al v. Motorola, Inc. et al, dismissing the case with prejudice, effectively ending what has been a highly charged and contested conflict.

The two cases were consolidated for judicial economy, with each party claiming damages. Apple’s claims focuses on patents 6,493,002, 6,343,263, 7,479,949, and 5,946,647, and Motorola’s claim centers around US patent 6,359,898. The dispute began in 2011, with Apple initially claiming 16 patent violations, and Motorola claiming 6. From the . . . [more]

The most recent annual report of the Law Commission of England is now available.

The report includes highlights of the past year’s work. In particular, the Commission saw two pieces of legislation that derive from its work reach the statute book: the Estates of Deceased Persons (Forfeiture Rule and Law of Succession) Act 2011 and the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012.

A number of other reports are awaiting implementation in the areas of trust, marriage breakdown, conspiracy, business partnerships, renting homes, etc.

Part 4 of the report is entitled “Measuring Success” and provides interesting stats about the . . . [more]

As of four days ago, websites wishing to set cookies for UK viewers are required first to obtain permission to do so. I talked about the largely neglected 2009 EU directive to this effect a year ago on Slaw, when the UK, needing to move on the matter, gave businesses a year’s grace to grapple with the law. Now that grace period is over.

The terms of the directive are spelled out here, in an excerpt from my post of a year ago:

The cookie law is paragraph 66 of Directive 2009/136/EC [PDF] and essentially mandates that computer users:

…be

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This is an update to my recent post: Could Cellphone Use Constitute Electronic Presence at Crime?