Jack Straw yesterday announced three proposals to reform English defamation law, which has long been considered one of the most plaintiff-friendly in the world. The proposals are designed to curb perceived ‘libel tourism’ by foreign magnates, sheikhs and oligarchs, who have used English courts to stifle criticism in publications whose distribution within the United Kingdom is incidental.
If the proposals are adopted by Parliament (which would not occur until after the general election), three main changes would be made to the law: Read more »
The Register has an interesting piece analysing how cybercrime botnets are connected and why they seem impervious to outside attack. It seems that the botnets are programmed to reconfigure themselves if one upstream provider goes down, and are each strongly interconnected, which creates a whole lot of redundancy:
“What they’ve worked really hard to do for themselves is build a spiderweb of connections to the outer ring if the outer ring were the internet at large,” Sean Brady, manager of RSA’s identity protection and verification group, told The Register. “As you start picking off threads, they work to reroute, to crawl along different threads.”

Needless to say, this redundancy is pretty attractive to botnet controllers (who typically seem to buy or lease access from malware creators). What’s really interesting, though, is that it turns out all the major botnets rely on about nine commercial ISPs, which are legitimate businesses. Take those ISPs offline — or require them to block botnet communications — and it will be much harder for botnet operators to re-establish contact with infected computers once the command and control link is severed (as recently happened with the Zeus botnet). This raises a very interesting legal question about whether those ISPs are, or should be, liable to block access.
Hot on the heels of the ever-popular song graph meme, we have cartographorisms:

Get your fix of topographical humour over at the New York Times.
I could use one of these monkeys to write my thesis:
More great comics here from the talented penmanship of Mrs Stuart.
In a speech delivered at the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism in London last week, Sir David Eadycalled for an end to nationalised approaches to litigation arising from internet communications:
What is plainly required is an international agreement to govern communications on the web and, in particular, to determine whether they are to be regulated by an agreed set of supra-national regulations or, if not, to provide a generally acceptable means of deciding which domestic law should apply to any offending publication. But clashes of law are undesirable and will only come increasingly to sour international relations. I would characterise this as essentially an international problem deriving from technical advances. It is obviously not a specifically English or UK issue.
The full speech (bizarrely entitled ‘Strasbourg and Sexual Shenanigans: A Search for Clarity’) is well worth reading. It provides an engaging and erudite overview of the history of media regulation in the United Kingdom, and gives a nuanced account of some of the issues facing courts and legislatures when setting the balance between the rights to freedom of expression and private life.
According to Iranian news reports, Iranian intelligence forces have hacked into 29 human rights activism websites which they allege are a front for US espionage and intelligence agencies. The attack follows the finding of an Iranian domestic court that the websites were developed to spy on Iran’s nuclear programme, and for the purpose of ‘provoking sedition and illegal demonstrations and rallies through releasing unreal and unfounded news and reports after the June presidential elections … providing media and news support for the Jundollah terrorist group and the monarchist opposition groups.’ Apparently, the network also distributed American anti-censorship software.
Update: Following the attacks, Iranian security forces arrested dozens of people accused of being involved in the websites’ operation. However, Western media tells a very different story, with The Tech Herald now reporting that those arrested in the operation:
were tortured for their access to the various websites, and as such the sites were taken down by physical violence, and not hacking. They have 30 members of our group held hostage, including the sister of one of our members, who has nothing to do with this matter. Each of the 30 hostages is a human rights activist and nothing more. …
With all the fuss over the iiNet decision today, it might be easy to overlook another interesting copyright judgment that was handed down just a few metres away.
In Larrikin Music Publishing Pty Ltd v EMI Songs Australia Pty Ltd [2010] FCA 29, the owner of copyright in the children’s song ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree’ successfully sued the Australian band Men at Work for infringing copyright in the musical work by reproducing the flute riff in its hit single, ‘Down Under’, which has become a kind of unofficial anthem for many Australians. Kind of ironic that the national spirit infringes copyright.
Update:The judgment has been released — more analysis coming soon.
Justice Cowdroy of the Federal Court of Australia has just handed down judgment in Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Ltd [2010] FCA 24 (iiNet Case), finding in favour of the respondent. As you’re probably aware, the iiNet Case centres on allegations of copyright infringement in connection with unauthorised downloads of films by iiNet’s subscribers using the BitTorrent protocol. The decision confirms the safe-harbours enjoyed by internet intermediaries that prevent them from having to police internet content and limits their responsibility for users’ conduct. Some huge ramifications for Australian service providers were avoided today. From his Honour’s summary reasons:
“iiNet is not responsible if an iiNet user uses [the BitTorrent] system to bring about copyright infringement … the law recognises no positive obligation on any person to protect the copyright of another”
I’ll post a more detailed analysis of the judgment once I’ve had time to digest it fully. For now, the essential points from his Honour’s reading of the summary (as liveblogged and twittered from Courtroom 18C) seem to be as follows: Read more »
[24] There are several reasons why this application must fail. One or two of the defects are, or may be, capable of being cured, but we should make it clear that in our view there is no reason for supposing that the papers ever would or ever could be put into a state which would warrant the summoning of a grand jury. There is a wide range of deficiencies. Most of the affidavits fail to state the deponent’s place of residence. … In addition, the affidavits are objectionable by reason of the way in which they put before the Court a hotch-potch of documents and assertions, inadequately identified and sourced. No-one would wish to see an applicant in person suffer as a result of inability to assemble and verify material as a lawyer would, but benevolent indulgence cannot be stretched to the point of accepting what has been put forward in this case. Quite apart from questions of proper form and admissibility, even applicants in person cannot expect a court to wade through material of the present kind in the hope that there may be found “a grain or two of truth among the chaff”. What, for example, are we expected to make of the vicissitudes of Mr Fyffe, said to be currently lodged in Port Phillip prison for threatening to kill, or those which have beset Ms McKinnon in her attempts to defeat her prosecution for a traffic offence? … Read more »
Some interesting comments from Michael Geist concerning the now-infamous Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which is being negotiated in secret by representatives of most developed countries. This piece considers the extent to which states party to ACTA would be required to amend their domestic laws:
most [representatives] have sought to dampen fears by implausibly claiming that ACTA will not result in any domestic changes in their own country. With that in mind, we get:
- the European Union stating “ACTA will not go further than the current EU regime for enforcement of IPRs”
- the USTR maintaining that ACTA will not rewrite US law
- Australia’s DFAT confirming they do not expect to see major domestic changes to Australian law as a result of the ACTA
- New Zealand stating “ACTA will not change existing standards”
- Canadian Industry Minister Tony Clement assuring the House of Commons that ACTA will be subservient to domestic rules
Of course, if all of this is true, skeptics might reasonably ask why ACTA is needed at all. The truth is that ACTA will require changes in many countries that ratify the agreement. The EU Commissioner-designate for the Internal Market, Michel Barnier, recently acknowledged precisely that during hearings in Brussels. Meanwhile, US lobby groups have stated that they view ACTA as a mechanism to pressure Canada into new copyright reforms. Read more »
A friend forwarded me this entertaining demonstration of the unwavering patience shown by our courts to litigants in person who allege the existence of secret masonic conspiracies -- particularly when, as in this case, an interesting (if obscure) point of criminal procedure is raised. This judgment of the Full Court concerns an ex parte application to summon a grand jury pursuant to s 354 of the Crimes Act 1958 (Vic), a procedure (one of the few on the books still to refer to 'men') which has been repealed in all other Australian law areas. As to the construction of that section, the Court overruled a previous decision of the Full Court, instead holding that the Court retains discretion whether to order the summoning of a grand jury.
However, the real fun begins at paragraph 15, where the Court makes fairly extensive comments about the 'highly unusual facts of this case' (at [14]) (emphasis added):
Unsurprisingly, the application was unsuccessful: