Australia’s first privacy class action settles
On 9 December 2019 the Supreme Court of NSW approved a settlement of a class action alleging invasion of privacy (the first Australian case of this kind). read more…
Way more than an everyday interest in IP
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On 9 December 2019 the Supreme Court of NSW approved a settlement of a class action alleging invasion of privacy (the first Australian case of this kind). read more…
Because data is intangible and not protected by a single legal doctrine the law struggles to fashion appropriate remedies when data has been copied or ‘stolen’ in an unauthorised manner. The High Court of Australia faced this issue in a hearing on 12 and 13 November 2019 involving a challenge to the validity of a search warrant – leading to the Court wondering whether the journalist was asking the Court to recognise a tort of invasion of privacy in Australian law. read more…
Two companies enter into a franchising agreement. Amongst other things, the franchisor agrees to provide the franchisee with customer data for marketing purposes “subject to relevant privacy legislation”. Say that such customer data sharing would be in breach of privacy laws. Will the franchisee still be able to enforce the franchisor’s obligation to provide customer data in these circumstances? read more…
If you have more than the most passing of interests in the video game industry, you will know that the hot topic in the field for the past few weeks has been the use of “lootboxes” by Electronic Arts as a reward system in their new title Star Wars: Battlefront 2. The consumer backlash to read more…
Open source software is regularly used as a way of leveraging the collective knowledge of the software development community by allowing anyone to improve and contribute to the code, provided they ‘pay it forward’ and allow their improved code to be used by the community. Open source software is often incorporated into proprietary software to read more…
Between 31 May 2012 and 26 March 2013, an Australian husband and wife (Mr and Ms Vinson), through their self-managed superannuation funds, invested $1,250,000 and $1,625,000 respectively in a company that never earned any operating revenue. The company, Semantic Software Asia Pacific Limited (formerly Tralee Technology Holdings Pty Ltd) (Semantic), was a software company looking read more…
A recent judgment from the NSW Supreme Court involving the lease of gas turbines is actually a useful and important reminder to content producers seeking to retain copyright in content provided to customers until those works are paid for. On the face of it, the decision in Forge Group Power Pty Limited (in liquidation) (receivers read more…
Many regulators take an expansive view of their remit, and the Australian Privacy Commissioner has acted in this way in the Ashley Madison case. The Ashley Madison data security breach attracted enormous publicity worldwide, when details of approximately 36 million subscribers were published by hacktivists operating under the monicker “The Impact Team”. The company that read more…
Recent publicity about an Australian university’s practice of tracking the location of people connected to the university’s wi-fi network raises a mixture of policy and legal issues. The media report claims that the legal position is not clear, so this post is intended to help readers understand that position. The university’s spokesman is quoted as read more…