Way more than an everyday interest in IP
The Privacy Commissioner’s determination in the matter of CP and the Department of Defence illustrates one significant difference in the treatment of federal agencies and private sector organisations under the federal Privacy Act. This case involved an employee of the department who had made a claim for worker’s compensation in respect of an injury alleged read more…
I recently caught up on some UK legal developments, and was struck by a decision which held that the English common law did not recognise a lien over intangible property. Much of what the Court of Appeal had to say in its decision is likely to be influential in Australia. The case involved two parties read more…
The Administrative Appeals Tribunal decided at the end of August 2014 that the prior registration of “Melbourne Children’s Psychology Clinic” as a business name prevented the registration of “Melbourne Child Psychology” and “Melbourne Child Psychology Services” because the latter names were “nearly identical” to the former. Whilst the decision traversed issues of the kind familiar read more…
A Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia held recently that a fairly typical software distribution agreement did not confer on the distributor a right to use source code. One may ask why would the parties need to know? The answer lies in the application of royalty withholding tax to payments made by Australian read more…
The legal consequences of the prank call made in December 2012 in which Australian radio announcers called a hospital in London pretending to be Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles asking after the health of the Duchess of Cambridge are still to be determined. On 15 August 2014 the High Court of Australia decided that read more…
As anyone who has read Michael Lewis’ latest book, Flash Boys, will know there is a lot of money to be made and lost through high frequency trading (HFT). Whilst the Australian securities market is structured and regulated quite differently from the US market described by Lewis, there is no doubt that Australia has had read more…
In a rare example of the Commissioner making a determination under the Privacy Act, Aerocare Pty Limited has been found liable to compensate an airline passenger for the manner in which they collected and disclosed sensitive health information about the passenger in an airport departure lounge. The facts and determination Aerocare was acting as a read more…
On 27 March 2014 the Federal Court of Australia decided a case in which it was necessary to form a view of the meaning of one of the National Privacy Principles. Since the National Privacy Principles came into force in December 2001 there have only been two cases in the Federal Court of Australia to read more…
The NSW Ombudsman has lost a claim for immunity from liability for copyright infringements alleged by a software company: see MicroFocus v NSW [2011] FCA 787. Whilst interesting, the decision is unlikely to have widespread application because the court did not need to consider the broader question of whether the federal Copyright Act was inconsistent with the state legislation conferring immunity on a statutory officeholder.