Happy international open access week! Prof Bernt Hugenholtz wrote on the Kluwer Copyright Blog yesterday about the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA) statements (2018 | 2018 | (2022 pdf)) in support of secondary publication rights for scholarly articles. I am a principal investigator on a research group that has recently proposed some draft legislation to achieve this end at Irish law.

The research group is called SCOIR (Secondary rights, Copyright, Open access, Institutional policies, and Rights retention), and we are grateful to the National Open Research Forum (NORF) and Knowledge Rights 21 for funding. “Scoir” is an Irish word for “unharness”, and this project aims to unharness the power of open research, consistently with national and EU policy. One of the ways in which we hope to vindicate research outputs, and achieve the goals of Secondary Publishing Rights and Rights Retention in Ireland, is by means of a draft Copyright and Related Rights (Research Outputs and Open Access) Bill 2024 (the current version of the draft Bill is here and here (both pdf downloads)).

The aim of this draft Bill is to underpin and vindicate the rights of researchers and their employers and funders to publish publicly-funded research outputs on open access platforms.…

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1. Introduction
The Supreme Court has dismissed Graham Dwyer’s appeal against his conviction for the murder of childcare worker Elaine O’Hara (BBC | Examiner | Irish Independent | Irish Times | Gazette.ie | RTÉ | Sky | TheJournal.ie). The Court held that evidence of mobile phone traffic and location data was admissible at his trial. Collins J (pictured back right, in the photograph on the left) (O’Donnell CJ; Dunne, Charleton, O’Malley and Donnelly JJ concurring) delivered the judgment of the Court; Hogan J (pictured beside Collins J) concurred in a short judgment. In this post I want to sketch the background to the decision, the decision itself, and some consequences. In a series of forthcoming posts, I will look at all of those issues in more detail.

2. Background
On 27 March 2015, following a lengthy and high-profile trial in the Central Criminal Court before Hunt J and a jury, Dwyer was convicted of the murder of Elaine O’Hara in August 2012. He was subsequently sentenced to imprisonment for life, and he continues to serve that sentence.

Since January 2008, there had been an intense sexual relationship between him and Elaine O’Hara; and, after March 2011, they had communicated with each other by prepaid mobile phones.…

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I did a few podcasts recently. First, I chatted with the Irish Independent‘s Adrian Weckler on his Big Tech Show:

What is Facebook’s new metaverse?

Will we all switch over to a new, more integrated virtual reality to socialise, play, work and shop? That’s what Mark Zuckerberg thinks is going to happen. He and Facebook are now about to start building this ‘metaverse’, partly in Ireland.

How will it benefit our lives? How might it hurt our lives? To dig deeper into what the metaverse will and won’t be, Adrian is joined by Bloomberg’s technology editor Nate Lanxon and TCD professor Eoin O’Dell. The panel take a look at how the metaverse will work and what the privacy and regulatory implications might be.

video | audio

A little time later, I looked at the possible regulatory consequences of France Haugen‘s revelations about Facebook with Jess Kelly on Newstalk’s Tech Talk podcast:

Facebook is Meta …

Jess looks at the rebrand of Facebook to Meta. Dr Eoin O’Dell discusses upcoming legislation and Emmet Ryan explains what impact it will have on the issues facing the company. …

Finally, on a completely different note, I chatted with the Irish Times journalist Karlin Lillington about all things copyright on the fantastic Walled Culture podcast:

The copyright creation myth, a permission-based society, and EU vs US copyright law

Dr.

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0. Prolegomenon, or Why me?
Today is Bloomsday, the centrepiece of a five-day festival in Dublin and online celebrating the day in 1904 on which the events of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses unfold, which is the day Joyce first formally went out with Nora Barnacle. Their story is brilliantly told in the best book I’ve read this year, Nuala O’Connor‘s Nora: A Love Story of Nora Barnacle and James Joyce (New Island Books, 2021).

Several years ago, I wrote a post about Bloomsday for a blawg carnival called Blawg Review; sadly, the review is now defunct; but I thought I might revisit and update the post. Just like Oh Brother, Where art Thou?, the novel loosely parallels Homer’s Odyssey, and the original blogpost very very loosely paralleled Joyce’s Ulysses (or at least his chapter headings), to introduce some interesting contemporary legal stories. I will keep the sub-Joycean introductions, to introduce some current legal stories, and I have fixed broken links in the text that I have retained.…

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This is a call for papers for a conference on Reputation as Property: Perspectives from Tort and Property, to be held on 18-19 January 2019 in Trinity College Dublin:

How can tort law account for the harm of defamation? One answer to this question is to argue that our reputation is or is like property. While this analogy may make sense to tort law theorists, particularly those seeking to give an internal account of tort law, it may not make sense to property theorists. In addition, it is not clear whether this approach fits with the case law. Whether or not thinking about reputation as property makes sense raises the question of whether tort law theory understands property differently than property theory does. It also raises the question of whether the theory of the tort of defamation fits the case law. In what ways does it make sense to think about reputation as property, and in what ways does it not?

In this workshop, organised in association with the Private Law Group at Trinity College Dublin, we seek to bring together property and torts scholars to discuss both theoretical and doctrinal approaches to the question of whether reputation is property or not.

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