cearta.ie – Page 165 – the Irish for rights

I’ve just read the judgment of Smyth J in Finnegan v J&E Davy [2007] IEHC 18 (26 January 2007). A must read for contract students everywhere, for what it says about duress (“hobson’s choice”), exercising contractual discretion especially in awarding bonuses, and restraint of trade.

Update (21 May 2007): I’ve also just read the judgment of Finlay Geoghegan J in Boliden Tara Mines Limited v Cosgrove & Ors [2007] IEHC 60 (09 March 2007). It too is interesting, in part for what it says (albeit in the context of a pension deed rather than a contract) about construction of documents (applying the leading UK case, which has been approved by the Supreme Court in a case not referred to here, though an earlier decision is), the remedy of rectification, and setting aside for (unilateral) mistake.

Update (25 May 2007): I’ve also read the interesting decision of O’Neill J in Flynn v Dermot Kelly Limited & Anor [2007] IEHC 103 (16 March 2007) on the interplay between, on the one hand, the definitions of “consumer”, “consumer-hire agreement”, and “hirer” in section 2 of the Consumer Credit Act, 1995 (also here), and the implied conditions as to quality and fitness of motor vehicles contained in section 13 of the Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act, 1980 (also here; restated here (pdf)).…

Applications for the Position of Press Ombudsman Are Now Sought

18 May, 200710 December, 2012

| 2 Comments

| Defamation, Freedom of Expression, Media and Communications, Press Council

The Business This Week section of today’s Irish Times carries an advertisment (on page 18), under the heading used as the title to thise post, seeking applications for the position of Press Ombudsman. The advertisment is available online here (from Grant Thornton‘s recruitment arm).

The Press Ombudsman is a crucial part of the press industry’s Press Council package, and will be critical not only to the efficient working of the complaints system but also as a consequence to the public legitimacy of the entire project. According to the Press Council website [update (3 January 2008): the website has been redesigned and this link is no longer active]:

The Press Ombudsman

The Press Ombudsman will be appointed by the Press Council, is and will be the public face of Irish press regulation; s/he is the person who will receive complaints from members of the public, consider whether they are valid, and then seek to resolve them to the satisfaction of everyone involved. The Press Ombudsman will deal with the majority of complaints by members of the public, however s/he will also has the option of referring difficult cases (or cases where those involved are dissatisfied with the decision) to the Press Council of Ireland.

…

I must be doing something right?

18 May, 200725 May, 2007

| 1 Comment

| Blogging, Freedom of Expression

I like Eamonn Fitzgerald’s Rainy Day blog. Today – fatefully, perhaps, the day DaithÃ is blogging live from the OpenNet Initiative‘s Oxford conference on The Future of Free Expression on the Internet – Eamonn writes:

Banned in Beijing

Was it something we said? According to the Great Firewall of China, Rainy Day is being blocked by the regime in Beijing. read more

Always curious about these things, I immediately clicked on the link to find out if Cearta is being blocked too. It is! The text in the middle of the screen-grab thumbnail on the right (click on it – or here – for full size image) says: “Your URL is Blocked!”.

Eamonn and I must be doing something right …

Update (19 May 2007): More on ONI from the BBC and MediaPal@LSE; and another live blog from the day from Tobias Escher at the OII. The ONI website also has a system for checking whether a site is blocked, and according to that, neither Rainy Day nor Cearta is blocked by anyone, not even by China. What a pity. Of course, this raises the age old question of trust, especially online. What was it about Great Wall that led both Eamonn and me to trust its assessment that our sites were blocked, or at least to trust it sufficiently to blog about it – perhaps it was because it told us what we wanted to hear?…

Milton & Mill: Freedom of Expression online

18 May, 200718 May, 2007

| 3 Comments

| Blogging, Freedom of Expression

The classic liberal justification for freedom of expression has been stated by John Milton (pitctured left) in Areopagitica – A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England and by John Stuart Mill (pictured right) in On Liberty.

New from SSRN: David O Brink “Mill’s Liberal Principles and Freedom of Expression” in CL Ten (ed) Mill’s On Liberty: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). From the abstract:

John Stuart Mill’s defense of freedom of expression has proved extremely influential and finds important echoes in First Amendment jurisprudence. Though important in its own right, Mill’s defense of freedom of expression also plays an important, though sometimes overlooked, role in his more general defense of individual liberties. Mill turns to freedom of expression in the belief that there is general agreement on the importance of freedom of expression and that, once the grounds for expressive liberties are understood, this agreement can be exploited to support a more general defense of individual liberties. This means that a proper understanding of the significance of Mill’s defense of freedom of expression requires not only reconstructing his arguments on behalf of expressive liberties and exploring their bearing on issues of freedom of expression but also seeing how these arguments generalize to other kinds of liberties.

…

Speech just wants to be free – IV

17 May, 200718 May, 2007

| 1 Comment

| Blogging, Election 2007

There has been an exciting development in my campaign (see my earlier posts: here, here and here) to persuade RTÃ‰ to make the Prime Time leaders’ debates available online without restriction. I received the following letter from Fianna FÃ¡il (for reasons of accuracy, I have retyped it as it came in (here’s the PDF), including the not uncommon mis-spelling of my name, which I will forgive as I welcome the rest of it!):

Dr. Eoin O’Neill
School of Law
Trinity College
Dublin 2

14th May 2007

Dear Dr. O’Neill,

I refer to your letter to An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern TD, who has asked me to reply directly to you on his behalf.

Fianna FÃ¡il would be in full agreement that the Leaders debate should be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. It is a crucial part of the General Election campaign and for many people plays a key role deciding their voting intentions.

We fully support your proposal and will make our views in this regard known to RTE.

Kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

________________
Gerry Hickey
Special Advisor to An Taoiseach

It’s still not too late for the other party leaders to come on board or for RTÃ‰ to change their minds.…

Two Digital Developments Today

16 May, 20075 June, 2009

| 2 Comments

| Copyright, Digital Rights, Privacy

Eagle eyed readers of this blog (well, there are two readers – hi, mum and dad – and at least one of you must be wearing your glasses as you read this) will have spotted the CC button at the bottom of the right tool bar, and its accompanying text, that “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License”.

The Creative Commons organisation helps webauthors to make their works freely available to be shared and reused, either by helping them put the works into the public domain or by retaining copyright whilst while licensing the work as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. …

A Limerick on Taylor v Caldwell

16 May, 200715 June, 2007

| No Comments

| Contract

From Jeremy Telman on ContractsProf Blog, a limerick on Taylor v Caldwell (1863) 3 B & S 826, 122 ER 309, [1863] EWHC QB J1 (6 May 1863) (see wikipedia), the decision of Blackburn J which is now regarded as the foundation case of the modern law of frustration of contracts:

This case may be so well known as to need no introduction, but if people are in the market for visual aids, at left are public domain images of the Surrey Music Hall and Gardens, the former of which was the music hall that burnt down in Taylor v. Caldwell.

Since neither this nor the coronation cases are included in the casebook that I use, and since I am usually way behind by the time I get to this subject matter, this is a portion of the course that I teach entirely through Limericks.

Taylor v. Caldwell

Taylor rented a hall like the Met’s
For the purpose of concerts and fetes
When fire the hall downed,
The corut wisely found
A way to excuse Taylor’s debts.

[Jeremy Telman]

An earlier entry in ContractsProf Blog also has links to more on the Royal Surrey Gardens and Surrey Music Hall here (wikipedia) and here, including the image of the interior (left) (see here for images of what’s there now).…

What’s so wrong with giving people what they want?

15 May, 200716 May, 2007

| 1 Comment

| Digital Rights

Studios make movies to make money; publishers publish books to make money; music companies produce cds to make money – content producers want to exploit their content to make money. That’s why they seek strictly to enforce their copyright in movies, books, music, and so on. It’s how they make their money. And they adopt measures to protect this content from piracy. So, they objected to the photocopier, and to double-tape decks, even though a photocopy or copied tape is rarely as good as the original. Now, however, the benefits of digital content are threatened by the ease of copying digital content without loss of quality. And the content producers, in particular the movie and music companies, are (controversially) trying to use technology to prevent such copying and (even more controversially) to use the law to support (and enforce) such anti-copying technology. They have failed to understand why it’s getting such a bad press, and they have become locked into a mindset that seeks to corall and control their content. And they can’t see that much of this anti-copying technology makes life very difficult indeed for their customers.

The challenge for these companies is to find a way to co-exist with both the advantages and disadvantages of digital content, without losing customers.…