cearta.ie – Page 89 – the Irish for rights

The 1960 movie Spartacus (imdb | wikipedia) (dir: Stanley Kubrick; screenplay: Dalton Trumbo) tells the story of a slave rebellion against ancient Rome led by the title character, a Thracian gladiator, played by Kirk Douglas. When the rebellion is eventually crushed by an army led by the Roman general and politician Marcus Licinius Crassus, played by Laurence Olivier, the recaptured slaves are told that they will be spared crucifixion if they identify Spartacus. Instead, one after another, they each proclaim “I am Spartacus“. It is a famous scene of solidarity – all the more so since screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was one of the blacklisted Hollywood 10, and he was the first blacklisted writer to write a screenplay his own name again when he wrote the screenplay for Spartacus, based on the novel by another blacklisted writer, Howard Fast. Wikipedia reports that the “documentary Trumbo suggests that this scene was meant to dramatize the solidarity of those accused of being Communist sympathizers during the McCarthy Era who refused to implicate others, and thus were blacklisted”.

The phrase has been in the news recently because it has been taken up on twitter #IamSpartacus in solidarity with Paul Chambers (Guardian | Telegraph).…

Offences to feelings, and regulation of speech in a multicultural era

2 December, 201024 July, 2013

| 7 Comments

| Freedom of Expression

Picking up on last week’s post about Milton’s Areopagitica, in the classical liberal tradition, the fact that speech is offensive is not in itself a sufficient reason to censor it. As John Stuart Mill (pictured left) put it, “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”. And he utterly rejected that offence could amount to such harm:

Before quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, it is fit to take notice of those who say, that the free expression of all opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner be temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent. But this, though an important consideration in a practical point of view, merges in a more fundamental objection.

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Is a newsletter deal to sell a €395 book for €136 too good to be true?

1 December, 201020 August, 2019

| 4 Comments

| Contract, Mistaken offers

By way of update on this morning’s post, here is an extract from an email I received today from the Irish publishers Round Hall (the local imprint of Thomson Reuters) which raises very similar issues:

Oops! Correction of Offer Price for The Criminal Process

Correction

Our E-newsletter distributed on 30 November 2010 contained a mistake in relation to the 20% savings advertised for The Criminal Process by Thomas O’Malley.

The correct offer price, valid until the 15 December 2010, is in fact €316, and not €136 as advertised in our latest e-newsletter. The list price is €395. I’m sure that you will agree that this is still an excellent offer for this particular title!

Our sincere apologies for any confusion caused. (Our marketing department is doing suitable penance at the moment, and is also paying a little visit to the optician…)

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Is an online deal for a €98 tv too good to be true?

1 December, 201020 August, 2019

| 7 Comments

| Contract, Mistaken offers

An item in the Readers’ Queries feature on the Consumer page in last week’s Irish Times caught my eye, not least because it raised very interesting issues about ordering goods online:

Online TV deal too good to be true

A reader was on the Arnotts website recently pricing televisions when he found a 42” model for €1,498. According to the site it had a discount of €1,400. “A TV for €98? Where could I go wrong? So I put in my Laser card details, expecting to be told the order could not be processed due to a pricing error but no, it went through. I got a confirmation e-mail a few minutes later with an order number,” he writes.

He “kept checking the tracking of the order on their web page and it said the order was processed and waiting for a delivery date. Later that evening I got an e-mail saying they had made an error in pricing and my order was cancelled.”

The incident has left him curious. “Since Arnotts never took any money from my account but did issue the order number, do they have to honour the order or are they completely within their rights to cancel it?

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The impact of the IMF on Irish legal education – Updated

30 November, 201023 June, 2011

| 6 Comments

| Competition Law, Irish Law, Legal Education, Legal Services Regulation

I never thought I’d see the day when I’d put both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Irish legal education together in the title of a blogpost. But there it is, above. And this is because the summary of the the Joint EU-IMF Programme for Ireland on the Department of the Taoiseach website suggests that there will be consequences for legal education:

Competition

Removal of restrictions to competition in sheltered sectors including:

Legal profession:

– establish an independent regulator;

– implement the recommendations of the Legal Costs Working Group and outstanding Competition Authority recommendations. …

The enhancement of competition and the reduction of regulation in sheltered sectors is a standard IMF prescription, so this recommendation comes as little surprise. As for its details, the Legal Costs Working Group was established in 2004 and asked to look at the way in which legal costs are determined and assessed, and it reported in 2005 (pdf). In December 2006, as part of a series of reports on regulated professions, the Competition Authority published a Report on the Legal Professions which determined that the legal profession was in need of substantial reform. …

Academic Freedom and the Law

29 November, 2010

| 1 Comment

| Academic Freedom, Freedom of Expression

Hart Publishing have just published Academic Freedom and the Law: A Comparative Study (cover left) by Eric Barendt:

Academic Freedom and the Law: A Comparative Study provides a critical analysis of the law relating to academic freedom in three major jurisdictions: the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States. The book outlines the various claims which may be made to academic freedom by individual university teachers and by universities and other higher education institutions, and it examines the justifications which have been put forward for these claims. Three separate chapters deal with the legal principles of academic freedom in the UK, Germany, and the USA. A further chapter is devoted to the restrictions on freedom of research which may be imposed by the regulation of clinical trials, by intellectual property laws, and by the terms of contracts made between researchers and the companies sponsoring medical and other research. The book also examines the impact of recent terrorism laws on the teaching and research freedom of academics, and it discusses their freedom to speak about general political and social topics unrelated to their work.

This is the first comparative study of a subject of fundamental importance to all academics and others working in universities.

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Reshaping the Law for the Digital Economy – II – the liability of intermediaries

24 November, 20106 November, 2012

| 2 Comments

| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, Copyright, Cyberlaw, Defamation, Defamation Act 2009, Digital Rights, Fair use

As I said my first post yesterday, last Friday morning I attended a seminar on Promoting innovation – Reshaping the Law for the Digital Economy, hosted by Google Ireland, co-sponsored by the Institute for International and European Affairs (IIEA), and chaired by TJ McIntyre. In that post, I summarized the presentations by Johnny Ryan (the internet has created a hinge in history when information is plastic and copyright law is a block upon total commerce) and Niall O’Riordan (for Google, a fair use doctrine in Ireland and Europe is an idea whose time has come). In this post, I’ll look at last Friday’s other presentations; and in tomorrow’s post, I’ll add a few comments of my own on some of the issues raised by the seminar.

Kate O’Sullivan (Director of Regulation and Public Policy, UPC Ireland) pointed out that intermediaries (such as Google, Facebook, and ISPs) are caught in the middle between content producers seeking to enforce their rights as against users, and it is not appropriate that ISPs should be judge and jury in such a cause. Section 40(3) of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000 (also here) provides that the mere provision of facilities by an ISP, for example, which enable the making available to the public of copies of a work “shall not of itself constitute an act of making available to the public of copies of the work” and therefore shall not for that reason amount to a copyright infringement.…

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit

23 November, 20106 December, 2010

| 5 Comments

| Blasphemy, Censorship, Freedom of Expression, prior restraint

The title of this post is taken from the third paragraph of Milton’s Areopagitica. As I commented in an earlier post, one of the classic liberal justifications for freedom of expression was stated by John Milton (pitctured left) in his Areopagitica – A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England. According to The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor (with added links):

It was on this day in 1644 that John Milton published a pamphlet called Areopagitica, arguing for freedom from censorship. He said,

I wrote my Areopagitica in order to deliver the press from the restraints with which it was encumbered; that the power of determining what was true and what was false, what ought to be published and what to be suppressed, might no longer be entrusted to a few illiterate and illiberal individuals, who refused their sanction to any work which contained views or sentiments at all above the level of vulgar superstition.

He compared the censoring of books to the Spanish Inquisition and claimed that the government wanted “to bring a famine upon our minds again.”

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