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In 2005, the Government decided that in tandem with new defamation legislation it would bring in new privacy legislation. To that end a working group, consisting of a senior lawyer and three civil servants, was set up in July 2005 and reported in March 2006. Its terms of reference required it to consider Articles 8 and 10 ECHR and prepare proposals on a general tort of violation of privacy, and identification of specific offensive forms of invasion of privacy. The group concluded that the arguments in favour of the introduction of a clear statutory cause of action outweighed the arguments against...

Ireland’s current defamation law is largely common law (judge-made law), partly codified and updated in the Defamation Act 1961, which was modelled on the British Act of 1956. Successive Irish governments had promised to modernise defamation law and finally a new Bill has been published. The Bill follows many of the recommendations made by the Law Reform Commission in 1991 and reconsidered by a Legal Advisory Group established by the Minister for Justice in 2003. Some of the provisions are essentially tidying-up measures and clarifications of uncertainties that had developed. Others involve more...

The European Commission recently approved under EC Treaty state aid rules four aid schemes meant to support film making in Poland and Ireland, music recordings by new talent in France and newspaper distribution in Denmark. All four schemes were found to entail no undue distortion of competition within the Single Market. The Danish plans sought to give publishers of certain newspaper-like publications direct grants totalling EUR 1.3 million. The aid will enable publishers to freely choose their distributors in their efforts to distribute these publications. In deciding to favour this scheme, the...

The Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) has granted a research group at Trinity College Dublin 50 megahertz of radio spectrum to enable it to carry out real time experiments in dynamic spectrum allocation. Until now radio stations, mobile phone operators and such like have only been entitled to use the spectrum they have been granted for specific purposes. In 2004, the OX Report (see IRIS 2005-2: 16), commissioned by the Irish Government, included in its recommendations that better use should be made of the spectrum. The grant of spectrum for research has been made under ComReg’s...

The High Court on 24 January made an order requiring three ISPs to hand over to four record companies the names, addresses and telephone numbers of 49 alleged file-sharers. The first such order had been made by the Court in July 2005 (see IRIS 2005-10: 15). The file-sharers in the recent case were all alleged to have downloaded between 500 and 5,000 files, in breach of s.140 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000 (see IRIS 2000-8: 13). The music companies intend to take infringement proceedings against the file-sharers. Mr. Justice Kelly described the activity as a modern form of thieving....