CooperMills

Archive for October, 2011

The Victorian and New South Wales governments have teamed up to open a tender for the application and provision of registry services for new GTLDs including .melbourne and .sydney.

The tender appears to be for a ‘start to finish’ service provider who can apply to ICANN for the GTLDs, manage the process and provider registry services.

There are a number of local players who would be likely to bid in the tender process, including Melbourne IT (who originally managed the .au space) and Ausregistry who currently provides registry services for the .au space (as well as a number of other international TLD and ccTLDs).

Tags: .melbourne, .sydney, domain law, domain lawyer, domain lawyers, domain name law, domain name lawyer, domain name lawyers, technology law
Posted in Domain law and domaining, General, IT Law | Comments Off

The ACCC has announced that it intends to appeal the recent Federal Court decision which found that Google was not liable for misleading and deceptive conduct in publishing Adwords advertisements.

In its recent press release the ACCC said:

The ACCC alleged that Google had engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct by publishing these advertisements on Google’s search results page where a headline of the advertisement comprised a business name, product name or web address of a business not sponsored, affiliated or associated with the advertiser. When a user clicked the words in the heading of the advertisement associated with the competitor’s business or product, he or she was taken to the advertiser’s website.

Justice Nicholas found that although a number of the advertisements were misleading or deceptive, Google had not made those representations. Google merely communicated representations made by the advertiser. As such, Justice Nicholas ruled that Google had not breached the Trade Practices Act.

On appeal the ACCC has indicated that it will be challenging this finding by the Court with respect to 4 advertisements. The ACCC also indicated:

The ACCC takes the view that Google’s key word insertion system, plus the role of Google staff, were fundamental to the representations being made.

This is a significant case as there is a lack of Australian case law on Google Adwords advertisements, which are now one of the most commonly used advertisement methods for Australian businesses, with some businesses spending thousands of dollars per week.

 

Tags: ACCC, Google, Trade Practices Law, Trade Practices Lawyer
Posted in General, IT Law, Trade Practices Law | Comments Off

Cooper Mills was recently quoted in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, IT Pro section 11 October 2011, some quotes from the article entitled ‘Is it legal to send your data overseas’:

Despite their determination to keep hold of their data, however, many companies are still being less than careful with their cloud diligence, says lawyer Erhan Karabardak, director of IT specialist firm Cooper Mills Lawyers.

“It’s amazing how little due diligence people do with cloud services,” he explains.

“People say ‘our data is in the cloud’ but if you ask them where, and in which country, and whether it’s encrypted, they just don’t know. Companies really just need to ask some of the basic questions.”

Such questions become more complicated, Karabardak adds, when a particular cloud service distributes data between servers in different countries to boost the redundancy of data storage;

The full text of the article is viewable here.

Tags: cloud computing, Erhan Karabardak, IT Law, Privacy Law, Sydney Morning Herald, technology lawyer, The Age
Posted in General, IT Law | Comments Off

The ACCC has failed in its bid to have the Federal Court declare that the manner in which Google differentiates sponsored links to organic search results was misleading and deceptive within the meaning of the Australian Consumer Law.

The ACCC had argued that by failing to adequately distinguish advertisements from search results, Google had engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct.

While the Court failed to agree with the ACCC, Google has since changed the labeling of advertisements from ‘sponsored links’ to ‘Ads’ in line with comments by the Court, that the labeling was unclear, but not misleading and deceptive within the sense of the Australian Consumer Law.

Tags: ACCC, Australian Consumer Law, Google, Trade Practices Law, Trade Practices Lawyer
Posted in General, Trade Practices Law | Comments Off