The Cabinet Office's Better Regulation Executive (BRE) is currently undertaking a review of penalties for businesses that fall foul of the law and business should ensure their views are heard. This spring, a consultation paper will be released which will be the final opportunity for stakeholders and interested parties to contribute to the review before it makes its recommendations to the Government in late 2006 ...
Dominant companies have special responsibility to ensure that the way they do business doesn’t prevent competition on the merits and does not harm consumers and innovation», said European Competition Commissioner Mário Monti, regarding the Commission’s Microsoft decision dated March 24th, 2004 ...
The interoperability information on Microsoft’s decision deserves special attention by the undertakings that have a dominant position in the market. Intellectual property rights, granted as an incentive for the creation of innovation and as a tool to recoup the investments made by companies, used to be understood as providing several rights to its owners ...
The Police and Justice Bill was put before the House of Commons on 25 January 2006. The main aim of the Bill is to improve the powers and scope of the police force but there are a number of sections which look to update the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (CMA) and in particular to make Denial of Service (DOS) Attacks illegal. DOS attacks can take many forms but are essentially an attempt to disrupt the use of a computer, server or website ...
TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION II ...
The Police and Justice Bill was put before the House of Commons on 25 January 2006. The main aim of the Bill is to improve the powers and scope of the police force but there are a number of sections which look to update the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (CMA) and in particular to make Denial of Service (DOS) Attacks illegal. DOS attacks can take many forms but are essentially an attempt to disrupt the use of a computer, server or website ...
The Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) and the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) both came into force on 1 January 2005. The Acts gave the general public the right to request and receive information held by public authorities for the first time ...
The implementing rules and regulations of Republic Act No. 6957 as amended, or the BOT Law, have been revised to increase incentives, minimize government regulations, allow reasonable returns on investments, share risks between the government and the project proponent, and assure transparency and competitiveness in the bidding and award of projects ...
Every day in Mumbai, India, a team of 5,000 couriers deliver, collect and return 200,000 lunch boxes. This massive logistics operation is undertaken with an error rate of less than 1 in 8 million deliveries and without using any information technology. Enormous labour cost disparities enable this manual operation to be undertaken cost-effectively ...
What will the impact be when the Scottish Parliament Finance Committee reports on Accountability and Governance asks Kelly Harris The Finance Committee of the Scottish Parliament has been conducting an inquiry into Accountability and Governance in Scotland, looking at the proliferation of Commissioners and Ombudsmen established since devolution. The impetus behind the inquiry was the growing concern that money might be being wasted as a result of overlapping functions and responsibilities ...
Procuring and implementing an ICT system within an organisation can be a stressful task. High profile failures in both the public and private sectors hit the headlines all too often. The National Audit Office's report last month on the £6.2bn NHS IT upgrade in England put many of the challenges firmly in the spotlight. In the heat of the procurement process it is easy to forget some basic procurement principles ...
State Aid is something of a European hot potato as the European Commission is currently in the process of reforming the rules surrounding State Aid. This reform process is the key priority for Robert Hankin, head of the Regional Aid Unit at the European Commission. State Aid involves support given by a member state to businesses, in the form of subsidies or tax breaks for example, and has a wide-ranging impact throughout Europe ...
• Directors of NPOs are subject to substantially the same duties and liabilities as directors of for-rofit companies • Being a director of an NPO is not merely an honorary role • The corporate governance rules recommended for or imposed on reporting issuers are examples of best practices for NPOs; however, like for small businesses, they should be adapted, depending on the situation, to avoid unduly complicating the NPO’s processes • Special attention should be paid to certain differenc
The House of Lords has clarified what makes a message sent by means of a public electronic communications network "grossly offensive" and therefore capable of amounting to a crime under the Communications Act 2003 ("Act") ...
There has been a great deal of interest generated by the Bankruptcy and Diligence etc (Scotland) Bill on its passage through the Scottish Parliament ...
The revelations of the intercepted phone messages from Prince Harry and Prince William earlier this year are a reminder of how vulnerable personal data can be. Proposed changes to the law will mean that those who hold confidential personal information must be even more vigilant about what they do with that data. Most businesses will be familiar with the Data Protection legislation but it is important not to be complacent ...
Open source software ("OSS") is quickly entering the mainstream and becoming increasingly widely used. In fact International Data Group analysts have predicted that the OSS marketplace will be worth £35 billion by 2008. OSS is software that is freely available (without discrimination) and can be copied, modified and redistributed ...
The IT outsourcing market has matured in the past years. Many IT outsourcing relationships are fruitful and long lasting. Nevertheless international surveys continue to show that numerous outsourcing deals are untimely terminated in the first two to four years. This paper highlights the key risk factors for failure of IT outsourcing relationships. These key risk factors will be underlined by various failed outsourcing case law. Such case law probably only represents the top of the iceberg ...
Bolivia has just culminated the step that will have the greatest impact in the process of creating a new constitution for Bolivia. On Sunday July 2, Bolivia elected the constituents to the assembly that will be in charge with providing structure and substance to the new constitutional norm ...
He may be a knight, one of the most successful music artists and a noted viniculturalist, but Sir Cliff Richard is not resting on his laurels. Add legal reform campaigner to this list as the Peter Pan of Pop leads the quest to change UK copyright law.Copyright can be deceptively simple on the face of it, but scratch the surface and you reveal the complexity of co-existing legal rights. Take Sir Cliff's 1959 best selling single 'Living Doll' ...
On 4 December 2006 the Disability Equality Duty will come into force. It will join the broadly similar Race Equality Duty, which has existed under the race relations legislation since 2001. Meanwhile, an analogous Gender Equality Duty is due to come into force in April 2007.The intention behind the creation of these new duties is to ensure that bodies which exercise public functions “mainstream” equality issues when exercising those functions ...
The legal systems of the nations that comprise the Gulf Cooperation Council -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates -- have undergone dramatic, radical and progressive change and development in the past 25 years, which is continuing ...
The Sappier Decision: Supreme Court of Canada Recognizes Aboriginal Right to Timber for Domestic Purposes and Clarifies Requirements for Establishing an Aboriginal RightOn December 7, 2006, the Supreme Court of Canada handed down its decision in the cases of Gray v. R and R. v. Sappier and Polchies ...
As concerns the contents of the Act, we can say primarily that certain proven principle and institutes reappeared known from original Act No. 199/1994, Coll., on Public Procurement which Act No. 40/2004, Coll ...
On 26 October 2006, the Antitrust Court issued a decision, from a defense of competition perspective, in connection with the legality of the behaviors between Voissnet S.A. ('Voissnet') and Compañía de Telecomunicaciones de Chile S.A. ('CTC-CHILE'). Voissnet, a company that provides telecommunication services consisting of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), accused CTC-CHILE of performing acts against free competition ...
