Tag

human rights

Free Speech

Regulating the Raunchy? Free speech and obscenity under Miller v. California

June 21, 2019

One of the most interesting aspects of being a technology lawyer is that it necessarily requires a strong understanding of Internet regulation and digital rights, including the right to express yourself online.  As such, free speech is one of my favourite areas of legal history and theory.  Coincidentally, two major US Supreme Court cases regarding free speech were decided on this day —  21 June! This post takes a look at one of them: Miller v. California [1973].  In a later post, I’ll explore a second landmark free speech case decided on 21 June: Texas v. Johnson [1989]. The Constitution in Court.   Most…

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Privacy Law

Do Neo-Nazis have a right to privacy?

December 13, 2018

Earlier this month, a leftist art collective in Germany called the Centre for Political Beauty (Zentrum für Politische Schönheit or “ZPS”) launched a website to name and shame neo-Nazis. At soko-chemnitz.de, people were invited to examine photographs taken during this summer’s violent anti-immigration protests in Chemnitz, and in exchange for identifying suspected right-wing demonstrators, would receive a crowd-funded reward of at least €30. The twist? The image recognition database was a honeypot: a sophisticated hoax to induce neo-Nazis into identifying themselves. This recent project gives rise to serious questions regarding the exploitation of personal data for illegitimate or unlawful purposes – even if those…

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Uncategorized

Photos of Oxford Student Celebrations Raise Questions About Privacy Rights and Journalism

October 14, 2018

Dear reader, This post was originally published on 14 October 2018, and subsequently deleted on 24 October 2019, after an interested party contacted me and asked that any reference to them in my blog post be removed. I chose to delete the post in its entirety to avoid any further problems. I stand by what I wrote and shared, including the watermarked images from a stock photo company for illustrative purposes, an image from Flickr, and screen captures of newspaper headlines on a related subject. I also quoted information that the individual had already manifestly made public themselves in statements to…

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Sir Cliff Richards v BBC: is publicity the soul of justice?

July 25, 2018

You don’t have to be a privacy or media lawyer to have heard of the sex abuse allegations levied against celebrities in the entertainment industry over the last few years. The investigations concerning Sir Cliff Richard, a famous British musician, included a widely-televised raid on his estate in Berkshire by South Yorkshire Police. Nearly four years after the BBC first named and shamed Sir Cliff in what is now considered to have been “sensationalist” journalism, the High Court has determined that his rights of privacy were infringed. What makes this case so interesting is that it does not focus on defamation —that…

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Google prepares for the first “Right to Be Forgotten” trials in England

January 30, 2018

All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret. ― Gabriel García Márquez The European Union’s Court of Justice decision in Google Spain v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González (“Google Spain”) confirmed the “right to be forgotten” for European citizens. This right is further enshrined in the upcoming General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). Accordingly, European data protection law grants individuals a qualified right to have personal data relating to them removed from search engines. This right is however considered by some to be a uniquely European phenomena, which resulted from one unusual CJEU judgement. Now, two upcoming cases against Google will be the first time in which the…

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