WESTLAW HEADING FOR AUSTRALIA
Hard on the heels of Butterworths, who launched their Lexis Asia Pacific operation last year, the Thomson Legal & Regulatory publishing group has announced plans expand its Westlaw service into Australia. Mike Boswood, the managing director of TLR Europe has confirmed plans to extend the Westlaw service outside the USA and UK into a "global network of Westlaw operations around the world". Westlaw services in Australia/New Zealand, Canada and Spain are all scheduled to launch in the first half of 2001.

In a related development, Sweet & Maxwell has appointed Maria Hamrefors to the newly created position of director of Westlaw UK. Hamrefors was previously the managing director of Fakta Info Direkt, one of the leading legal publishers in Sweden and another part of the TLR group which also owns Sweet & Maxwell. Hamrefors, who reports to Sweet & Maxwell managing director Wendy Beecham, will have overall responsibility for the strategic direction of online services at Sweet & Maxwell, including the commercial development of Westlaw UK.

BOULDING MOVES ON
Simon Boulding, who over the past couple of years has helped raise the international profile of London law firm Manches, has moved on to a new post as head of marketing at Hobson Audley. As well as being well known in the IT law world through the activities of one of its partners Robert Bond, the London-based practice recently joined the select number of UK law firms to opt for outsourcing its entire IT operations to a third party - in this case Tikit. Here at Legal News Media we believe law firm managements are seriously underestimating the benefits of an outsourcing and facilities management strategy.

IT CONSULTANTS TAKE ON THE TAXMAN
Today sees the final day of court proceedings in an application for judicial review brought by the UK's Professional Contractors Group - which describes itself as "the IT workers lobby" - against the Inland Revenue over the proposed IR35 tax rules. According to the PCG, the change in the rules (which affects self-employed "independent" consultants working on a regular basis for specific employers) would mean their members paying 35 percent - rather than 21 percent - basic tax rates and so force many consultants to move abroad, thereby causing an IT skills shortage. The Inland Revenue argument is that IR35 merely closes a tax loophole that has been exploited by everyone from software programmers to pizza delivery boys.

LAW REPORTS BOSS TO HAVE HIS DAY IN COURT
Norman Stanley Fletcher-Bagnall, better known as Kenneth Bagnall QC, the founder and former chairman of next-day law reports publisher New Law Publishing, is due to appear in court on 2nd April to face charges arising out of the 1997 takeover of New Law by Croner Publications, part of the Wolters Kluwer group, In October 1998 Bagnall was charged with nine counts of theft totalling £375000. The money is alleged to have been stolen in a series of transactions that took place during and in the immediate aftermath of the Croner takeover.

In November 2000, Wolters Kluwer sold New Law and parts of the Croner.CCH business to Sweet & Maxwell. Although the sale price was not disclosed at the time, Legal News Media sources suggest it was twice the sum the sum Wolter Kluwer paid for it three years earlier.

WEB SITES BREACH FAIR TRADE LAWS
This week the UK's Office of Trading published the results of a survey of 637 consumer web sites. According to the OFT, 52 percent of the sites were in breach of the Distance Selling Regulations, which came into force in October 2000, because they failed to provide consumers with easily accessible information about the sites' order cancellation, exchange and refund policies.

PASSIVE DOMAINS MAY BE IN BAD FAITH
A new WIPO domain name arbitration ruling has ruled that the passive holding of a domain name by a company (for example, where the name has been registered but there is no web site) in the knowledge that a competitor company may have legitimate interests in the name, is strong evidence of bad faith and may justify the domain name being reassigned.

MARC JENNINGS TAPPED AS PUBLISHER FOR LOISLAW
Aspen Publishers, a Wolters Kluwer North America company, announced at the American Bar Association's Annual Technology Show the appointment of Marc Jennings as publisher of Loislaw. Jennings joined Aspen in 1999 as executive managing editor for the New Media group and was instrumental in jumpstarting Aspen's XML conversion program. Last September, Jennings was promoted to associate publisher with responsibility for e-commerce and electronic product development. Wolters Kluwer completed the purchase of Loislaw.com on 31st January 2001.

NAPSTER SAYS IT IS TRYING HARD
Napster has told a US federal judge that it is trying to weed out unauthorised songs from its system as fast it can reports and is blaming the recording industry for not providing it with adequate information. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) responded by accusing Napster of stalling.

JUDGE PULLS OUT OF MICROSOFT RACE CASE
US federal judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, the trial judge in the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit, has said he will not hear a racial discrimination case brought against Microsoft because of the "appearance of (his alleged) personal bias or prejudice" against Microsoft. The comments come at a time when Microsoft is pursuing an appeal against Judge Jackson's verdict in the case on a number of grounds, including his perceived bias against Microsoft.

WEB SITE TRAFFIC FIGURES CONTINUE TO CREATE WAVES
The ongoing dispute surrounding the interactive entertainment company E-district.net - which has already seen the sacking of its chief executive Steven Laitman - has taken another twist with the suspension from duty of two more senior managers and the revelation by PricewaterhouseCoopers Forensic Services that the company's revenues may have been "overstated" by more than 30 times the genuine figure. In March 2000 the company was floated with a value of £100 million, yet it now appears the company's revenues for the six months to 30th June 2000 were not £1.04 million, as reported in the interim results, but were instead a mere £32,000.

The problems at E-district first emerged when it was discovered that its former chief executive had been inflating web site traffic figures. By coincidence, a new report from the software house SAS suggests that many commercial web site regularly over-estimate their web traffic figures by approximately 30 percent because they do not taken into account the visits logged up by search engine robots and their own staff.

Here at Legal News Media we also run the hit list of the UK's 25 busiest legal web sites. However the problem we have noticed is not that law firms are deliberately inflating their web traffic figures but rather that most have no idea how many people are visiting their sites and so have no way of judging their effectiveness or justifying their investment in the web.

REASONS GIVEN IN WEB SITE DISCLOSURE CASE
The Times newspaper has published its law report in the Totalise plc -v- Motley Fool & Another (Queen's Bench Division, Robert Owen J, judgment 19 February 2001) case which considered the occasions when a web site operator might be ordered to disclose the identity of an anonymous contributor who had posted defamatory material onto a discussion board. (The solicitors were DLA, Linklaters and Stephenson Harwood.)

An anonymous user, known only as Zeddust, had posted prima facie defamatory material about Totalise on discussion boards run by Motley Fool and Interactive Investor. Although Zeddust posting were banned by Motley Fool, although they subsequently began appearing to the Interactive Investor site, both companies refused to disclose his identity.

Motley Fool said it had given an undertaking to its users that it was committed to protecting and respecting their privacy and that it would not disclose any information about individual users except as described in its privacy statement or to comply with applicable laws or valid legal process. Interactive Investor merely carried a statement that the contents of its discussion boards did not represent the opinion of the web site operator and that the author was not the author of those opinions.

So were the two companies obliged to disclose the identity of Zeddust? Yes, said Mr Justice Robert Owen allowing an application under section 10 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981. This states that "No court may require a person to disclose... the source of information contained in a publication for which he is responsible, unless it be established to the satisfaction of the court that disclosure is necessary in the interests of justice or national security or for the prevention of disorder or crime."

According to the judge, the decision in the 1974 case of Norwich Pharmacal -v- Customs & Excise that innocent parties could be compelled to disclose the identity of wrongdoers was not restricted by section 35 of the Data Protection Act 1998. Furthermore, the protection provided to newspapers by section 10 of the Contempt of Court Act had no application to the facts in this case as the defendants took no responsibility for what was posted on their discussion boards and exercised no editorial control - they simply provided a facility for discussion.

Exercising his discretion, the judge said he was satisfied the postings were defamatory and that disclosure was necessary in the interests of justice. "The claimants were at risk of serious damage. Zeddust was hiding behind a cloak of anonymity and the claimants had no practical means of identifying Zeddust. The balance fell in favour of the claimants otherwise one could defame with impunity on web sites."

UK GOVERNMENT'S VIEW ON SOFTWARE PATENTS STIRS CONTROVERSY
After carrying out a recent consultation exercise on whether patents should be granted for computer software and ways of doing business, the UK's Department of Trade & Industry has concluded that: there should be no significant change to the patentability of software; the law is not clear enough and urgent European action to clarify is needed to clarify the position; and business methods should remain unpatentable.

Commenting on these findings, the e-minister Patricia Hewitt said: "Some people who responded to our consultation favour making it easier to patent software and others see patents as a threat to development of new software. Our key principle is that patents should be for technological innovations. So a program for a new machine tool should be patentable but a non-technological innovation, such as grammar-checking software for a wordprocessor, should not be. The majority of those who responded agree with the Government and oppose patents for ways of doing business on the internet."

Consumer affairs minister Dr Kim Howells added: "The patent system is there to stimulate innovation and benefit the consumer. This is the test we have applied to determine what should, and should not, be patentable in the fields of computer software and ways of doing business. Patent law is harmonized under the European Patent Convention, and we shall be recommending the conclusions we have reached to our European partners.

"The European Commission is currently evaluating its own consultation on software patents, and we shall be pressing them for an early Directive which embodies our conclusions, and with which the Convention can then be aligned. In particular we shall press for clarification of European patent law to put an end to uncertainty about what software can and cannot be patented. The consultation showed that at present there is confusion, and that that is damaging."

However in an interview with the Financial Times newspaper, Philip Atkins, a partner the law firm Eversheds, said he thought the UK government's stance "is a retrograde one and a major surprise coming from a government which is supposed to support innovation". He added that software patents were already being granted in Europe but the Americans were getting them at the expense of UK businesses.

EUROPEAN SELF-REGULATORY HOTLINE TO ADDRESS COPYRIGHT PROTECTION ON THE NET
The MCPS-PRS Alliance is co-ordinating a team of European organisations including major telecoms companies, a university and legal experts to set up an EU-funded project - known as RightsWatch - to develop codes of conduct and procedures to deal with the removal of copyright infringing material from the internet.

The RightsWatch pilot project aims to facilitate a safe and self-regulated online environment for materials protected by intellectual property rights by setting up a pilot notice and take down procedure. The pilot will act as a model for a future third party body which will assist rights owners, ISPs and users to resolve intellectual property infringement disputes by providing transparent and fair alternative solutions.

Joining the MCPS-PRS Alliance in the project are telecoms companies BT and Sweden's Telia, the University of Florence, law firm Denton Wilde Sapte, Netsearchers and consultant S Philipson & Associates AB of Sweden. Acting as advisers and consultants for the project will be UK-based Rightscom. Funding for the project will come from the EU IST Accompanying Measures programme and, if successful, it is hoped that the concept can be extended to other intellectual property rights owners.

Commenting on the launch of the RightsWatch project, David Lester, executive director legal, at the MCPS-PRS Alliance said: "The project first has to design a set of realistic and practical rules for dealing with rights infringement on the internet. We need to look at the parameters within which a third party facilitator can work and what can be expected of all parties in terms of notice and take down. For that, we'll be looking closely at some existing self-regulatory initiatives including the Internet Watch Foundation, set up by UK ISPs in 1996 and developments in Notice and Takedown procedures in the USA and Finland."

Martin Atherton, BT European Regulation Manager, added: "By the end of the project in 2002, we hope to have developed the model for an organisation with broad industry support which will facilitate a pan-European self-regulatory procedure for the removal of material infringing copyright. We also hope that we'll have built trust between rightsholders and intermediaries and stimulated the development of the information society." www.mcps-prs-alliance.co.uk

LEGAL TECHNOLOGY NEWS.COM - FROM THE PUBLISHERS OF LEGAL TECHNOLOGY INSIDER. NEXT ISSUE 22.03.2001