Internet Protocol meaning

In this issue: Key developments and materials New technologies Internet Advertising, marketing and sponsorship Telecommunications LexTalk®TMT: a Lexis®Nexis community Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Useful information Key developments and materials Assimilated law procedures paused as part of UK–EU ‘reset’. The government has deferred commencement of section 6 of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 as it works towards a UK–EU reset. As a result, the new court processes for assimilated law will not take effect on 1 October 2024 as previously planned. See: LNB News 30/09/2024 27 and LNB News 26/09/2024 2. Accordingly, the timetable shifts and the new procedural rules are postponed. New technologies DSIT confirms the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill will be brought to Parliament in 2025. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) confirmed this following the July 2024 King’s Speech. The Bill seeks...

Banking & Finance 2024 case round up Force majeure—shipping contract—reasonable endeavours RTI Ltd (Respondent) v MUR Shipping BV (Appellant) [2024] UKSC 18 This Supreme Court decision examines how a force majeure clause in a shipping contract between MUR Shipping BV (MUR) and RTI Ltd (RTI) should be interpreted. Such clauses excuse a party from performing when specified events outside the parties’ reasonable control (acts of God) occur. They frequently contain a ‘reasonable endeavours’ proviso, which prevents a party from invoking force majeure if the consequences could be averted by taking reasonable steps. The appeal turned on whether those reasonable endeavours required the party seeking to rely on force majeure to accept an offer of performance that did not match the contract terms. In this instance, the suggested alternative was payment in euros rather than US dollars. The Supreme Court unanimously allowed the appeal, ruling that MUR’s refusal to accept RTI’s non-contractual proposal did not amount to a failure to exercise reasonable endeavours...

Giuseppe Abbamonte, who heads media policy at the Commission, noted that the EU’s executive has been locked in ‘endless’ talks with rights holders over whether European copyright rules function effectively in reality when applied to generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Opt-out protocol Under Directive (EU) 2019/790—the EU Digital Single Market Copyright Directive, known as the EU DSM Copyright Directive—there is a text and data mining exception that permits content owners to ‘opt out’ of scraping of online material by a reservation of rights. However, implementing it in practice is proving difficult today. ‘The primary hurdle is the absence of a recognised, machine‑readable opt‑out protocol—there is no standardised method to state a reservation of rights,’ Abbamonte observed at the AI and Copyright: policy, challenges and perspectives, Digital Constitutionalism & Policy on 20 June 2024. Rights holders must also be confident that any such protocol enables them to signal an opt‑out across the whole online ecosystem, not merely on their own sites, as...

This Practice Note explores particular matters within Ofcom’s regulatory framework concerning voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology, offering pragmatic guidance on addressing shifts in this field. VoIP now underpins widespread carriage of voice calls online. More and more, both individuals and businesses adopt it as a lower-cost substitute for traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) services. The regulatory position In an early communication on the topic, Ofcom, the UK telecommunications regulator, identified three aims it regarded as central when shaping policy for VoIP services: fostering innovation in a technology-neutral manner ensuring consumers are well informed maximising the availability of access to emergency services Providers of communications services (including VoIP providers) must comply with Ofcom’s General Conditions of Entitlement (GCs). The GCs are updated from time to time; however, they underwent a major review and structural overhaul in 2018, with the stated purpose of updating them to reflect Ofcom’s current priorities and concerns, and making them simpler and clearer for industry...

This Practice Note sets out how intellectual property and related rights, together with data protection duties, operate in the setting of web crawling, indexing, caching and scraping, viewed from a website operator’s standpoint. An explanation of the terminology The principal concepts of crawling, indexing, caching and scraping are outlined below. Crawling Web crawling is the activity whereby automated programmes (often called ‘bots’, ‘spiders’ or simply ‘web crawlers’) are deployed to traverse and read information across the web. One well-known crawler is Googlebot, which Google uses to copy web pages onto its servers; Google then indexes them (see the section on Indexing) to support searching of the internet. Website operators often provide ‘sitemaps’ (an XML file listing all pages on a site) to assist and enhance search engines’ crawling. Crawlers can also be put to other uses such as ‘scraping’ (see the section on ‘Scraping’) or collecting email addresses to send unsolicited emails (i.e. spamming). In addition to search engines, web crawling...

This Practice Note covered the background to domain names, how registrations are obtained, and the practical and legal avenues and steps available for resolving domain name disputes. What is a domain name? Computers were around long before the internet. In the 1960s and 1970s, the US government financed work on linking computers and allowing people to communicate across different networks. The outcome was technology that enabled systems that were markedly unlike one another to connect through very lightweight mechanisms—namely, internet naming and addressing. Over time, that architecture has underpinned ongoing advances in both infrastructure, including, for instance, a shift from copper wire to fibre optic cable, and from wired connections to wireless, and in applications, moving from static web pages to rich media and on to voice-over IP telephony, many of which developments were never even imagined by the internet’s original designers. A domain name forms part of the internet’s transport layer; it is the internet’s naming and addressing system. Every computer or device that is...