I just finished writing a DCC Legal Watch Paper on medical data sharing and privacy yesterday. Interesting then today to come across a reference to this story. Much too low brow for the Legal Watch Paper :-) but an interesting example of medical data privacy issues in practice nonetheless!
Image by We're Britney's Fans on Flickr BY-NC-SA
For those if you that are fans of this format, you might be interested to know of the monthly podcast produced by Ibrahim Hasan. Ibrahim discusses all the latest FOI decisions and gives his personal views as to how they affect FOI practice. There are also interviews with experts and FOI stakeholders.
You can access the podcast here. You may also listen to previous podcasts or read the full transcripts.
JISC Legal has recently released two update papers on Freedom of Information (FOI).
The first is a short ‘essentials’ paper giving a summary of the main provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and highlighting what colleges and universities need to consider in order to comply with the Act.
The second is much a longer paper which they term ‘overview’ but is really quite detailed. This gives a fuller explanation of the responsibilities of public authorities, publication schemes, requests for information, and the exemptions to these. It also touches on related legislation such as the Environmental Information Regulations and Data Protection.
( FYI - the DCC will publish a Legal Watch paper on the Environmental Information Regulations towards the end of this year. There is already a briefing paper on Data Protection in the Resources section of the DCC website as well as an older one on FOI).
For those of you who don’t know about it, a bit more info on JISC Legal.
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The JISC Legal Information service is funded by the JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) and hosted by Strathclyde University
The principle aims of the service are:
1. To disseminate information and to raise awareness of the legal issues relating to the use of information technology particularly with reference to the following:
• Data Protection
• Intellectual Property Rights
• Human Rights
• Freedom of Information
• Disability and The Law
• E-Security (Monitoring and Encryption)
• Cyber-crime and Criminal Liability
• ISP (Internet Service Provider) Liability
2. To follow relevant court cases and legislative developments within the United Kingdom (and where relevant internationally) and examine the effect such developments may have on the sector.
3. To co-ordinate and liaise with FE and HE organisations, relevant regulatory bodies, projects and studies in areas related to the remit of the service.
Check out their website for lots of useful IT-related legal information.
The February issue of Open Source Business Resource is devoted to Open Data. Here are the articles:
• Dru Lavigne, Editorial
• Tracey P. Lauriault and Hugh McGuire, Data Access in Canada: CivicAccess.ca
• Joseph Potvin, How is Copyright Relevant to Source Data and Source Code?
• Jordan Hatcher, Implementing Open Data: The Open Data Commons Project
• Ismael Peña-López, The Personal Research Portal
Image by diylibrarian on Flickr CC-NC-SA
I missed this interesting copyright story over Christmas. The Egyptian government announced a proposed law that will require royalties to be paid when copies are made of artifacts or monuments such as the sphinx or the pyramids. Only exact, to-scale replicas would be subject to royalties. Copyright experts have questioned whether the law would be enforceable internationally.
What do you think of this?
You can check out coverage of the story below:
BBC
National Geographic
Slashdot
Overlawyered.com (what a great name for a site!)
You may have already seen this but if not do take a look at Richard Poynder’s interview with Peter Murray-Rust. It’s so informative. The links to relevant documents, sites and blog posts are invaluable.
You may have heard of a group called mysociety.org. They’re a charitable organisation that builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. They’ve built loads of really useful websites such as PledgeBank, TheyWorkforYou and FixMyStreet. I’ve been an admirer and user of their sites for some time.
Well they have another one in the offing and this time it’s based on Freedom of Information legislation
The new site will help people make Freedom of Information requests from different parts of government. It will then archive the responses on the web.
Keep your eyes peeled!
… oh go on then – I’ll make sure I tell you so there’s no hard work involved for you!
