(2004) 1:2 SCRIPTed 227–362

Issue DOI: 10.2966/scrip.010204

Volume 1, Issue 2, June 2004

Welcome to the second issue of SCRIPTed. This is the list of contents:

Editorial


Peer-reviewed articles

  • The Cult of Celebrity and Trade Marks: the next instalment
    Gillian Davies, pp.230-240
    In response to the increasing use of registered trade marks by celebrities to protect their names from exploitation, the UK Trade Marks Registry has recently issued guidance on registration of “famous names”. This article seeks to examine the implications of the guidance in light of the existing legislative framework for registration of a personal name and recent judicial developments, together with examples of some famous names that have been granted registered protection.
  • An analysis of the Icelandic Supreme Court judgement on the Health Sector Database Act
    Dr Renate Gertz, pp.241-258
    Six years after the Icelandic Health Sector Database Act came into force, the Supreme Court of Iceland as court of appeal was asked to give a judgement on the constitutionality of the Act. The appellant had unsuccessfully applied to the Director General of Public Health to prevent the transfer of her deceased father’s medical records to the Health Sector Database. The court of first instance, the Reykjavik District Court, dismissed the case for lack of legal standing. The Icelandic Supreme Court decided that the appellant had legal standing due to the fact that from the data related to hereditary characteristics of her father information about the plaintiff herself could be inferred. The Icelandic Supreme Court further discussed privacy and data protection issues with regard to the Health Sector Database, coming to the conclusion that the one-way encryption system was a sufficiently safe mechanism for data protection, but that due to the richness of data to be entered into the Health Sector Database, individuals could be identifiable.
  • From Laws for Cyberspace to Cyber Laws (literally): Integration of Legal Norms into Internet Protocols &Law for Closed Digital Management Communities
    Nicholas J Gervassis, pp.259-271
    This paper is an introductory summary of a large-scale project, which I first outlined in more detail during the assessment for my Masters degree and is currently under development. It describes what I call the “Cyber Law Protocol”, an automatic system capable of enforcing legal rules into networking operations.
  • A Comparative Study of Copyright and the public interest in the United Kingdom and China
    Tang Guanhong, pp.272-300
    This paper aims to study the public interest in copyright law on a comparative basis, mainly between the United Kingdom (UK) and the People’s Republic of China (China) in order to help the development of Chinese law in this respect.
  • Universal Service, the Internet and the Access Deficit
    John Huntley, Nick McKerrell and Shaista Asghar, pp.301-334
    This paper is concerned with the universal provision of telecommunications services. It is argued in this paper that universal service is no longer entirely driven by social inclusion imperatives, but is also increasingly driven by emerging governance imperatives. The focus of this paper is on Internet access in general. The debate has moved on since the empirical work for this project was carried out and is more clearly focused on access to broadband.

Analysis


Book Reviews