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My Master of Law dissertation on the legal enforceability of Gartner's rights for a cloud computing customer
Cloud Computing is a new technology, where scalable information technology capabilities can be provided as a service to multiple customers commonly using the internet (but also, much less likely, completely locally.) The market impact of Cloud Computing growth is staggering.
The US analysts Gartner estimates that, over the course of the next five years, businesses will spend $112 billion cumulatively on Cloud Computing. This practice-focused dissertation (PFD) promotes the need for the provision of clear legal advice to a business client wishing to implement pay-per-use Cloud Computing facilities within his or her business. This PFD will focus on its use on legal and commercial considerations of small- or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) concerning “SaaS”, one of the most popular ? deployment methods? of Cloud computing. However, the PFD is of potential relevance of the whole of the Cloud Computing industry.
Gartner suggested in July 2010 that Cloud customers should aspire to six rights in their use of SaaS. The components of the transaction are important. The service level agreement (SLA) can become potentially a legally-enforceable contract which cover an array of other relevant legal concepts. Identifying and controlling the commercial and tactical factors can then lead the lawyer to deliver strategies which directly promote the needs of the client and profitability of the law firm. The major driver of market uptake of Cloud Computing has been in business the SMEs; therefore it seems sensible to investigate attitudes regarding SMEs towards Cloud Computing in detail.
This PFD presents findings from an original online survey from November 2010 of the business and legal attitudes of thirty-two SME Company Directors, predominantly resident in the UK, regarding the six Gartner rights towards the purchase of SaaS. Through analysing an extensive range of legal sources (including established case law and recent statutes particularly), this PFD submits evidence that the practitioner can address a number of different issues in the agreement to provide expert legal solutions. However, this novel approach necessitates lawyers to gain an accurate picture of those problems perceived by clients as the most important in the first place. As these issues are all common to all Cloud deployment methods, to varying degrees, this research should provide a foundation for further research into other classes of clients and deployment methods, to see if the findings extrapolate more widely.
To download this dissertation, click here.
Talk this evening 6.15pm @BPPLawSchool Holborn on innovation implementation in technology
This evening, I will be giving a presentation in room 2.6 here in the BPP Law School, Holborn, on disputes involving Apple, Samsung and HTC involving tablets and smartphones.
The learning objectives of this talk are as follows:
- To give an overview of two disputes in intellectual property between multi-national parties in the technology sector.
- To contextualise the importance of two intellectual property rights (patents and design rights) in how multinational companies create ‘competitive advantage’.
- To improve the “commercial awareness” of applicants for training contracts this summer.
I wished to give an explanation of how multi-national companies involved in technology use innovation to create competitive advantage to generate profit, but look at it from the perspective of the industry of intellectual property protection in the form of design rights (tablet) and patent (“slide-to-view” mechanism of smartphones).
The handout for this talk is here.
Students on the LPC might find the talk interesting as these intellectual property rights have been introduced on the Legal Practice Course special elective on commercial law and intellectual property. The subject-matter is also a valid topic for a recent interesting example of ‘commercial news’, which might be aired in the training contract application form or in the interview itself.
A “calico” – all will be revealed….
The new @Legal_Recruit verbal reasoning practice assessment for law students
The @Legal_Recruit system (which will be available here) is a very attractive easy-to-use cloud-based service which will allow @Legal_Recruit learners to complete sample tests, under real assessment conditions.
It will be available on Monday 3 October 2011 for the first time.
Current law students, who are doing the GDL, LPC, LLB(Hons) or LLM, especially those who are seeking training contracts or vacation placements for 2013/4/5 being made available in the next academic year may find this new service/product useful. It will be available on the internet via a secure website, and will cost £7.50 for unrestricted lifetime use. All Legal Recruit learners will have their own secure website username and password, and be invited to participate in the development of the huge bank of validated questions. These questions are set in a fair way, with due attention to equality, diversity and culture.
This product has been built because it is felt by many that law students, the staff of their colleagues/universities (including their academics and their career services) and corporate law recruiting managers that the pivotal importance of the verbal reasoning test is grossly underestimated. This is not sensible, given the intense effort needed to complete any qualification in law. However, if your performance in a verbal reasoning test, and you fail to meet the cut-off score, it is possible that you will not be invited for interview, despite having a II.1 or above. This is clearly a tragedy.
Such practice will be ideal for any law students needing to complete a SHL Direct assessment for their real training contract/vacation placement application. Candidates are strongly advised to look, as a top priority, the practice tests in the practice area of the SHL website. There you can take a full-length verbal reasoning test which has been made available from the main SHL Direct website and it’s well worth looking at the example questions. You’ll also most likely enjoy looking at the advice given about verbal reasoning tests on leading corporate law recruitment sites, such as Eversheds and Clifford Chance. Obviously, Legal_Recruit does not actively endorse any of the entities above, or vice versa.
There will be very clear instructions in the @Legal_Recruit practice assessments which are akin to the current SHL verbal reasoning instructions. In the practice test, you are allowed to go backwards, although in the real assessment you will not be given this option. You must complete the practice examples before you do the test, and you are told not to press any function keys or do any background jobs such as printing during the test itself.
The word count per passage will ideally vary from 70 to 150, with a mean length of 107. Passages will avoid as far as possible the use of semi-colons, and be of no shorter than 8-10 words. They will be written in plain English, with no spelling or grammar errors. The passages will therefore avoid American spelling or American English. The mean number of words in a sentence will be about 15-20.
Assessments will consist of 30 questions, containing 15 passages (2 questions per passage). The 15 passages will be selected at random by the Legal_Recruit system from a huge database consisting of an equal number of questions in the following 16 subject areas.
- Biology
- Business
- Economics
- Education
- Engineering
- Environment
- Geography
- Geology
- Health and Safety
- Human resources
- Medicine
- Modern Languages
- Physics
- Technology
- Transport
@Legal_Recruit follows the leading twitter accounts in the world which daily produce news stories, which make excellent narratives for the verbal reasoning assessment that Legal_Recruit will be offering.
Legal_Recruit learners will be able to choose a maximum time permitted from 19 to 39 minutes; this is to that it’s easy to do the assessments with reasonable adjustments for learners who will benefit from them to allow them to perform on a ‘level-playing field’.
It’s interesting that there is no subject bias at all in the exemplars. Interestingly the passages appears to avoid contentious branding, politics, or subjects which are generally controversial.
It is essential for our system to work for our questions to be carefully set in keeping with the real verbal reasoning tests which our Legal_Recruit learners will face in their real assessments set by SHL for their training contract/vacation placements. If you would like to participate for free, and receive immediate feedback, in our sample assessments, please direct message @legalaware or @legal_recruit, and if there are any problems in me following you, please do let me know immediately, and I will remedy. We benefit from obtaining a huge bank of normative data, which indicates to us that all the questions are of the same (correct) standard, and from being able to give you an accurate indication of where you sit on the normal distribution curve.
You may enjoy following up-to-date developments in online psychometric assessment on the @SHLGROUP twitter feed.
Continued problems over Google Adwords
Interflora initiated litigation proceedings last year after M&S purchased its rival’s name as a Google AdWord, which meant that when an internet user typed ‘Interflora’ into the search engine an advert for M&S Flowers appeared.
According to the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), Niilo Jääskinen, Marks & Spencer’s (M&S) use of Google AdWords infringed florist network Interflora’s trademark. An ECJ ruling on the case will be made in a few months’ time, and if the decision is in favour of Interflora there could be huge ramifications for the whole of the online advertising sector.
The Advocate General considers that use of a rival trademark as a Google AdWord constitutes trade mark infringement where the consumer is unable to determine whether or not the advert is for the brand they originally searched for. Even though the ECJ ruled last year that Google was not liable for trademark infringement by selling AdWords to rival companies, the search engine firm could feel the impact of any decision made in favour of Interflora in other ways. Last year, the European Court of Justice found that Google didn’t infringe on other companies’ rights by allowing competitors to bid on trademarked keywords. The court, however, left it to individual countries to decide on the matter and possibly apply stricter rules. Both Google and the LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton) luxury-good company, two of the parties involved, have declared victory in the case.
The AdWord service is a major source of revenue for the California-based corporation Google. It is possible, with this opinion, that Google’s customers may well reconsider how extensively they want to use a competitor’s mark as an AdWord.
An introduction to the GoogleAdwords as trademarks is given in the Intellectual Property video of ‘Legal Aware’.
The Streisand Effect and *that* footballer
This graph shows the spike which happened for the footballer at the centre of the Twitter legal battle which happened at Friday 3pm.
The plot can be done easily from Trendistic.
The Streisand effect is a primarily online phenomenon in which an attempt to hide or remove an item of information has the unintended consequence of publicising the information more widely. The effect is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cases of attempted suppression of files and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.
Mike Masnick of Techdirt introduced the term after the singer and actress, citing privacy violations, unsuccessfully sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US $50 million in an attempt to have an aerial photograph of her mansion removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs. Adelman said that he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion. As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially; more than 420,000 people visited the site over the following month.
This issue has frustrated many organisations: when MI6 wanted to remove a list of its agents from the site cryptome.org, it was frustrated by the site’s American owner. The Church of Scientology has been similarly frustrated in its efforts to keep secret its “briefings”. When the British-based Internet Watch Foundation tried to ban the digitised cover of the German rock band Scorpions’ Virgin Killer album from the net, its attempts led to wider circulation of the image than would ever have happened otherwise.
