Ireland IP & Technology Law Blog : Dublin Lawyers & Attorneys for Intellectual Property, Communications & Information Technology Law in Ireland, U.S. & England

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request the UK Cabinet Office has this month published its latest ("Phase 2") reports on the G-Cloud Programme. The G-Cloud Programme sets out to define how the public sector could utilise the cloud computing approach to ICT delivery and to explore what benefits and challenges this approach creates. The G-Cloud Programme is a core element of the UK Government's ICT Strategy and is an enabler of cost savings targets for the 2011-2014 period, as well as other government objectives such as enhanced public services, improved data centre services and the green agenda.

It is envisaged that the G-Cloud will provide a variety of managed, common, utility and custom services for public sector organisations through a dedicated private cloud and trusted public clouds. Public sector organisations would be expected to use G-Cloud services as their first choice where available and where they fit their business needs. This will be a significant change from today's ICT landscape across the public sector as organisations will no longer procure and own the end-to-end ICT lifecycle for their services. It is hoped this this will drive efficiency and value through standardisation, sharing and re-use of services, as well as providing a route for rapid access to a portfolio of G-Cloud services.

Proposals under consideration by the UK Cabinet Office include the creation of a central G-Cloud authority to measure the merits of competing technology standards. This central authority would have as a primary objective the ability to impose technological, commercial and security standards on the public sector and its suppliers to create the equal opportunity necessary for G-Cloud to operate efficiently. The G-Cloud Programme also envisages an Applications Store for Government (ASG) being implemented to provide the public sector with an ICT marketplace to readily source, share and promote ICT services. The ASG would be a single online retail website for Public Sector organisations to use when purchasing ICT services. The proposals seek to avoid ‘lock in’ to a particular infrastructure provider by ensuring there will be a choice of at least two infrastructure providers for each application, and that public sector purchasers should be able to transfer their chosen application service to another infrastructure provider if required at some future point. In parallel to the development of G-Cloud services and the ASG, it is hoped that a cross public sector rationalisation, virtualisation and consolidation exercise will deliver a reduction in data centres (with the first tranche of data centre consolidation targeted by August 2011).  

The UK Cabinet Office is due to publish a formal G-Cloud proposal in March as part of the government's overall ICT strategy. ICT suppliers doing business with the UK public sector (in Northern Ireland and elsewhere) will be awaiting further developments with interest. The UK Cabinet Office's recently published Phase 2 reports on the G-Cloud Programme are available here.

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 The recent case of Nokia GmbH and Others .v. IPCom GmbH & Co. involved an appeal against a decision of Mr Justice Floyd who had held that IPCom’s two European Patents (relating to cellular mobile phone technology), were invalid for obviousness.

IPCom had made two applications to amend the patents, one of which was made shortly before the trial and the other one after the trial. Mr Justice Floyd refused both applications firstly on the basis that the application made just before the trial raised a whole new set of issues and secondly, on the basis that it would have necessitated a new trial on issues that should have been determined in the main proceedings.

The Court of Appeal upheld the judge’s refusal to amend the patents, ruling that IPCom had proposed amendments too late for them to be dealt with fairly at trial. Lord Justice Jacob held “they were not, as they could have been, formulated at a much earlier stage of the proceedings, a stage when they could fairly be considered at the trial.” Accordingly, the Court of Appeal held that the judge was correct in regarding the applications to amend the patents as procedurally unfair and that it was an abuse of process to subject the other party to further litigation.

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The European Commission has approved Israel's status as a country ensuring an "adequate level of protection" under the Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC).

The Data Protection Directive prohibits personal data from being transferred to third countries, outside the EEA, unless the country ensures an adequate level of data protection or certain limited exceptions apply (such as where the data subject has explicitly consented to the transfer or a data transfer agreement incorporating the EC-approved standard contractual clauses is used). 

The countries approved to date by the European Commission as having an adequate level of data protection include: Switzerland, Guernsey, Argentina, Isle of Man, Faroe Islands, Jersey and Andorra. Canada has been approved for certain types of personal data. The ‘Safe Harbour’ arrangement has also been approved, to facilitate transfers of personal data to US organisations which have signed up to the arrangement. Recently, the Commission has also approved the transfer of advance airline passenger data to the US, Canada, and Australia.

European Commission website – list of approved third countries.

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The Communications (Retention of Data) Act 2011 (the Act) was signed into law by the President on 26 January 2011. The Act has not yet been published, but there appear to have been no amendments to the Bill after the Committee Stage in the Dáil. 

The Act transposes the Data Retention Directive (2006/24/EC) (the Directive). The Directive requires telephone and internet service providers to retain details of internet and call data for not less than 6 months and not more than 2 years, in order to ensure that the data is available for the purpose of the investigation, detection and prosecution of serious crime. 

The Act requires telephone service providers to retain telephone data for two years, and internet data to be retained by internet service providers for 12 months. Telephone data was previously retained for three years pursuant to Part 7 of the Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) Act 2005 (which the Act repeals). Internet data was not previously required by law to be monitored or retained. 

The Act does not require data concerning the content of calls or emails to be retained, however the identity of the senders and receivers of the communication must be retained as well as the data and time the communication was sent, and in the case of mobile phones, the location of the phones.

The Act requires service providers retaining such data to take certain security measures in relation to the retained data. For example, data (with the exception of data accessed and preserved as a result of a disclosure request) must be destroyed by the service providers at the end of the specified retention periods, however a grace period of one month after the retention period has expired is provided for, in order to facilitate any last minute requests. 

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