Mandatory notification has been in place for three years now, and, if we look beyond the encouraging rhetoric about improving patient safety, the scheme has kicked up some surprises, including last year's 40 per cent surge nationally in the number of reports made, which, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Authority (AHPRA) has, so far, been unable to explain.

While the increase might encourage belief in the scheme fulfilling its goals of ensuring patient safety, we should aslo bear in mind that the rise also increases the chances that health practitioners, who take the serious step of making a report, may face legal action when they do so. If we drill down into the 40 per cent increase, we find that the most significant contribution comes from Queensland where the number of reports has almost tripled, rising from 85 to 220.The increase is even more troubling because health practitioners making mandatory reports about colleagues are not absolutely protected from defamation. Put simply, doctors reporting colleagues, and members of the public reporting health practitioners, can be sued for defamation.

In our previous article ‘Proposed New Developments in Electronic Contracts: Web Page Advertisements and E-mails’  we dealt with a number of updates to Australia’s electronic transaction regime including default rules to determine the time that the law will deem an email to be sent and received.

In addition to these changes, a safeguard providing a right to withdraw an email or online communication (where an input error occurs in a portion of an electronic communication) has been implemented, the recognition as to when an electronic signature will be legally effective has been broadened and the relationship concerning intermediaries such as web hosts has been clarified, along with default rules that have been formally passed into law to determine the place of dispatch and receipt of electronic communications.

London's Technology and Construction Court has recently found that a company did not own the emails of its former Chief Executive Office, even though they were work related.

The case turned on its own facts, one of which involved the senior executive sending and receiving company emails using private or non corporate accounts and servers.

The physical storage of the emails was what caused the problem.  At a practical level, the emails were not on the employer’s servers.  Some had been sent using the executive’s private account (and therefore held on external third party servers), others had been sent from a work server, but copied to the personal server and, thereafter, deleted from the employer’s server.

Access to emails is often an important management tool, which facilitates good and proper administration, in relation to the affairs of a business, but, also, is important in corporate negotiations and, potentially, disciplinary matters.  In those circumstances, it is important to ensure that emails of a work nature are sent and received using company facilities and not by utilising private or non corporate accounts and servers.

The ACCC had claimed that sponsored links displayed by Google between 2005 and 2008 had conveyed misleading and deceptive representations.  The case involved searches using keywords such as Harvey World Travel and Honda, which were redirected to competitors websites.

Cloud computing is already a big part of our lives; though, often, we don’t realise we are using it. Partly, no doubt, that is the intention. The name itself encourages fuzzy thinking and its users are blissfully unaware of what lies behind the image on the screen.

Cloud computing has been around, as an idea, for decades – since the 1950s, in fact – and has been used widely in practical popular services such as Hotmail, Facebook, YouTube, Gmail and Dropbox for many years now. By definition, a cloud computing service is any service that allows you to load information into a cyber locker that is located elsewhere from the computing hardware you operate.The new services have brought with them new ways of copying and storing text, photos, films and music. All acts capable of infringing the Copyright Act, if done without permission or authorised without permission. When you load information into a cloud, do you still own the copyright on that material? By loading it, are you already infringing copyright? And, more precisely, can the person who stored it for you make copies of that material? And who is legally responsible for any infringements associated with the upload and sharing of that material?