The Supreme Court of Queensland has recently been asked to consider whether or not an exchange of emails between a potential purchaser and the agent of a vendor was sufficient to create a legally binding contract. The first question answered by the Court was whether or not the facts of the case supported the finding that a contract existed, and second whether or not that contract could be created on the mere sending of emails. In this case, there was no formal contract for the sale of land.

3D printing has been around in one form or another since 1984, when a process was introduced to transfer digital data into tangible objects. While initially utilised in experimental, technical and scientific endeavours, the technology has advanced to a point where “home printing” and desktop scale printers have been introduced to the market. The technology is now readily available to the consumer.

Readers may recall a short article that was published in our Corporate and Commercial newsletter on Cyber Security which drew attention to the steps that can be taken in order to assist in the prevention of cyber-attacks (please click here to read this article). Further to that article, ASIC has recently published a report on cyber resilience which is intended to help regulated organisations improve their ability to prepare and respond to cyber-attacks.

In January 2015 the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner published a guide to "securing personal information" by recommending reasonable steps to protect personal information.

Cloud storage and the protection of personal information is a vexed and difficult issue to deal with.  Under the Australian Privacy legislation a local entity that provides personal information to a storage facility outside Australia may be exposed to liability that arises if the external storage provider breaches the Australian Privacy Principles.

Five Things to Know About Electronic Communications:

• "Click Wrap" agreements;
• When is an email received;
• 'Meeting of the minds';
• Input errors; and
• Electronic signatures

On 23 October 2014 the Federal Court of Australia handed down a decision that dealt with the downloading of software by an employee immediately before his departure from that firm and his taking up employment with a competitor.

Despite the court’s finding that the employee received no material benefit from use of the information, and his new employer had no access to the information, significant monetary compensation was payable by the employee.  The facts are as follows.

Intellectual property rights include patents, trade marks and copyright. The Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) grants exclusive rights in the copyright owner, including the right to use, reproduce and publish works. Copyright exists in original works, such as computer programs.

APRA Ltd v Jain (1990) 26 FCR 53

University of NSW v Moorhouse [1975] HCA 26

Big data is a term used to describe the exponential growth and availability of data, both structured and unstructured (1). In terms of health care, big data represents all of the data which has been collected on relevant multiple databases. Click here to read more.

Two recent cases before the Australian Privacy Commissioner (Commissioner) serve as a reminder to organisations of the importance of keeping personal information of clients secure and adequately disposing of information that is no longer in use.