A text transcription follows.
This transcript is for anyone with a hearing impairment or who for any other reason cannot listen to the MP3 audio file.
The following is the text spoken by OUT-LAW journalist Matthew Magee.
Hello and welcome to OUT-LAW Radio, the weekly podcast that keeps you up to date on all the twists and turns in the world of technology law.
Every week we bring you the latest news and in depth features that help you to make sense of the ever-changing laws that govern technology today.
My name is Matthew Magee, and this week we find out what two new sites for rating professionals' performance are doing to try to avoid getting sued for libel.
But first, the news:
Ryanair cancels aggregator-booked tickets
and
Government wants to up copyright fines
Ryanair has said that it will no longer honour bookings made through aggregator sites. The Irish budget airline said that cancelling would be quicker and more effective than lawsuits.
The move follows legal action against two aggregator companies by the airline. It won a case in Germany and one in Ireland is pending. It claims that companies' use of information from its website to sell flights breaks laws on trade marks, copyright and 'passing off'.
The cancelling of aggregator-booked tickets represents a more direct approach by the airline. It said that it is investigating further what technological measures it can put in place to prevent other firms from gathering the data in the first place.
While most companies welcome the extra business such aggregation brings them, some do not and, like Ryanair, prohibit screen-scraping or any other commercial use of their website in their terms and conditions.
The Government plans to increase the maximum fine that Magistrates' Courts can award for online copyright infringement from £5,000 to £50,000.
The Government and the Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO) are consulting on the plans, which would allow Magistrates' Courts in England and Wales to issue summary fines of £50,000 for online copyright infringement.
The larger fine is proposed for commercial scale infringements, where the person involved profits from the infringement.
The Intellectual Property Office said that the change in the fines available to courts would allow it to better combat commercial scale infringement.
The courts in Scotland and Northern Ireland operate differently from those in England and Wales, and there is no equivalent sentencing guideline system there, but the consultation suggests that those courts could still implement maximum fines.
That was this week's OUT-LAW News
It used to be that there wasn't much of a marketplace for some things. If you were sick you went to the local doctor's surgery. If you had a legal problem you went to the family solicitor's office on the High Street.
Try telling the receptionist at the one-doctor practice thirty years ago that you wanted a choice of physician and she'd have looked at you like you'd just asked to be fitted with a third arm.
Yet choice is the mantra for all sorts of services now that never used to be submitted to the rigours of the market. So how do you – as a potential customer – know who to pick?
That is where, increasingly, the internet comes in. OUT-LAW Radio talked a few months ago to the pioneer behind an American lawyer-review site, avvo.com.
Well, that idea is catching on in the UK, where customer review sites of professions we traditionally held in awed reverence are beginning to make their presence felt.
We’ll hear shortly from the man who has set up a doctor reviewing site, but first David Sprake tells us why he set up solicitor.info, a site where you can review lawyers that you've used.
Sprake: Basically I had a bad experience with a solicitor a few years ago. I did complain about them at the time and I didn’t hear anything back. I thought basically an internet site where people could actually post comments on the service they got from any service industry was a good thing really. So I knocked up this website where basically you can either add and recommend a solicitor or you can actually search for a solicitor and read what their clients have actually said about them. I have now got an absolutely fantastic solicitor which was recommended to me by a friend and I think that is a great way of finding people to work for you.
Sprake's is a service that is starting on a small scale. He hopes word of mouth will carry news of it far and wide, and that users of lawyers will eventually populate his database with reviews.
Neil Bacon has grander ambitions. He founded doctors.net.uk, a medical publishing operation which he recently sold.
Bacon is using some of the money from that sale to fund a new venture, iwantgreatcare.org. This is a doctors' review site, where patients can give their honest opinion of the medics who have treated them.
We apologise for the poor sound quality on Bacon's line, but here he is, explaining the rationale behind the site.
Bacon: iwantgreatcare is a service allowing patients to write reviews and ratings of doctors who have looked after them and therefore provided doctors’ feedback on their performance and also create a database allowing patients to go and search when they need to find a doctor so they can find the sort of doctor that other patients rate. Well I’m a doctor so I’m aware of the needs of patients to get good information about doctors and the healthcare they receive and I’ve also run an internet business for the last ten years called doctors.net.uk so I’m probably aware of the way the internet can have massive impact on healthcare as well and putting the two together I saw a need and a way of meeting that need.
It sounds like a great idea, but potential problems soon leap out. If you let everyone write reviews how do you ensure those reviews are honest. People might write crushingly negative reviews of lawyers or doctors over an unrelated personal grudge, or even just for fun.
And just as dangerous for these sites' credibility, the lawyers or doctors themselves could write fictional reviews of their services or their firms, praising themselves to the hilt.
Sprake admits that there is not much he can do about falsely positive reviews.
Sprake: Companies that actually review themselves, there’s not an awful lot we can do about that other than remove them but it’s very difficult to tell in some cases and we’re just going to have to deal with that, we’re just going to have to live with that side of it.
More potentially dangerous are negative reviews that doctors or lawyers think have gone beyond fair comment and into the realms of defamation.
This is extremely sensitive territory. Courts traditionally save the biggest defamation payouts for ones which affect a person's ability to earn their living. Little fits that bill quite as snugly as sites such as solicitor.info and iwantgreatcare.org.
So how do they avoid being liable for all that risky material?
Firstly, says Neil Bacon, there isn't that much risky material at all.
Bacon: Let’s put this into context: 95% of the thousands and thousands that we’ve already had have been overwhelmingly positive, and even those 5% or 6% of comments that are critical and negative of a doctor will count on one hand the number that actually were libellous.
It does exist, though. Bacon is cagey about actually explaining how his site deals with potentially defamatory content, but here is what he will say.
Bacon: What we do is we have a multi-layered system, they are automated systems as well as manual systems to make sure that we can control what’s out there, whilst at the same time meeting the absolute need of a service and the need of patients to have freedom of speech. Now obviously freedom of speech doesn’t mean breaking the law and so no libellous comments can be on the site. Some may be there for a very brief period but in the first three weeks of operations we found a system which works very very nicely in either blocking or removing such entries.
Bacon said that content is largely dealt with after publication, that moderation of content is reactive.
Bacon: Now you’ll appreciate that I probably don’t want to go into absolutely too much granular detail because that will damage the protection but we have a complex layered process. We do not screen every comment, we respond and react in the event that something untowards being put up there and being aborted.
The question of when a site operator actually looks at reviews that someone has submitted is crucial, it can make the difference between the operator being liable for the comment and not.
Generally speaking – and this is a complex and developing area – if you pre-edit comments you are deemed to be responsible for those that get published. If you don't you are not responsible, as long as you act quickly on any complaints those comments gather.
Sprake has designed his system to work along those broad guidelines.
Sprake: We’ve stopped editing any comments made on the site. Anything that a third party posts on the site will stay on the site and we don’t look at it or edit it whatsoever. However we have to protect ourselves. We’ve done two things: the first thing is that if a solicitor asks us to remove it, it will be removed expeditiously, as soon as we can basically. The second thing that a solicitor can do if he’s not happy about a post he needs to actually respond to it. If you have a look on the website it’s quite easy to do.
Both projects are wildly ambitious, aiming to get user-generated reviews covering their respective professions across the country. Their progress will be keenly watched not just by competitors who might want to perform the same service in other industries, but by the very people they cover. A test case could be just a few comments away.
That’s all we have time for this week, thanks for listening.
Why not get in touch with OUT-LAW Radio? Do you know of a technology law story? We would love to hear from you on radio@out-law.com.
Make sure you tune in next week; but for now, goodbye.