IBM checks into hospital IT contract

The contract covers three of New York's largest hospitals--Mount Sinai Hospital, New York University Medical Center and New York University Downtown Hospital.
IBM will administer data centers centralizing IT facilities for each hospital, said David Leiderbach, vice president for IBM's health care industry business. Applications and data for each hospital will be stored in a main data center near Manhattan and a backup facility 100 miles away, with the backup data constantly updated through real-time mirroring.and also they can share the information together easily at the same time.
http://news.cnet.com/IBM-checks-into-hospital-IT-contract
if you look at above sentences carefully you will understand the main issue for this contract is the privacy of the patient that they ignore it . it is good to save the data but sharing the data need additional contract with hospitals and patient to show they give the permission to share their information with the other hospitals .
Please share your idea with me. thanks

“Medical Justice” promotes legally and ethically suspect doctor-patient copyright agreement

There is an excellent article on the ongoing battle between companies and consumers over online criticism, the article noted the following:
The group Medical Justice, which helps protect doctors from meritless malpractice suits, advises its members to have patients sign an agreement that gives the doctor copyright over a Web posting if the patient mentions the doctor or practice.

Dr. Jeffrey Segal, chief executive of Medical Justice, said about half of the group’s 2,500 members use the agreement.

“I, like everyone else, like to hear two sides of the story,” he said. “The problem is that physicians are foreclosed from ever responding because of state and federal privacy laws. In the rare circumstance that a posting is false, fictional or fraudulent, the doctor now has the tool to get that post taken down.”
This so-called “agreement” strikes me as both legally and ethically suspect. Not only does copyright law generally require written assignments of copyright to be for some kind of payment (what is the payment here? The medical treatment? I thought that was what health insurance and co-pays were for?) but unless it is a work-for hire or some other kind of ongoing employment relationship, you generally can’t force people to assign their copyright in a web posting before it is written, also in my opinion they should ask the paitiont before share the information with the other may be they do not want their information share with other parties this ia their privacy rights ,do you agree?

http://cyberlawcases.com/category/contract/

contract and Copyright Infringement

Jacobsen’s copyright infringement claim would probably be unremarkable in any other case that lacked so many precedent-making issues, and perhaps it remains unremarkable despite this context. However, it is an assertion of a fairly thin copyright on behalf of a free software project that otherwise is extremely generous in granting permissions for downstream copying, modifying, and distributing its works. To be fair, Jacobsen, who was also in attendance at oral argument, clearly does not relish litigation and would prefer to write model train software in peace. Only when Katzer sent demand letters requesting significant patent licensing fees and when Katzer’s allegations made Jacobsen feel that his reputation and even job were jeopardized did he determine that litigating the case to clear his name was essential. Furthermore, if Jacobsen’s allegations are true, it is one thing for a free software project to grant a generous license to those who agree to abide by its terms, including particularly attribution, and quite another thing for that free software project to be expected to acquiesce in someone stripping out all such attributions and passing off the project’s work as their own for commercial gain. Nonetheless, because the copyrighted work at issue in this case is a selection and arrangement of data, it represents a type of copyrighted work that many free software proponents would, in many cases, prefer not be copyrightable at all but due to there is lack of sufficient contract elements sometimes parties catch in trouble.
so we should be careful about the contract very much.

electronic coupons contract

Response Reward Systems v. Meijer Inc. 189 F. Supp. 2d 1332 (M.D. Fla. 2002)
Response Reward, a Florida company, owns patents on issuing electronic coupons
Meijer, Inc. is a Michigan corporation that operates supermarkets
Meijer operated a website that offered electronic coupons
Response Reward alleged that Meijer was infringing its patents
Response Reward could have sued in Michigan, where Meijer was located. Instead, it sued in Florida
The Florida long-arm statute permits jurisdiction over a defendant who is “engaged in substantial and not isolated activity” within Florida
Meijer’s website was accessible from anywhere, but Meijer
was not licensed in Florida
had no offices, stores, employees or property in Florida
did not advertise in Florida
issued coupons which could not be used in Florida
BUT, some stores owned by others accepted the coupons in Florida
The Florida long-arm statute, as interpreted by the Florida courts, permits jurisdiction over a defendant who commits an act outside Florida that causes damage within Florida, e.g. patent infringement
Is it constitutional for Florida to exercise jurisdiction over Meijer?
No. Meijer did not have minimum contracts with Florida.
Think about it. Should there be jurisdiction just because the patent owner happens to be in Florida?
https://www.rfcexpress.com/lawsuit-related-cases.asp?ID=24641

Contractual Liability

I found a very interesting case about contractual liability that I’d like to share with you:

Salvage Assoc’n v’s CAP, 1995
March 1987: Salvage Association contracted CAP Financial Services to develop specs for an accounting system
July 1987: specs delivered & accepted
Further contract for CAP to implement the specified system by May 1988
However, delays & problems emerged… Errors were found in the specification…
Problems with telecoms link…
Key staff left project…
CAP proposed “re-analysis & re-design” , Salvage organised an independent review
Consultants said CAP plan was impossible
Salvage terminated & filed for damages…
Salvage went to court and claimed damages of £800,000 to recover costs, also claiming CAP’s liability limitation clause (£25,000) was unfair
The judge ruled for Salvage:
 Salvage were justified in terminating contract – it was clear CAP could not deliver a system
 CAP’s limitation clause breached the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 – any such limitation had to be reasonable; CAP’s wasn’t.

do you think judge made a good decision?
In my point of view the judge made a good decision due to CAP did not act in terms of the contract and they had to examine the software before sell or implementing in other organization, but also salvage should ask Consultants befor accepting the contract , do you agree?

Hijacking the Digital Signature!

All of us know about digital signature but for whom that did not know digital signature is a piece of data that identifies the beginner of a document. It utilizes asymmetric encryption, where one key (private key) is used to create the signature code and a different but related key (public key) is used to verify it.
BUT as you know it has some problems: Security and confidentiality of private key, possible misuse and the legal implications which arise.
Usually criminal use it for hijacking: first an authenticated user had established with a remote service for this attack, the target was chosen to be the e-government portal. The web application that handles access to the financial information of a citizen requires the user to digitally sign a document to prove her /his identity. If a digital signature is used to authenticate a user to a remote application, the relaying server can let the packets through until the login process is complete. Then, it can interrupt the communication to the victim, thereby hijacking the user’s session; when the login is successful the server issues a session cookie. This cookie is used in subsequent requests by the browser to tag these requests as being sent by the previously authenticated user. The first attack uses Internet Explorer to steal the session cookie after a successful login procedure, thus allowing an attacker to duplicate the session. To steal the session cookie, the attacker requires local access to the victim’s machine with the privileges of the user running the browser. The easiest way to perform the attack is a malicious browser plug-in!
With browser helper objects, one can write components (specifically, in-process Component Object Model (COM) components) that Internet Explorer will load each time it starts up. Such objects run in the same memory context as the browser and can perform any action on the available windows and modules. Through a special interface, the browser helper object can access the functions of Internet Explorer, thus being able to read and manipulate data.(read more :http://www.iseclab.org/papers/citizen_technical.pdf)
As you know anybody can put you in trouble if they could easily access to your signature and they can contract with many parties and abuse it to self interest!

Another court deals major blow to DVD copting

A California appeals court on Wednesday overturned a lower court ruling that had paved the way for a $10,000 DVD copying system called Kaleidescape and other products from the company with the same name.

The 6th District Court of Appeal in San Jose, California, was the second court in two days to rule that companies are bound (.pdf) by the entire Content Scramble System licensing regime, which prevents duplicating DVDs.

A San Francisco federal judge ruled late Tuesday that RealNetworks’ DVD-copying software was a breach of the Content Scramble System license, which is required for DVDs and computers to play DVDs. The license allows DVD players to descramble the encrypted code on a DVD, but the license prohibits the duplication of a DVD. Both RealNetworks and Kaleidescape claimed a loophole in the CSS license allowed the copying of DVDs.

In both cases, Kaleidescape of Sunnyvale, California, and RealNetworks, of Seattle, claim that the CSS license issued by a partner of the motion picture studios — the DVD Copy Control Association — did not require, as the studios alleged, that a DVD be in the machine to play back the movie. Hence, a copy could be made, they claimed.


court decision did not immediately block Kaleidescape from marketing its wares. Instead, it ordered a lower court to review the entire CSS contract to determine whether Kaleidescape’s DVD-copying machines are in breach of contract.

A lower state court had ruled that, because some of the terms of the contract were forwarded to Kaleidescape after the deal was signed years ago, the company was not obliged to follow them — including specifications that the DVD be in the machine during playback.

The Kaleidescape case dealt almost exclusively with California contract law. A ruling in favor of Kaleidescape likely would have presented a showdown between prevailing interests — California contract law and the DMCA
Do you agree?
Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/08/another-court-deals-major-blow-to-dvd-copying/#ixzz0qWSMzhu3