But commercial sport’s casts more shadows on the law than that. Let’s not forget the orange ladies that dared to wear minidresses. Part of a commercial conspiracy by Bavaria Beer to get ‘free’ advertising on the back of the World Cup, they faced charges  of "unauthorised commercial activities inside an exclusion zone" and "enter[ing] into a designated area while in unauthorised possession of a commercial object".

Under diplomatic pressure from the Dutch government, the charges were dropped. Yet somewhat incredibly, the UK government has also seen fit to make commercial use of certain words (like “Gold” or “2012”) a criminal offence once the Games roll into town – I shit you not).

Here’s a quick lesson in how commercial interests get to set criminal law in this country:

Corporations, if they really suffered damages, could potentially sue. But then, the poor sponsors are faced with the hassle of going after minidress wearers, in tort law, or the people the sponsors bought their ad exclusivity from (in London 2012’s case, the IOC and LOCOG), in contract law.

So the sponsors have a good ol’ moan (in SA, to FIFA; for the Games, to Seb Coe); these then bring their weight to bear on our governments, who then crack the whip over their legislature in order to pass draconian criminal laws.

How nice: I’ll have to remember that next time I go into commerce, I should just get the state to make some special criminal laws making it a special criminal offence for people to tread on my special business toes. Much better than having to get my own lawyers involved to sort out my own commercial problems – I can just send the cops in. And who knows; maybe we should even do what the South Africans do: fast-track it through a special system of steroid-addled courts, at huge financial outlay.

Even the Chinese government didn’t think it appropriate to go down this route for Beijing 2008. But clearly, the West is unwavering in its commitment to democracy and the rule of law and gets to repeatedly poke the Chinks in the eye with how bloomin awesome our constitutions are. Especially during their Olympics.

One can only hope they think to return the favour.

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And what they saw, for a country trying to ‘rebrand’ itself, was troubling. Anxious to ensure that crime didn’t spoil the marketing and festive spirit, a system of hardcore ‘FIFA courts’ was setup to deal with ‘World Cup-related crime’ in the rainbow nation, rapidly doling out harsh punishments for a wide variety of crimes. These ran the gamut from pissing off the sponsors, to mugging the tourists, even being used to seemingly ‘get one back’ at foreign journalists whose pen was not unquestioningly friendly to all that was going on.

Giving the SA justice system a booster shot is not, invariably,  a Very Bad Thing. But this is arbitrarily streaming  certain types of justice over others, to protect and further a political and economic motive. That goes against basic principles of the rule of law and the separation of powers.

Nor is it seemingly fair on the few fools who committed World Cup-related crime, given how tough the sentences are and how ridiculously expedient the sentencing was. It’s Judge Dredd-ish, and politically motivated. One would have thought that a country with South Africa’s history would have been reluctant to return to a system of inequality before justice…

Case(s) in point:

- a 15 year sentence to hard time for the robbers of two Portuguese journalists. Time from arrest to sentencing took just 48 hours.

- a full 3 year sentence for a Nigerian convicted of handling 30 stolen tickets in Pretoria: arrest to sentencing in 24 hours

- a full 2 year sentence for a 21 year old that pilfered a German tourist’s picnic blanket, 3 beers and guidebook; arrest to sentence in less than 24 hours

- a full 3 year sentence, delivered in just 20 minutes’ court time, to a 22 year old Jo’burg youth South African unarmed youth with no criminal priors that nicked an Argentine’s mobile

This in a country with 400,000 thefts each year…

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2. Imagine a country…

TO: Data Controller / Legal Compliance

Facebook Ireland Ltd

Hanover Reach

5-7 Hanover Quay

Dublin 2

IRELAND

RE: Subject Access Request (Data Protection Acts)

Dear Facebook (Ireland),

I wish to make a subject access request under s4 of the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003 (Ireland), the Data Protection Act 1998 (UK) and all other applicable legislation reflecting the rights I am conferred as an EU citizen under EU Directive 95/46/EC.

If you are not the designated Data Controller for Facebook, please pass this to the appropriate person, bearing in mind the legal deadline. I am expecting the company’s full and frank compliance with applicable Irish and EU law and thus expect to be given this data within the stipulated 21 days. Facebook was first given notice of this request in writing (via several channels on your online communication system on the Facebook website) on 10^th May 2010.

As my (EU-based) contracting party, I am by law entitled to receive a copy of any information you keep about me, on computer or in manual form, and any information about me passed outside the EU.

I would like a full and frank disclosure of all information held. Please inform me of all information you are legally bound to withhold. Please note that I will not be satisfied by any attempted exemption of information allowing the identification of third parties where those parties are known to me (i.e. form part of the same Facebook ‘Networks’ as me).

I prefer to be sent this information digitally wherever possible, in as full a depth and breadth as possible, and additionally in such structured formats as it is accessed, processed and/or communicated by your company.

I understand that you might like me to prove my identity, so a copy of my UK passport is attached. That is to be the sole lawful purpose for that document’s use. I understand that my rights also extend to demanding the removal of information about me when it is not held for the lawful and clearly stated purpose, and thus am giving advance notice of my exercise of that right: please release and delete that document once it is no longer required to prove my identity.

Yours faithfully,

Philippe Bradley

Also included was a photocopy of my passport and my contact details, plus a link to my facebook profile.

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• - your conscious self, actively filling in your profile
• - your less conscious self, passively interacting with the site, browsing certain pages, ‘Liking’ pages around the Web (or not clicking the Like button and still telling Facebook what pages you’re on)
• - your social network, interacting with you – indeed, your social graph can be highly predictive of who you are.

But what constitutes ‘my information’ for the purposes of a Subject Access Request (SAR) under UK, Irish (indeed, Europe-wide) Data Protection legislation?

A subject access request is an order any person in the EU can send any EU-based business that collects their data. It’s an order along the lines of ‘show me what you got’.

So I sent one. Initially, and with infinitesimally little hope of a reply, through some of the Contact Us webforms on facebook.com – doubtless to join mountains of rubbish in there, despite being clearly marked ‘Legal request: please respond; subject access request under the Data Protection Acts’.

And yet I knew that an earlier brave soul had managed to use a different part of the Data Protection Act to get Facebook to properly delete his account (Facebook prefers you to ‘deactivate’ accounts so you don’t leave an information black hole in the picture they’ve built up of everyone around you.

This told me two things. One, that for some reason Facebook thought it was under DPA jurisdiction. Two, it considers your social graph to be very important data – data about you, but with wider implications than that. So it was worth pushing on.

Thanks to a good spot by eagle-eyed lawyer Andrew Sharpe (@TMT_lawyer on Twitter if you want to follow his developing thoughts on the implications of his find; and here’s me), the secret is out: unless you’re accessing Facebook from the USA, in which case you’re contracting with a business in California, under Californian law, if you’re dialling in from anywhere else you’re dealing with a business in… Ireland!

All hands to the typewriter, I boshed out a pitiful attempt at a serious sounding Subject Access Request Letter (which I will post later)(Edit: HERE) and dispatched it, airmail to be signed for on delivery, with haste.

I suppose technically Facebook’s 40 days for compliance started when I sent them my first SAR (through their website forms). That was 16 days ago. Whether I want to argue that or not probably depends how nasty I’m feeling 24 days from now. Facebook’s been under the privacy kosh recently and maybe they deserve the extra 16 days if we mutually were to consider my posted letter to be the first SAR.

Let’s see what happens now. I would love suggestions in the comments concerning what data I should insist upon receiving, and in what format.

I will also be posting a rough guide to use of European data protection legislation in the coming weeks. In the meantime, wherever you are, you can have a look at the EU pages on the subject.

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FOIA is pretty wonderful. It gives you a (qualified) right to drop an email to any public authority, being as snippy as you like (in fact, terseness and clarity are very much encouraged) and they have to bend over backwards (up to 18 man hours’ worth) to get you an answer.

The problem is that ‘public authority’ is defined even more narrowly in FOIA than it is for other ‘good government’ citizens’ tools, like the Human Rights Act (which gives you rights against interference by public authorities) or judicial review (whereby any unfair or improper decision taken by a public authority can be put through the courts which can order that it should be ‘done right’, and fairly). In FOIA, public authorities are either the ones listed in Schedule 1 to the Act, or designated as such by the Secretary of State (i.e. by the government). The buck, seemingly, stops there. You can’t get anywhere with a FOIA request to any government contractors, like many care homes for example, or ex-national utilities, now privatised (e.g. Network Rail, BT, etc), or bodies charged with ‘self regulating’ and industry.

Or can’t you. This post is effectively a bleg: I would love to know from someone with experience with FOIA, whether the following hypothesis has any legal merit. I wonder whether you could probably construe s3(2)(b) as catching any information gathered (and thus now held) under delegated powers. It reads:

s3: Public authorities

(1)In this Act “public authority” means—

   (a)subject to section 4(4), any body which, any other person who, or the holder of any office which—

      (i)is listed in Schedule 1, or

      (ii)is designated by order under section 5, or

   (b)a publicly-owned company as defined by section 6.

(2)For the purposes of this Act, information is held by a public authority if—

   (a)it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person, or

   (b)it is held by another person on behalf of the authority.

I would love to be able to slap a FOIA on government contractors or pseudo-governmental regulatory bodies. How good would it be to FOIA the Press Complaints Commission for emails, reports, the lot… we could disinfect the single biggest influence in modern British politics and society, the popular press!

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"Why do you live in a commune? Please explain…"

So asks a friend. I’ve moved. But not to a commune! To a co-op. This post aims to start explaining what it is and why living here is so desireable.

This is an especially good time to set out the basic principles, given Gordon Brown’s statement earlier this week that Ed Miliband will work with the Co-operative party to draft Labour’s forthcoming election manifesto. Gordon Brown, it is worth remembering, is the first British Prime Minister to be a member of the Co-operative Party, alongside his main party affiliation (New Labour).

This post will focus on the general legal principles behind cooperative housing, especially the one I now live in. I hope to discuss other aspects in later posts, if there’s any interest. My overarching aim is to spread some appreciation for the concept (both from self interest and in the hope that maybe readers or their acquaintances might consider helping co-ops to be set up or develop by getting involved in their financing, making gifts or provisions in their wills.

I’m a tenant, with similar basic rights and obligations as any other poor bastard grinding away in this big city, paying rent to a landlord. But in a co-op housing association, there’s a difference – my landlord is virtual; a legal fiction, a juristic ghoul created by the founders of the co-op when it was built 35 years ago, courtesy of a big change in the law in 1965.

When you sign the tenancy agreement, a token £1 payment gets you a share in the co-op society, making you a full member. Through voting  and volunteering, the members of the co-op animate this ghoulish puppet. Dear landlord – we would like to hedge against rises in gas prices and slash our CO2 output by installing woodchip-fuelled heating systems. And the landlord makes it so. Dear landlord – we would like you to please set aside some of our rent (about £51 a week – £40 for basic rent, the rest is bills, tax, insurance and service charge) to fill a room with paint, tools, flooring, lightbulbs any other consumables we need for our houses. Make it so! Dear landlord – we would like a totally noninterventionist, liberal policy concerning how we arrange the house, paint walls, put up fixings, etc. So.

The landlord is us; we hire CDS (itself a cooperative) to handle the bureaucracy. We own the land (on long lease from the council) and can do largely as we please with it. So when one resident – a designer with the very illustrious Heatherwick Studio – came up with a plan to build a huge storage cage for bikes built with Russian railway sleepers – the co-op agreed and members got together to get it built, with the money, as always, coming from our rent.

There are ~120 of us living here, in houses and apartments. We live a 20 minute cycle from Waterloo, five minutes from a Jubilee Line station, and just around the corner from Goldsmiths Art College. It’s insane how far rent can stretch, even this close to central London, when nobody’s trying to make a profit.

———- Legal detail

The governing statute for the co-op is the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 1965. Under it and the Financial Services & Markets Act 2000, the co-op is registered with the FSA (Financial Services Authority). As with most co-ops, companies (often co-ops themselves) provide co-op housing societies with management services and registration, doing the basic bureaucracy and letting the ‘hippies’ get on with actually calling the shots concerning the property.

Share structure:

Like public companies, a co-op has share capital. There are diverse ways of organising this, but where I live the share structure is par value, fully mutual: each member gets 1 share; each share costs £1; and on moving out, you get your £1 back – you can’t take it with you or sell it for more even if the property has gone up in value. Your share gives you a single vote on the rare occasions where everybody gets together to vote on something. Liability when things go wrong is usually limited to that £1. The property remains in the ownership of current occupants (members) – but any profit cannot go to them; it must, by its regulations (and probably by law*), be spent on improving the co-op. If one day the land is sold at a profit, that profit has to stay within the co-op or find another co-op (cy-pres principle) – the same with any excess from the rent. This is a form of land ownership that’s very different to most in the country – it is not owned in the hope of making a buck at the end (what this means for the mortgage provider, I’m not sure yet).

Tax:

The land is private property; my council tax is paid from my weekly £51 rent (council tax is £2.58/week at present). The co-op, if fully mutual, is normally exempt from Capital Gains Tax and Corporation Tax*; co-ops can also often classify as charities and get the vast tax benefits associated with that, too. I don’t know for sure whether my co-op is a registered society but I am going to infer it isn’t: charitable housing associations must give their members security of tenure, whereas my contract stipulates that I can be kicked out with a month’s notice (that’s also my notice period), which makes getting mortgages much easier (the lender is sure it can take exclusive repossession of the vacant property if the co-op were to default.

Tenancy:

A co-op, being run for its inhabitant’s benefit, is not an Assured Shorthold Tenancy; it is a contractual tenancy, which ends when membership is resigned or withdrawn. Things sometimes go wrong. The wrong sort of person is let in. A fully mutual status, with properly defined rules, allows the co-op to act to end a tenancy and withdraw someone’s membership; a sad but crucial control mechanism.

Financing the purchase

I’m fresh here and have little idea how the co-op was first set up, the lease acquired, or the houses built (surprisingly nice for 60s housing!). So this section is subject to the proviso that I’m talking about co-ops in general, which may or may not apply to where I live.

Primary funding for establishment will come from mortgaging the property, to the Housing Corporation and/or the bank (from my contract it seems both mortgages were entered into at the start – I have no idea what’s been paid off to date). Secondary funding is then from the members, from charities, the government. Some state funding was provided in the early 70s under Reg Freeson. Fresson was a member of the Co-operative Party and Housing Minister under the then Labour government – I suspect some of that went into this community; the timing fits. This co-op does not take council money as the council then demands the right to nominate people (e.g. the homeless) into membership – people that usually just want to get housed and don’t lift a finger for the co-op.

Most interestingly, co-ops can issue loan notes (properly called loan stock) to finance their activities. An investor will receive a fixed rate of interest back over the repayment term.

Those are the basics; I thought I’d start with the legal nitty gritty, having just come from a land law class on (of all things) leases!

*these are things I haven’t independently verified, for co-ops as a whole, and certainly not for the one I live in

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Marina-Selini Katsaiti finds that “obesity has a negative and statistically significant effect on individual well being”. She estimates that, in Germany, a three-point rise in BMI (from, say 24 to 27 – equivalent to gaining around 20 pounds for someone who’s 5’8”) reduces happiness on average by so much that it would require a 67% pay rise to compensate. In Australia it would require a doubling of income to offset the adverse effect of such a weight gain.
Now, contrast this to a new paper (pdf) by Andrew Clark and Yannis Georgellis. They show that, in the UK, men and women who have been widowed are happier in the 3-4 years after their loss than they were the year before it. Yes, their well-being slumps in the 12 months after bereavement, but it recovers thereafter.

Now, remember of course that winning the lottery will statistically do very little, if anything, to make you a happier person in the long run

How very peculiar!

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Unlike other systems, it is said that in the UK, political will can find it hard to block cases coming to court, because anyone in the UK can make the accusation and take it forwards, without the case being picked up (or shelved) by a prosecuting lawyer (e.g. in France, juge d’instruction).

It will be interesting to see how Cabinet can somehow repair ties. The Israelis are very displeased:

President Peres described the incident as “one of the greatest political mistakes” that Britain could have made and calling for the law to be changed.

Calling for our law to be changed, because they don’t want ex-leaders, now retired and stripped of their diplomatic immunity, having to stand trial for war crimes. Surely the office charged with protecting British values and interests around the world appreciates the strength of our system, and the will of our democratically elected Parliament in incorporating the United Nations Convention Against Torture into the Criminal Justice Act 1988, and responded in kind? Er…

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said yesterday that the Government was “looking urgently at ways in which the UK system might be changed in order to avoid this sort of situation arising again”.

Yes. How terribly embarrassing, sorry about that chaps.

To dump this action would be to risk a very serious constitutional crisis within the UK, one that has been building for a while.

Remember that the arrest, in London, of General Augusto Pinochet for war crimes (wanted under Spanish warrant) was considered by many as one of the most significant developments in human rights and international law since the Nuremberg trials. remember, then, that our Home Secretary (none other than Jack Straw, the miserable shit) found a back door to let him go rather than send him to Spain: grounds of ill-health made him unsuitable to go to Spain to stand trial.

So he went back to Chile, stood up from his wheelchair and smiled.

We seem somehow to have escaped the battle even more recently, after the government decided that a case against BAE (bribery and corrupt business deals with Saudi Arabia) should be dropped due to:

1. ‘national security’ – a breakdown of relations with Saudi Arabia threatening bilateral anti-terrorism efforts if we decided to go after the globally corrupt instead
2. fear of job losses: under EU law the UK government cannot continue to contract with BAE if it is found guilty of corruption, which it argues might cripple the arms manufacturer far more critically than any punishment imposed

And the most immediate context is the growing anger at how easily members of our 2003 administration are escaping serious questioning over our entry into the Iraq war and subsequent behaviour therein.

I for one encourage serious outrage if our law gets changed or meddled with at the behest of alleged criminals in foreign lands.

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Posted with his permission – original post here

Why is there still a row about bankers’ bonuses? What I mean is that the issue should by now be settled against them. There’s abundant evidence that large bonus “incentives” are not only not justified (pdf) by efficiency considerations, but can actually backfire, with the result that intelligent observers are demanding an end to them.

If we were serious about designing high-powered incentives, we’d consider abandoning bonuses and instead simply killing under-performing bankers. After all, the threat of death works perfectly well in motivating airline pilots or soldiers. So why not apply it more generally?*

Let’s be clear. Bankers’ bonuses have less to do with rational incentive mechanisms than with the fact that bankers have power. It’s a form of legal extortion.
Which raises the question; why is this not more clear? It’s because any power structure is sustained by ideology – a set of cognitive biases which might have a grain of truth but which serve to defend vested interests. In the case of bonuses, there are four such biases:

1. The fallacy of composition. If any one banker doesn’t get a big bonus, it’s possible he might flounce off in a huff to another firm. But it’s not possible for all bankers to do so; only a tiny handful of British bankers could get good jobs in New York or  Switzerland. In this sense, a blanket nationwide ban on big bonuses wouldn’t do much harm.
What’s true for an individual needn’t be true for a group.
There’s a parallel here with one of the errors that got us into this mess – what Keynes called the “fetish of liquidity”. An asset might be liquid from the point of view of an individual, but there is no such thing as liquidity for al investors.

2. Mental accounting. Last year’s banks’ losses seem to have been put into a separate mental box, and are regarded as an exceptional item now that business is back to normal. But this shouldn’t be the case. Those losses vindicate Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s point that banks, on average, don’t make money because occasional huge losses wipe out years of profits. Which suggests bankers don’t have the skill they pretend to.

3. The fundamental attribution error. The belief that banks’ profits come from skilled individuals is in part due to the common error of attributing to individual agency what is in fact the result of situational or environmental factors. It’s trivially true that today’s banks’ profits are due to cheap money, government guarantees and state bail-outs. But it’s always been the case that profits have risen and fallen according to environmental forces such as monetary policy, waves of takeovers and general investor sentiment.

4. The impossible/difficult conflation. Throughout history necromancers, witch-doctors alchemists and ju-ju men have extracted high incomes. They’ve done so because their patrons have believed their job to be very difficult, demanding supreme skills. But in truth, the jobs of foretelling the future, controlling the weather and turning base metals into gold  haven’t been difficult ones. They’ve been impossible.
So it is, perhaps, with banking. Making high risk-free returns isn’t difficult, but impossible. In failing to see this, we give bankers the fortunes our ancestors gave other charlatans.

* Of course, the same reasoning applies to politicians, as they too can make huge errors which cost society dearly. This probably explains why they are not proposing the idea.

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…cosmetic surgery is now primarily consumed not by the rich, but by the working and lower-middle classes, sometimes even by the poor.  According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), about 1/3 of cosmetic surgery is consumed by people who make less than $30,000 a year.  About 70% of it is consumed by people who make less than $60,000 a year. It is mostly women (90%) and mostly white, middle-aged women (80% and between 35-55 years old).

If past trends are much to go by, this is something we might possibly expect here in the UK and elsewhere in the West (not to mention Japan).

The fashion/beauty industry, for years the source of an irrepressible esteem-destroying, envy creating lifeforce targeted primarily at the very well-to-do with nothing better to do with their money, has now shat all over the minds of people who quite frankly ought to have better things to spend their money on, than plumping up their lips. Let’s not forget the role of lower class diet, doubtless a tidy earner for US liposuctioners.

Once again, business interests walk leash in hand with complacent middle and lower class sheep (a sheep, on a leash?) lacking better sense than to accept and be subject to (and typically pay for exposure to!) that noxious influence and keep their hand in their pockets for objectively valuable endeavours.

Oh, and hurrah for a reduction in the cost of getting cosmetic surgery. What a boon for society that we now have such an ‘affordable’ means to tackle the symptoms (but not the cause!) of endemic low assertiveness and wisdom.

You can’t even argue that it significantly helps intelligent, but not very good looking people (in an age where looks supposedly matter more) to pass on their DNA to the next generation: 80% of people getting cosmetic surgery are women approaching menopausal age anyway.

(via Marginal Revolution)

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Now comes the news that protest has spread from idiots on their blogs (bows), via broader groups like the Open Rights Group and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to the major players in the digital economy: Google, Facebook, eBay and Yahoo.

This can only be good news and I doubt anybody involved in pushing Mandy’s clause forwards expected such a quick and concerted slap in the face from established players in the UK’s digital economy. Whether fledgling businesses speak up for or against the Clause still remains to be seen; and I somehow doubt that the House of Lords would stand for the Clause either.

In that case, what on Earth was Mandy thinking he’d achieve by adding Clause 17 remains a mystery. Could it really be so sad and semi-sinister as a move to please a Corfu yachtsman? I don’t mean to imply greedy conspiracy on Geffen’s part; he has openly pledged to pass any money he makes from now on direct to charity. Or perhaps Murdoch is the likelier target of such posturing. Murdoch’s been badgering the great, the good and the puny for years now for stricter (or in his perspective – more generous) scope for extension and enforcement of copyright; here he is at it recently, hinting he’ll sue the BBC…

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As if that wasn’t weird enough, that patent application was used as evidence of genocide at Auschwitz by Penguin Books who were being sued for defamation by David Irving.

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