Topics Internet Law Update

Red Hat fails to protect its trademark in Court

The Tel-Aviv District Court (Judge Shoshana Almagor) has rejected a Red Hat lawsuit filed to protect its well-known Fedora trademark. The defendants, Start Commercial Ltd. and its director, deal with IT and data protection. According to Red Hat, they post in their blog and website, logos that closely resemble Red Hat's registered trademark. The court did not find conclusive similarity ...

EU confirms Israel's adequacy

The EU Commision published the much-anticipated announcement on the adequacy of data protection in Israel. Published on January 31st, the decision adopted by the commission determines that Israel provides and adequate level of protection for personal data transferred from the EU, however only in relation to automated international data transfers and to automated processing of data in Israel.

The decision ...

Developers of gaming website convicted

In a first of a kind decision, the Magistrate Court in Rishon Le-zion, convicted two computer personell who provided technical support to a gambling website. The two were convicted based on their own admissions and as part of a plea bargain, for assisting in the running of lotteries and gambling (a crime under section 225 of the Israeli Criminal Code). ...

Debt notifications cannot be sent by text messages

The ethics committee of the Israel Bar Association Tel-Aviv district, recently published general guidelines addressing the use of short messages services (SMS) and phone services when contacting a debtor. The ethics committee received many complaints regarding SMS's sent and phone messages left on the debtor's answering machines by lawyers, whilst trying to collect a debt. Adv. Efraim Naveh, chairman of ...

Sloppy class action against Google Buzz dismissed

The Jerusalem District Court dismissed a 5 billion NIS (roughly $1.4 billion) class action against Google Israel Ltd. and Google Inc.
 
The class action was filed a year ago by a Gmail user, following Google's launch of the new Google Buzz social networking service. The action claimed that Google violated users' privacy, because Google automatically added Google Buzz to ...

Israel: Monitoring employees email severely restricted

In a 91 pages opinion, the National Labor Court laid down a clear set of rules on employers right to monitor their employees email messages. The rules impose severe restrictions on that right and employers should consider reforming their workplace policies accordingly.

The issue that was brought before the court was whether an employer may access employees email messages and ...

BGA blocks access to political websites

Ben-Gurion Airport (Israel's international airport) may be all shiny and new, but if you try using the wireless internet connection to surf political organizations websites – right wing or left – you might be surprised to find that these have been blocked. The websites were found to be blocked by the airport's information security and filtering software - Fortinet - ...
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