The Court of Appeal has just handed down judgment in Dept for Business and Trade v IC and Montague [2023] EWCA Civ 1378, confirming that ‘aggregation’ of public interests for exemptions under FOIA is permissible. This, I promise you, is much more exciting than that opening line implies.
Author: Ben Mitchell
Who next for 7 seconds of fame? Representative action SMO v TikTok discontinued shortly after getting started
If you search online for “how to win at TikTok”, you’ll soon land on the 7 second theory: the most successful TikTok videos are limited to 7 seconds. The idea being that users will happily grant you 7 second of fame before swiping onto the next video. However, the same logic does not hold as a winning strategy for representative litigation (a kind of opt-in class action) in the data protection sphere. The most recent such representative claim, against a variety of TikTok companies, has been discontinued by the Claimant. It had, by lawyers’ standards, an analogously short lifecycle on our screens but with notably less success.
EIR: Court of Justice gives guidance on the internal communications exception in Land Baden-Württemberg v DR
The Court of Justice recently gave guidance on the “internal communications” exception in the Environmental Information Directive 2003/4/EC. It gave its views on the principle that exceptions should be interpreted restrictively and the relevance of the Aarhus Convention Implementation Guide (tl;dr – internal is the opposite of external, to be a communication information has to be shared, there is no time limit on the exception, and neither the principle nor the Guide makes any difference to the outcome in the end).