Koger v O’Donnell, aka ‘Mind Your Code’

The Copyright and Related Acts, 2000 defines a ‘computer program’ as one that is original and its author’s intellectual creation. Ever since the beginning of this millenium, software that is the literal creation of its author(s) is very hard to find. Coders and programmers have, for over a decade, relied on and taken full advantage of application builders; these builders will produce code based on the parameters they are given. If three users set the same parameters, all three will get identical code. Immediately, one would assume that this excludes that code from any copyright (but for that of the third party) and, inevitably, the only thing that is left to be considered the intellectual creation of the author is the combination of the parameters that produced the code, or else, its functionality. But S17(3) of the 2000 Act makes clear that copyright ‘should not extend to the ideas and principles that underlie any element of a work’. Houston, we have a problem!

Seanad Referendum 2013: The Day After

Foreword: A lot has been said and written  about the Seanad over the last five years. Although some ideas seem consistently repetitive, arguments vary from ‘it is a waste of funds’ to ‘it is a pillar on the way to progress’ and  ‘I do not do politics’; we have heard it all.

As someone who has spent their life divided between two countries, and equally affected by the laws of both, I would like to voice my concern. The similarities in the political field of both Greece and Ireland are quite disturbing, and seeing the path the former is on, it is worth exploring what is keeping the latter from following. Albeit similar, though, there is one substantial difference; Greece has a unicameral assembly.