Free Law Dissertations - As Well As Analysing The Equivalent Provisions For The Word ‘disclosing’, He
As well as analysing the equivalent provisions for the word ‘disclosing’, he also referred to other provisions within the 1984 Act, including part I of the Schedule, which stated that:
Personal data held for any purpose or purposes shall not be used or disclosed in any manner incompatible with that purpose or those purposes.
This provision clearly shows the word ‘use’ within a provision where there is clear protection by the law of data outside its electronic form, thereby showing the intention of parliament to criminalise subsequent ‘use’ of data after retrieval and inevitable transfer from the electronic format. This reasoning is based on the linear timescale of the criminal act of ‘use’ of personal data. There is first retrieval, followed by transfer from electronic form, analysis and application. If criminality were to be established exclusively at the point of retrieval prior to the transfer of the subject matter from data into information, it would therefore mean that all other subsequent steps would be irrelevant for the criminal law and Lord Goff pointed out that all unregistered retrieval by a registered data enterer would constitute a criminal act, whereas completion of all four steps by someone who is not registered, would not be criminal at all. This in itself would lead to a great injustice of the law.
In his analysis, Lord Goff referred to no other issues as, since there was no ambiguity following this literal interpretation, the analysis of other sources, such as Parliamentary Hansard, was wholly unnecessary. This is very much an embodiment of the literal approach to the interpretation of statutes, which has proved to be utterly essential for the purposes of ascertaining the meaning of words, as shown in the far earlier case of Fisher v Bellwhich concerned the meaning of ‘offers for sale’ under s 1(1) of the Restriction of Offensive Weapons Act 1959. Here it was held that an offer could not be anything other than a binding contractual proposal to which an unqualified acceptance would constitute an obligation for the offeror to fulfil the offer. This therefore distinguished the ‘offer’ from the far more general ‘invitation to treat’ and, had the court stretched the meaning of ‘offer’ to include non binding invitations, the law of contract would have been badly distorted.
