La Gauche a gagne en France

06 May 2012 by Dave.

Francois Hollande, the PS candidate for President du Republique has won today. 6th May 2012.

I am at home in my flat in London.

I also remember when I heard that Mitterand, the last socialist to hold the post won, I was at CPSA conference in 1981, I think it was the Ship Hotel, and Dennis Skinner MP was speaking, he’d just been heckled, he asked what Williams, Jenkins, Owen & Rodgers had ever done for the Labour Party; the reply being they’d left it. He riposted, “I’ll use that next time”.

Posted in france, elections, europe, politics | No Comments »

Neither the UK, nor the EU should sign ACTA

13 Mar 2012 by Dave.

Red Sin Censura, published an Internet in Danger page the other day, which pointed me at Le Monde’s “What’s wrong with ACTA”. This has been worrying me, since much of the opposition has been based solely on secrecy, although this bleeds into democratic oversight. Since the treaty has been negotiated primarily between democracies and their politicians and public servants, to me secrecy alone is not sufficient to win broad support to opposition to the proposed treaty; there’s a lot of people that trust their politicians.

However, between Red Sin Censura and the Le Monde article, I’d say there’s a lot more ammunition and reason to oppose the EU and member states signing the ACTA treaty. The remainder of this article, precises the L’Monde article, which points out that ACTA is an international trade agreement,

• negotiated outside the world trade agreement infrastructure, deliberately because the developing country agenda differs and diverges from monopoly capitalism, and they, i.e. the developing countries,  have a majority in the UN infrastructure, and were excluded from the negotiating table
• in which the copyright corporations were on the inside track and ACTA embeds their privilege, it’s the pursuit of these privileges that required the negotiations to be secret; these privileges include the right to determine infringer’s penalties,the right to determine the ‘loss’, and the prohibition and constraining  of ISP safe harbour defences, all extend copyright privilidge.
• which creates its own maintenance infrastructure. Treaties constrain national sovereignty, ACTA signatories will find it very hard to change their mind.
• which is unlikely to be signed by either its authors (the USA) nor its main targets (the BRIC countries), so why the hell should we sign it.

The Le Monde article argues that,

“ACTA is an attempt to bypass multilateral institutions”.

 

The article looks at the role of the World Trade Organisation and the World Intellectual Property Organisation, both United Nations NGOs, that until the launch of the ACTA negotiations were the centre of international agreements on intellectual property law. The push for ACTA was started three weeks after WIPO announced its “Development Agenda”, which recognises the complexity of balancing the interests of the world’s citizens and participants in intellectual property markets and possibly made it much easier for NGO accreditation. According to Le Monde, the WIPO recognised the fundamental human rights interests in the debate around intellectual property law. Copyright holders wanted to focus on enforcement, developing economy governments and the WIPO wanted to focus on definition. Having lost in the UN, copyright holders and their agents, the US Trade Representative, started an initiative to get what they wanted.

 

“Negotiations were a secret to the general public, while corporations were well informed”.

 

More than this, major efforts were made to avoid democratic scrutiny and the citizen’s participation utilizing the sort of tactics that those used to the factional politics of the 70/80’s student movement will easily recognise. This stupidity is the reason why in the EU, further democratic scrutiny in the European Parliament is legitimate and essential.

 

“Developing Countries were excluded from negotiations, even though they are the target of the new norms.”

 

Le Monde speaks about the UN’s Right to Development and ACTA’s sponsors’ and negotiators’ flagrant disregard of the interests of the developing world. I suggest their response is almost certainly to be to refuse to sign up to the treaty. Glyn Moody reports on the likelihood of China & India signing in his techdirt article, “Why The Chances of China Joining ACTA Or TPP Are Practically Zero”.

 

“The ACTA norms are restrictive, unfair, and undermine or eliminate flexibilities in intellectual property laws that are needed to protect the public interest”.

 

Let’s hope so, the ECJ will strike it down. It copies the right holder’s global initiative of giving themselves enhanced rights in the enforcement arena, for instance defining the loss caused by piracy as that stated by the rights holder. Furthermore Le Monde states that,

 

“Right holders are given asymmetric rights as regards discovery against real or merely alleged infringers.”

 

and also places constraints on law makers in protecting the rights of internet service providers, and new entrants to the internet services markets. It provides for preferential treatment of rights holders, and even choice in the selection of remedies, it prohibits Governments from protecting even in a limited way, the rights of the online service providers. ACTA also allows for rights holders to have the last word on the loss caused by infringing activity i.e. the monopoly price charged by the rights holder. This is chilling stuff, I strongly recommend you read it. [Here], you’ll need to scroll down.

 

“ACTA makes it more difficult to implement liability rules, in cases where the public should have more freedom to use protected goods.”

 

Le Monde’s words, to expose the increasing restriction on the use of orphaned works and the ongoing “enclosure”. Knowledge Ecology International have issued a briefing on ACTA, Orphaned Works and Damages. The problem that creates orphaned works is that copyright is “strict” and no longer requires to be declared. Thus content is copyrighted by default, and strict liability means that its use is prohibited without rightsholders’ agreement. If the rightsholder cannot be identified, then the content can’t be legally used. You can imagine; ACTA requires both damages to increase, and that all legal fees are to be borne by infringers; innovators won’t take the risk. Most attempts to solve the orphan works problem have involved weakening strictness and reducing damages.

 

“The secret process that created ACTA sought to establish a new captured institution that will advance right holder interests through both hard and soft norms.”

 

To me the drop dead reason for refusing to sign. Any amendment, becomes virtually impossible. What this means is that there will be a non democratic organisation that determines the changes permitted, and no MP’s, no MEPs, no EU Commissioners, no elected officials will be able to influence the future of world wide intellectual property law. Copyright maximalists want everything, and the want it for ever.

 

“The United States does not consider itself bound by ACTA, but will seek to impose ACTA on developing countries.”

 

If India, China, Brazil aren’t signing the treaty, and the USA aren’t signing, why should the EU and its member states do so? Even more important, why sign first?

Posted in culture, copyright, acta, economics, digital economy, politics, internet, europe, technology | No Comments »

In the nick of time, a hero arose

11 Feb 2012 by Dave.

Finally got my thoughts on Sabam vs Scarlett out. This is the first European Court ruling on the copyright trolls attempts to wreck the internet. I have backdated it to November, when it first happened because I want to. The article has obviously been amended as things move on. Please read the full article here.

In summary the Belgian collective rights society, i.e. the private sector organisation that taxes pubs, cafes and jukeboxes on behalf of monoploy capitalism lost its attempt to force Belgum’s biggest ISP to do everything they wanted. The upside is that copyright trolls lost, the downside, they asked for everything and so some of what they want may still be legal.

Further  upside is that the European Court stated that the rights of citizens and ISPs must be balanced with those of copyright holders! This is our hope.

Posted in culture, copyright, digital economy, uk, law, europe, politics | No Comments »

Search Neutrality goes to Parliament

08 Feb 2012 by Dave.

Earlier this week I attended the @pictfor meeting advertised as about “Search Neutrality”. It had entered my radar when Alec Muffett who had been invited to speak, announced his attendance on twitter and his Computer World blog, “The Google Dialogues : Search Neutrality”. The speakers were Alec, and Shivaun Raff, the CEO of Foundem and Mark Margaretten, Professor at U. of Bedford. Foundem is one of the complaintants to the EU provoking an EU monopoly investigation into Google. This is covered in the Guardian, on the 20^th November, in an article called “Google search investigation sparked by complaint from British site”.

Shivaun argued that Google manipulates its sort order to benefit its own alternative properties, particularly the price comparison sites. (Foundem is a vertical price comparison site.) They argue that over 90% of European search is fulfilled by Google, and that when Google chose to discriminate against them, their traffic fell off to a business breaking trickle.

Alec and Mark took a similar line to each other, Google is one click away from failure, relevance including sort order is subject to competitive pressure & no-one has a right to a place in a search engine’s sort order. Alec in his blog post points at James Grimelmann’s article,“Some Skepticism about Search Neutrality” who makes similar points, although Grimmelmann argues that vertical search sites are rarely useful or usable. Margaretten dealt with this less judgmentally by pointing out that Google also prefers sites with original content, which is why aggregator sites do less well. He reinforced the point that there are good reasons to devalue vertical search sites, although Foundem can prove that they were specifically penalised. Grimmelman distinguishes between regulating for “Search Neutrality” which he opposes and anti-trust law which he argues is different and has its own theory and practice. The meeting missed this dichotomy between monopoly regulation and search neutrality.

Shivaun Raff was backed up by a spokesperson from Streetmap, who provided some evidence that Google had manipulated their sort order when they launched Google maps in order to better compete with the established players. I hope that they have made a submission to the Commission. The talk in the bar after was that streetmap lost out due to Google Maps technical superiority particularly features such as navigation, user generated content, personal customisation and world wide coverage; however even if this is true it doesn’t necessarily mean that the allegation of malicious action is unjustified.

I’ll be interested to see if the Commission come to consider Google to be a monopoly. It dominates in search, and its maps and mail are wildly popular but it’s definitely second choice for microblogging (g+) where it’s outgunned by twitter and facebook, identity assurance where Google Profile trails behind twitter and facebook, picture blogging (Yahoo), bookmarks (delicious and reddit) and blogging (wordpress). It’s interesting to consider this in the light of some changes made by google to their user experience over the last couple of months where they are staring to build walls around their services to make it harder to share one’s data with other companies services. For instance, they have wrecked Google Reader for me since I can now only share news via Google+, there is now no open XML feed for these. I’ll explore this in another post soon.

Posted in economics, google, monopoly, digital economy, europe, business, internet, politics | 1 Comment »

The chilling effect of global copyright enforcement

02 Feb 2012 by Dave.

And on to the EU’s attempt to implement strong copyright enforcement. I’ll return to the UK in the next week or so, but the European Commission signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) a couple of days ago. This proposed trade treaty has been negotiated in secret amongst a group of governments from the developed world. The US agenda was to strengthen international enforcement of intellectual property laws, and the original European agenda was similar, but orientated more around the protection of a number of geographic brands, such as champagne or cheddar. The Open Rights Group talks, on their blog, about the secrecy and how we have came to this point.

La Quadrature Du Net, a french based digtal liberty campaign, argue in their blog posting, that ACTA will have a chilling effect on ISP and Search providers forcing them to police their users and inhibit their business. LQDN say,

“By putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers (in a most subtler way than in previous versions of the text), ACTA will give the music and movie industries a weapon to force them to police their networks and users themselves. Such a private police and justice of the Net is incompatible with democratic imperatives and represent a real threat for fundamental freedoms.”

It also proposes increasing criminal sanctions for commercial scale infringement. This is definitely not the same as commercial activity and it also reinserts the criminalisation on aiding and abetting which industrial content have been trying to criminalise for the last five years, and seems to weaken all the national copyright exclusions. The treaty has self maintenance clauses, which have no citizenship accountability. It’s been negotiated and written by bureaucrats and lobbyists and having got (some of) the law they want they don’t want any pesky elected politicians looking to change and update it; they see that as their prerogative.

La Quadrature Du Net have published a call to arms for Europe’s citizens to campaign to have the treaty rejected  by the European Parliament. (They also have a campaign Wiki here.)

To further understand what’s happening, check out this article, entitled “Why the EU will repent ACTA at their leisure” published on a blog called Br0ken Teleph0n3, which was pointed out to me by Glyn Moody. In it, the author, Ian Grant, makes some startling predictions illustrating the weakness of the treaty for Europe’s citizens.

• There has been no parliamentary scrutiny to determine if the treaty conflicts with the current state of European law. No-one knows if it conflicts or not. (See my, or others, review of the last UK judgement determining if strong copyright enforcement conflicted with EU law or not, it shows there’s a lot of law to contradict.)
• The European Parliament’s technical assessment recommends postponing the signing of ACTA, that there is little benefit to the EU’s citizens. The rejection of this recommendation has led to the resignation of the EU Parliament’s Rapporteur. Interestingly, five EU member states have opted out of the signing process. (How’s that work?) For the record, they’re Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia.
• It seems doubtful that the US Senate will be asked to, or consent to ratification.
• India, China and Brazil have not been asked to, and are unlikely to agree to the treaty.
• As discussed above, the penalties for copyright infringement are likely to be increased. There is no embedding of copyright exclusions, for research, education or personal use in the treaty.

We seem to be on the path to agree a treaty in the economic interests of US entertainment and industrial software companies, where Europe’s competitors will not, and we give up many fundamental freedoms for the privildge.

I shall be writing to my MEPs this evening. I suggest you look at some of these links and think about this as well.

Posted in culture, copyright, news, acta, digital economy, uk, politics, business, internet, europe, technology | No Comments »

Yankee Law, freedom and the internet!

16 Jan 2012 by admin.

The White House, in a reply to a petition on its e-petitions site calling for them to oppose the current legislative attempts to censor the internet in the name of anti-piracy says, among other things,

“Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small. Across the globe, the openness of the Internet is increasingly central to innovation in business, government, and society and it must be protected. To minimize this risk, new legislation must be narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity…..”

It adds,

“We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk.”

It’s a shame they didn’t come to this conclusion earlier and continued to permit the US Trade Representative and the US’s Embassies the world over to lobby and bully for Hollywood’s laws and to seek extradition clearly non-criminal behaviour.

I demand that the US Government withdraw their extradition request for Richard O’Dwyer; its not in-line with the policy above. O’Dwyer is not a criminal; links are legal in the UK. (So actually, it is my view that foreign nationals should not lobby the US Government, just as I do not expect foreign nationals, or tax non-domiciles to finance politics in the UK . I have,however, signed one anti-SOPA petition; it was clearly labelled as a global initiative, so I would ask my US friends and comrades to take up O’Dwyer’s case. )

It is a disgrace that the White House can grandstand for its own fundamental rights and laws and its own business innovation while funding an oppressive lobbying regime and the legal pursuit of hobbyists.

It is a disgrace that British politicians and Judges, spinelessly permit this abuse to occur.

It is a disgrace that American legislators are prepared to attack the freedom of speech for the rest of the world in order to protect the super-profits of billionaires.

Posted in digital economy, culture, copyright, white house, press freedom, extradition, politics, internet, law, europe, technology | No Comments »

Why the DE Act is not in breach of EU law?

30 Dec 2011 by Dave.

I have finally finished my summary of the Judicial Review of the Digital Economy Act. [here]. I have posted it on this blog backdated it to 21st April 2010, since that is the day after the judgement was delivered, and close to when I started it.  It’s a hard read, and I am not sure my summary is much easier. It’s clearly taken a long time to read the judgement and write my review in hours taken and from when I started, for that I apologise. It doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading.

The ruling states that,

1. the DE Act is not a technical regulation and thus does not need to be notified to the EU Commission as part of the legislative process, although the subsidiary Ofcom regulations will.
2. the DE Act does not conflict with the EU’s E-Commerce Directive because the ‘mere conduit’ defence is not absolute, it does not require ‘general monitoring’, and copyright protection measures are excluded from the domain of the ECD.
3. the DE Act does not conflict with the EU or UK Privacy and Data Protection laws because copyright enforcement measures are permitted processing measures under the Law.
4. the DE Act does not conflict with the EU’s Authorisation Directive since the AD does not prohibit amendment or supplementary regulation, however it does invalidate some aspects of the proposed cost sharing order.
5. the claimants fail to prove that the DE Act and its parliamentary passage was sufficiently disproportionate to warrant being struck down i.e. that intellectual property rights are balanced against the rights of ISSPs and citizens by Parliament.

The ruling made no comments on the proportionality of any “Technical Measures” since they have not been drafted, agreed or promulgated.

The court made no comment on whether a law requiring “careful balance” on the issues of “fundamental rights” should be passed using the unprecedented accelerated procedures of House of Commons’ Wash-up. This process meant that the possibly 100’s of hours of review time spent by elected politicians was avoided. (The Commons spent under 10 hours considering the Bill.)

Judge Parker refused the claimants the right to appeal, but this has now been granted on all grounds except that the DE Act breaches the E-Commerce Directive by imposing a duty of general monitoring.  This was reported by the Guardian [here] and Linx [here].

Posted in digital economy, copyright, uk, europe, internet, politics | 1 Comment »

Program or be Programmed, it starts at school

11 Dec 2011 by Dave.

It would seem that even the IT industry is fed up with England’s IT education syllabus. A number of IT companies, most of them US subsidiaries have issued a “report” seeking to influence the quality of IT teaching in England. In an article, called “Coding the New Latin”, the BBC report,

Today, the report is dated 28th Nov, the likes of Google, Microsoft and other leading technology names will lend their support to the case made to the government earlier this year in a report called Next Gen. It argued that the UK could be a global hub for the video games and special effects industries - but only if its education system got its act together.

The BBC continue

But the problem, according to those campaigning for change, begins at school with ICT - a subject seen by its detractors as teaching clerical skills rather than any real understanding of computing.

It seems that these Hi-Tech companies argue that teaching in schools focuses too much towards using office software, by which we all mean Microsoft Office. Despite suggesting that we aim higher, the first quote points our children at the Entertainment industry and not computer design, manufacturing nor system software engineering.

My experience as an observer, and parent of school students is that the syllabus for our brightest and most committed IT students is exclusively about using Microsoft Office products. Frankly this bores the brighter students. This boredom was compounded at the turn of the century, if not today, by the decision taken by many schools to teach the GNVQ syllabus, and not the GCSE National Curriculum. This decision was taken because good GNVQs scored more highly than the GCSE in the school league tables and it could be taught (sometimes) with the same time commitment.

Let me assure you that the GNVQ IT syllabus is boring as fuck, requiring a very narrow rote based skill set demonstrating the ability to write a letter using Microsoft Word. There is no HTML, no CSS, no SQL, no scripting, no programming and very little hardware. My children didn’t  even open up a computer to examine the parts or to learn about, what are now called, user installations, such as memory DIMM installs. NOr did they even teach anything useful like how to configure an internet gateway or set a password on the router!

This shockingly unambitious syllabus is worsened by teaching staff in many cases with limited real experience of IT or Computing.

Today I go to seminars where senior software development managers are crying out with frustration that Universities aren’t turning out skilled programmers. In Britain we are struggling to write innovative code and code is constrained only by imagination ( and the speed of light).

Europe and the UK’s system software business is tiny, there’s only one European CPU and no European computer manufactures. Even in the mobile business we are in retreat with the demise of Psion and Nokia. We are almost at the point where all Europe’s computer scientists work for US companies.

So at last, even some of the campaigners for the current curriculum recognise that it’s 20 years too old. The reality is it’s designed to prepare us as consumers of foreign software and not to prepare us to be wealth creators in the 21^st century. We need change to encourage our best to work in IT and Computer Science, and contribute to the IT platform which will be the base for the next generation’s wealth creation and our, by which I mean those who want them soon’s, pensions.

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This is meant to be a rant about the British education system and so I have two postscripts

1. The UK’s early specialisation makes this an issue of crucial importance. People that fail or give up at GCSE (16) will be most unlikely to study such a subject at either “A” level (18_ or University.
2. I reckon that the Scottish Assembly has control of the Scottish curriculum. It seems odd to write about an English issue, but that’s how is as far as I know.

However, we can’t look at Education in isolation to certain macro- and industrial economic developments,

1. ARM is a beacon.
2. Nokia have given up, and soon most phones will use US authored operating systems; Nokia shit-canned their own phone operating systems.
3. Siemens is a system software licensee, the big European integrators don’t do system software.
4. MySQL AB (Sweden) sold itself to Sun Microsystems.
5. Canonical Ltd. is a UK quoted company, is this the last of the European Linux distros?

Posted in economics, education, digital economy, uk, europe, politics | 1 Comment »

A Nordic morning

04 Dec 2011 by Dave.

Just back from a trip to Guildford, to the Scandinavian Fair. We now have some Xmas presents for others, a hat for me, and some snacks with which to watch “The Killing”.

No pickled fish unfortunately, but we made up for that on the way home.

Posted in diary, europe | No Comments »

Sabam vs Scarlet, the People vs. Copyright

24 Nov 2011 by Dave.

The European Court rules to balance the rights of copyright holders against citizenship rights. Finally some sense from the courts. The SABAM vs Scarlet case from Belgium has finally reached the end of the road. The European Court of Justice has ruled that EU Law prohibits national courts from forcing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to filter and block all users, including alleged and proven copyright infringers.

The ruling balanced the rights of all Europe’s citizens, the rights of the ISPs and the rights of copyright holders and decided that

• the right to freedom of speech and expression
• the right to conduct a business
• and the right to privacy

are all of significance and are not outweighed by copyright holder rights to tax the use of their content. Basically copyright holders are going to have find the criminals, not pursue the innocent.

The organisation European Digital Rights, in an article Scarlet/Sabam Ruling a vital victory for Internet freedoms argue that the ruling prohibits a national court, including the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, the organisation once known as the House of Lords Judicial Committee, from instructing an ISP to install and run a monitoring and blocking system in the interests of copyright holders. In fact Sabam, the Belgian version of the Performing Right Society, asked,

whether a national court may order ISPs to install a filtering and blocking system for all its customers for an unlimited period, in abstracto and as preventive measure under EU law and if this was in line with the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The Court of Justice of the European Union answered that such a measure is contrary to European legislation and that it violates fundamental rights in particular the right to privacy, freedom of communication and freedom of information. It also breaches ISPs’ right to conduct business.

Phil Muncaster at v3.co,uk in an article European court rules that ISPs can’t be forced to block pirated content reports on the ruling and quotes the judgement as saying,

“EU law precludes the imposition of an injunction by a national court which requires an internet service provider to install a filtering system with a view to preventing the illegal downloading of files,”

The BBC report the ruling here….EDRI again, argue that

The measure requested by SABAM is only incompatible with EU law because it does not meet the legality test set out to enable restriction to fundamental rights, i.e. the criteria of proportionality, necessity and effectiveness.

Furthermore, law should be sufficiently clear, accessible and foreseeable, and it (sic) that particular case it was not.

It would seem that SABAM’s requests under the injunctions in the Belgian courts were exceptionally broad, but one conclusion we can draw is that SOPA-like laws cannot be passed by the national legislatures of EU member states, so what impact will this have in the UK. Surely this must change the context in which the appeal by BT and Talk Talk of the judgement in the DE Act judicial review occurs.

BT and Talk Talk ’s lawyers argued in court earlier this year that the UK’s Digital Economy Act contravened several tenants of EU Law. Basically Justice Parker disagreed striking down the arguments that the Law had to be consulted with Commission, that it was in breach of ISP’s common carrier and single market obligations, that it was an overly onerous obligation placed by the state on a telco business. He also ruled that the law did not breach the ISP’s customers’ fundamental rights to privacy.
The Judical Review judgement can be read here…. My long review is published on this blog here. The judge defines certain discretion to the legislature; it would seem to me that the ECJ have narrowed this level of discretion.

Mr Justice Parker ruled that the “Initial Obligations Code” of the DE Act had not been published and therefore there was no need to consult the EU Commission, and nor could he review it. But one has to wonder if after this ruling whether the proposed “Technical Measures” to be applied to alleged copyright infringers under the DE Act will be deemed illegal on the grounds that they are disproportionate (and lets face it ineffective). AtThe UK court stated that proportionality was a matter forParliament, the ECJ my have stated that ts a matter for the courts. At least this ruling must ensure that the courts review and take seriously BT’s duty of privacy to its customer. BT and Talk/Talk plan to return to court to appeal the Regina vs Secretary of State judicial review. Let’s hope the robust ruling of the ECJ will make the Judge’s job easier.

The other major case in the UK is even more interesting. This is the newzbin2 case. If filtering and blocking is disproportionate, even if newzbin2 remains deemed to be a criminal site, surely the copyright holders will now have to pay for the site blocking. Also all BT’s caveats to the injunction which the judge dismissed must now be reviewed. The fact that

• the injunction is unlimited in duration (disproportionate, and a factor in the ECJ’s ruling)
• BT can’t moderate their compliance for emergency operational reasons without permission from the court, from the plaintiffs (disproportionate, restraint of trade, breach of consumer rights)
• BT must pay for the enforcement (restraint of trade)
• BT must apply the filtering to all their customers (many businesses and government customers don’t want/permit “Cleanfeed” filtering on their lines) (breach of freedom of information, restraint of trade), this might be a killer
• BT have no right to claim consequential liability for false accusation (disproportionate)

It might not be a new dawn, but after the appalling run of legal precedents in the UK, Europe and the USA, this at least is a restatement that copyright trolling is not a human right because it’s not. The Copyright law is a political agreement and settlement between creators and the polity. They have no right to the last word.

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See also http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/11/24/eu-court-rules-against-web-filters-to-block-file-sharing/http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/11/777&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

Posted in culture, copyright, digital economy, europe, law, politics | 1 Comment »