Submitted by “The controversial Digital Economy Bill has been passed into law during the wash-up period, which sees outstanding legislation rushed through before a general election. The most controversial aspects of the bill – which could see persistent illegal file-sharers disconnected from the web and copyright holders given the power to block access to websites hosting illegal content – survived the process.”
Yet again vested interests force through a law.
But the great thing about this modern technical age is that all these attempts to control us unreasonably will end up looking foolish. Think twitter and Iran. Think tunneling and the great firewall of china. Think prosecuting 14 year old kids for decss.
This will fail for 2 main reasons:
1. You can’t reliably prove someone committed the office. Networks can be hacked. PCs can be commandeered. “IP addresses” which they base the evidence on means nothing. The real baddies will never get caught, you’ll end up targetting Granny Smith who never changed her wireless router’s password after she got it from the shop.
2. The legal firms are all boasting about how “confident they are in their technology.” I can’t wait to see this tested in court, in public gaze. There is no such technology. If they believe they have bought such technology, again, they’ve been fooled by salespeople. There IS NO SUCH technology that can prove guilt. Again looking like fools.
And the result will be that the lawmakers will look like fools for not being a bit more intelligent about beinding over just to one group of interests.
This is a democracy for corporates, not the people.
Sorry but it won’t be that way and it already is not.
The court will simply ask an expert and take his word for granted. No matter if that so called “expert” was talking out of his ass.
For example one of these experts mentioned in front of an Austrian court that it is impossible to change exif data …
Or another case of perfect expert-ship — here unrelated to IT — would be the disaster of Kaprun. The verdict was set before the trial started and the first expert doing actually his job was replaced with “experts” who were also talking out of their asses. Guess what nothing happened.
As soon as you are on trial no-brainers become the biggest puzzle of human kind.
I must be missing something but I don’t understand the striked through China. Thom?
Edited 2010-04-12 20:55 UTC
<hint>UK is almost as China regarding recording and surveillance of network related articles </hint>
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/uk-govt-ip-address-…
exactly – shows what kind of monkeys they are, making laws about things they don’t understand.
I can just see BigMedia saying “don’t worry about IP addresses, let me draft the law for you …”
…as the mandatory filters that are now law in New Zealand and soon to be so in Australia. And it will come to a country new you real soon.
Big Media with their government cohorts have been dumbing down the population for years, and while they’ll run just enough press that is anti this type of legislation, there are undertones in the background of just about every other news story, and indeed in movies, that “educate” the brain dead population about why these things are necessary to protect them. Hence we see situations where this type of legislation slips through quietly despite the screams from the thinking few.
And it’s just going to get worse…
They are not mandatory in New Zealand, it’s up to the ISP. A small difference, but relevant.
How exactly would they go about “disconnecting you from the web”? Does the bill actually have such an incredibly clueless and ineffectual wording or is that the work of the person who wrote for BBC?
All ISP are regulated on modern non-criminal societies(kof kof eastern block) so basicly they just call ISP and ask them to disconnect you. I couldn’t care less, they already regulate guns so nothing new here. Give me my rifle back and I give you internuts.
He probably meant that “disconnected from the web” should have been “disconnected from the internet”.
Its a good question, how they do the disconnection, and its not clear. The powers seem to envisage an ISP being asked to disconnect a user from the Internet, not the web. That is, a particular access account will be terminated.
It is not so far suggested that the individual should have his or her email accounts and online subscriptions terminated. Nor is it proposed that he or she should become a banned individual or household, that is, banned from obtaining another access account from another ISP.
This is where it really starts to have civil liberties implications, and where it interacts with other UK laws. In the UK, there is something called an ASBO – anti social behavior order. What happens is that you are doing something which may or may not be unlawful under existing law, but which is thought by a local government to be undesirable. It may really be that, it may be truly vicious harassment of your neighbors which the authorities have failed to curb under existing law. So local government or the police make application to a magistrate for an ASBO. This can do a variety of things. A common one is banning orders or internal exile orders, where people are forbidden to enter certain geographical boundaries. Or are forbidden from talking to or making contact with certain other people.
It would be perfectly possible to have an ASBO which forbade person A to use a computer, any computer. Or to subscribe to an Internet account. Or to read certain publications, or visit certain sites. People have been forbidden from attempting suicide, because it disturbed the health services. A boy was forbidden from being sarcastic, to which he memorably rejoined that he was being not sarcastic, but ironic.
When you break an ASBO, you are automatically in contempt of court. So you can go to jail for that. The result is that there are lots of things now that are unlawful for A to do but not for B to do.
We must see how the new law fits into this. One suspects that it will have to get more and more draconian to have the desired effects – ISP hopping is after all not the purpose. Probably subscription to proxy services will also have to be forbidden.
Its going to be fun.
Edited 2010-04-13 08:47 UTC
yeah, the strike in the title doesn’t come through into your feed (or my feed reader); China UK, sounds like Hong Kong.
@alcibiades
Excellent description, thank you for the insights about ABSO!
While my country is not yet so deeply affected by such legislations I think people should be more concerned about this ‘laws’ before they say “nah, no one is gonna be jailed for this”.
This kind of shady laws are creating a state where people is increasingly guilty until proved innocent and where your daily life can be harrassed by administrative, trivial, situations. Situations where a silly mistake by an employee can cause you a LOT of trouble to rectify due to the burocrasy of the system.
More importantly and disturbing, in this ‘brave new world’ when this laws that some people call stupid are enforced with ignorance or malice, you are suddenly a Criminal, a true Criminal with an open case in court!! Good luck explaining how stupid that law is when asking for a loan to save your house or travelling overseas to visit your ill mother…
My bastard MP was one of the people who voted for this travesty. He voted for ID cards too, and for there to be no enquiry into the Iraq war.
Unfortunately, I think he’s stepping down at the next election, so I can’t vote against him in this one.
Not happy!
To give you an idea of the stupidity of the UK Govt when it comes to technology, the Labour Party manifesto says that by 2011 they are promising “virtually every home in the country a 2Mb/sec broadband connection”.
As a few people and an article on The Register pointed out, they really meant MBits. The promise above is actually promising a 16.8MBits/sec broadband conncetion to everyone in the UK. Doh!
Your Gov. quote is wrong you used the term Mb which actually means megabits and not megabytes as you intended.