Given the outcome of previous hearings on copyright infringement, the court’s conclusion this week that the UK’s major ISPs should be ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay was no surprise. However the judgment raises an interesting technical issue. In a previous hearing, it had been pointed out that there was a way to […]
Author: Andrew Cormack
I'm Chief Regulatory Advisor at Jisc, responsible for keeping an eye out for places where our ideas, services and products might raise regulatory issues. My aim is to fix either the product or service, or the regulation, before there's a painful bump!
IETF on Botnet Detection
A bot is a program, maliciously installed on a computer, that allows that computer and thousands of others to be controlled by attackers. Bots are one of the major problems on the Internet, involved in many spam campaigns and distributed denial of service attacks, as well as allowing attackers to read private information from the […]
Consent – the last resort?
I did a presentation at the EEMA eID Interoperability conference last month on alternatives to “consent” in federated access management. At the moment consent seems to be the most often cited justification for processing personal data – websites frequently say that “by using this site you consent to…”. The problem with this is that the […]
IWF Annual Report 2011
The annual report of the Internet Watch Foundation was published yesterday. The highlight is news that through closer collaboration with hotlines and Internet industries in other countries, the average time for removal of an illegal indecent image of a child from the Internet has dropped from over a month to twelve days. That is the […]
US Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights
Having been studying Europe’s proposed Data Protection revision for several weeks, it’s interesting to compare it with the proposed Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights recently published by the White House. This, too, recognises that the Internet is different to the paper-based world, but it seems to me to put this in a more positive way […]
I’ve just sent in a Janet Submission to the Ministry of Justice’s Call for Evidence on the EU Data Protection proposals. Our response mentions the good and bad things about the proposal, as discussed here previously, for Internet Identifiers: still no clarity on when IP addresses etc. are personal data, but at least more realistic […]
The Ministry of Justice has published their response to the Joint Parliamentary Committee’s comments on a proposed Defamation Bill. As discussed in a previous post, those comments included a novel suggestion that third party postings on websites be treated differently depending on whether the posting is attributed or anonymous. For organisations that allow such postings […]
Copyright blocking – recent UK cases
The latest case brought by rightsholders under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 has found that bittorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay does infringe copyright according to the Act. Following this decision it seems likely that rightsholders will seek injunctions under s97A of the Act requiring ISPs to “block” access to the site, as […]
After ruling last year on the balance between the rights of copyright holders, users and network providers, the European Court of Justice has now ruled on the same question applied to the case of a hosting provider, the social network Netlog. As in the earlier Scarlett case, the copyright collecting society (SABAM) had asked the […]
An interesting talk by Ken van Wyk on threats to mobile devices at the FIRST/TF-CSIRT meeting last week. While it’s tempting to treat smartphones just as small-screen laptops (let’s face it, users do!) there are significant differences in the threats to which the two types of devices are exposed. These need to be recognised in […]