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!
I’ve just submitted our JANET response to the latest Ofcom consultation on the draft Code to implement the Digital Economy Act. The Code contains a lot of the detail that was missing from the original Act and has some significantly different proposals in areas that had been previously discussed in Parliament and elsewhere. In particular: […]
I was asked at very short notice to provide input into the joint Treasury and Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ review of how to promote growth in the Digital and Creative Industries. Sadly, the briefing paper’s only mention of the Internet was as a “threat to our ability to protect and monetise creativity”, so […]
I had an interesting day in Brussels yesterday, providing input for the Commission’s revision of the 1995 Data Protection Directive. Invitations had been sent to those who responded to the consultation last year, so a wide variety of organisations were present, including banking, marketing, medical, consumer rights, content industries and telecommunications operators. There was general […]
For a while I’ve been trying to understand how pseudonymous identifiers, such as IP addresses and the TargetedID value used in Federated Access Management, fit into privacy law. In most cases the organisation that issues such identifiers can link them to the people who use them, but other organisations who receive the identifiers can’t. Indeed […]
Cloud computing was the theme of the day at the FIRST conference, with talks on security and incident response both concluding that we may need to re-learn old techniques. The adoption of at least some form of “cloud” seems to be inevitable, so we need to understand how to do this with an acceptable level […]
Regulators and governments are moving towards creating a requirement that anyone who suffers a security breach affecting personal data would have to report it. A number of American states already have such laws, the recent revision of the European Telecoms Framework Directive introduced a breach notification requirement for telecoms providers and the Commissioner has stated […]
Having now gone through Ofcom’s consultation paper on the draft Initial Obligations Code, there seems to be both good news and bad news. As with everything else around this Act, a lot of thought has gone into the implications for consumer broadband connections. The consultation document contains several significant improvements for those types of connections. […]
I’ve just sent off JANET(UK)’s response to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills consultation on how the costs incurred in implementing the first stage of the Digital Economy Act 2010 will be shared between rightsholders and ISPs. The consultation covers three sets of costs: Costs incurred by ISPs in implementing systems to receive and […]
I’ve been having a look at what the first stage of the Digital Economy Act 2010 will require of qualifying ISPs and comparing it with what JANET already requires of the universities and colleges that connect to the network. And I can’t see that the Act would add anything to our existing measures against copyright […]
Ofcom have invited me to a meeting to discuss the definitions in section 16 of the Digital Economy Act 2010, so I’ve been staring at what the Act says and trying to make sense of how it applies to universities or colleges with JANET connections. Since a wide variety of answers to this question have […]