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!
The Digital Economy Bill completed its highly abbreviated journey through the House of Commons last night and now only requires the final approval of the House of Lords to become law. To get enough support from opposition parties two further amendments have been made to the later stages of the copyright enforcement provisions: Clause 11 […]
The Government has proposed an amendment to the controversial web-blocking proposals recently added to the Digital Economy Bill. Instead of creating the blocking powers immediately, the amendment would give the Secretary of State the power to do so at some future date. This would be done by Statutory Instrument (SI) – a process that permits […]
The Government has published a factsheet on the position of universities, libraries and others under the Digital Economy Bill. On how these organisations fit the Bill’s definitions, they conclude: Without examining the situation for each university and their relationship with JANET, it is not possible to say whether JANET is acting as an ISP or […]
I’ve been reminded that section 62 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, passed last November, created a new offence of possessing non-photographic images of children that are pornographic and fall into one of a number of sexual categories. When the section is brought into force such images will be classed in the same way […]
The Commission have been running a consultation for several months to inform a possible revision of the Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC), which is now fifteen years old and starting to creak under the strain of new ways of doing business. I’ve sent in a JANET(UK) response raising issues we’ve tripped over in developing the UK […]
The amended EC law requiring opt-in, rather than opt-out, to non-essential cookies was criticised last week as “breathtakingly stupid” because of its implications for advert-funded sites. However advertisers have now said that they don’t think the law requires any change to current practice! So is there a problem, or not? I don’t know, but I […]
On Tuesday I was invited with Chris Gibson of FIRST to give evidence to the Home Affairs Sub-Committee of the European Affairs Committee of the House of Lords. They are currently looking at the European Commission’s proposals to protect Europe from large-scale Cyberattacks. We spent an hour and a half explaining what CERTs are, how […]
Considerable concern has been expressed about the news that it has apparently been agreed to change European law on cookies as part of the revision of the Telecoms Directives. The current law on cookies is contained in Article 5 of the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (2002/58/EC) and Regulation 6 of the UK’s matching […]
Further to my last posting on breach notification, my attention has been drawn to a recent (22nd October 2009) draft text of the proposed Directive to amend the EC telecoms directives. As an amendment to the existing Directive 2002/58/EC the new proposals would apply in the first instance only to public telecommunications networks and services. […]
The all-party parliamentary communications group (apComms) have published the results of their enquiry into various aspects of internet security – entitled “Can we keep our hands off the net?” – to which JANET provided written evidence earlier in the summer. We responded on two of the five questions, relating to the work of the Internet […]