Ofcom’s 2010 report on “Site Blocking” to reduce online copyright infringement concluded that using IP addresses to block infringing sites “carries a significant risk of over-blocking given that it is common practice for multiple discrete sites to share a single IP address” (page 5). They have now published a report commissioned from CMSG that shows […]
Category: Articles
Thoughts on regulatory and ethical issues relating to the use of technology in education and research
Categories
ISOC Report on Copyright Enforcement
I’m pleased to report that the Internet Society has published a discussion paper looking at different methods being proposed around the world to respond to the use of the Internet to breach Intellectual Property Rights. For each of the approaches – graduated response and suspension of access, traffic shaping, blocking, content identification and filtering, and […]
Categories
MoJ Summary of Data Protection Responses
The Ministry of Justice have published a summary of the responses to their consultation on European Data Protection proposals. On the issues we raised around Internet Identifiers, Breach Notification and Cloud Computing there seems to be general agreement with our concerns. No one else seems to have mentioned Incident Response specifically, but there was a […]
The Government Data Service have published draft identity and privacy principles for federated access management (FAM) systems. It’s interesting to compare these with the approach that has been taken by Research and Education Federations to see whether we have identified the same issues and solutions. The first thing that caught my eye was that the authors seem […]
Categories
Think Before You Tweet
As the BBC are pointing out, there has been a lot to celebrate on Twitter recently. However there have also been quite a few instances of tweeters (the French refer to us/them as “twittos”) getting it badly wrong. We should all know that “email is like a postcard”, but sometimes it seems that “Twitter is […]
Article 15 of the European Ecommerce Directive states that Member States shall not impose a general obligation on providers … to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity. However recital 47 says that “this does not concern monitoring obligations in a […]
Categories
“Internet” means Open Internet
A couple of developments in network neutrality. The Broadband Stakeholders Group have announced an update to its Open Internet Code of Practice, which has already been signed by a number of UK ISPs. The previous version of this voluntary code concentrated on transparency, by requiring those who signed up to document their traffic management practices. […]
Statewatch have published what appears to be a document from the Council of (European) Ministers containing comments on the proposed Data Protection Regulation. It’s interesting to see that there seems at last to be a recognition that the current legal treatment of indirectly linked identifiers is unsatisfactory. At the moment European law has been interpreted […]
Categories
Digital Economy Act: Who is Covered?
Ofcom’s draft Digital Economy Act Code recognises that the real Internet is more complex than the Act’s model, and that there may be a variety of “communications providers”, “Qualifying ISPs” and “non-Qualifying ISPs” involved in getting packets (and possibly Copyright Infringement Notices) delivered to “subscribers”. This post describes some of the combinations likely to be […]
One definition of a “hacker”, according to Wikipedia, is someone “who makes innovative customizations or combinations of retail electronic and computer equipment”. I was recently asked by TERENA to have a think about the legal issues around using federated access management to control access to resources in eResearch. This has quickly come to feel like […]