Thoughts on regulatory and ethical issues relating to the use of technology in education and research
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has published the first draft Statutory Instrument (SI) required for the implementation of the Digital Economy Act’s copyright enforcement process. The Online Infringement of Copyright (Initial Obligations)(Sharing of Costs) Order is is the SI that covers sharing of costs betwen rightsholders and ISPs: as suggested in last summer’s […]
The European Commission has published an overview report of the responses to its recent consultation on network neutrality. It seems that respondents agreed that “traffic management is a necessary and essential part of the operation of an efficient internet” and that its use to address security and congestion issues is entirely legitimate. However there appears […]
For a while there has been one pair of contradictory answers to the question of whether an IP address was personal data. Two different German courts were asked about addresses in the log of a web server: one said that was personal data, the other said it wasn’t. Now we seem to have another pair. […]
An interesting presentation at the TERENA TF-CSIRT meeting on how visited and home sites need to work together to resolve complaints about users of eduroam visitor networks. Stefan Winter is both an architect of eduroam and a member of RESTENA-CSIRT, so well placed to understand these issues. Although the JRS and eduroam Policies both require […]
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has published its response to the consultation on how costs under the Digital Economy Act 2010 should be shared. These are the costs of ISPs’ systems and processes to receive and pass on Copyright Infringement Reports (CIRs), Ofcom’s costs in regulating the process, and the costs of the […]
An interesting report from the French data protection authority (CNIL) that the European Commissioner has announced a delay in the proposed revision of the European Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC. Rather than publishing a draft Directive later this year, it seems that the plan is now to publish a report this autumn with the draft expected […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]