A press release from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport confirms that the Government is looking to browser manufacturers to provide the main approach to implementing new European laws on cookies. However the release also confirms that current tools for managing cookies in browsers are not considered sufficient to obtain the consent that will […]
An interesting news item from SWITCH, the Swiss NREN and also operator of the .ch and .li TLD registries, on how they are alerting website owners to malware and, if necessary, taking action to protect customers from being infected. Swiss law allows the registry to suspend a domain for five days, or longer if the […]
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) published its annual report yesterday, including information on the use of the Internet to distribute indecent images of children. There is quite a lot of good news to report. These images remain a very small fraction of Internet content – fewer than 9000 dealt with all year and only around […]
Nominet have published an issues paper asking whether there are circumstances in which it might be appropriate to rapidly suspend a DNS domain involved in criminal activity, and the processes that would be needed to ensure such action did not create too great a risk of unfairness. I’m writing this in an attempt to sort […]
Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee is carrying out an enquiry into the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights Online and, in particular, the effectiveness and proportionality of the Digital Economy Act 2010. Since the Act isn’t yet in operation – we are still awaiting the publication of the Implementation Code by Ofcom – it’s […]
The Information Commissioner managed to greatly raise the profile of the new EU law on cookies last week, warning in a press release that “UK businesses must wake-up” to the forthcoming change. However this alarm bell seems to be a bit early, as the Government admitted that although it does expect to meet the deadline […]
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has today announced that Ofcom will be asked to review the practicality of the provisions in section 17 of the Digital Economy Act 2010 that might in future allow courts to order blocking of infringing sites. In our responses to previous consultations on the Act we have expressed […]
An interesting morning yesterday at the launch of the Ministry of Justice’s Response to the Call for Evidence on the Current Data Protection Legislative Framework. JANET’s evidence focussed on the difficulties of applying data protection law to the Internet: the current law has proved unclear on the status of IP addresses and similar pseudonymous identifiers, […]
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 have recently published a more detailed action plan to support their draft Internal Security Strategy from earlier this year (that’s “internal” as in “within the continent”, by the way!). Most of the strategy covers physical security, including natural and man-made disasters, but one of the five strategic objectives is to “Raise levels […]