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 […]
The Home Office have concluded that a couple of aspects of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 need to be fixed in order to comply with European law, and are doing a rapid consultation on the changes. Unfortunately although the consultation document is clear about what the problems are it doesn’t give a clear […]
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 […]
Earlier this year the European Community revised its regulatory framework for telecommunications networks, so the UK Government is now consulting on how to implement those changes in UK law. Although most of the changes are not relevant to JANET as a private network, I have responded in three areas: Data breach notification, where the UK […]
The Ministry of Justice has been seeking evidence to inform its input into the ongoing revision of the European Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC). I’ve submitted a JANET response, covering three issues where we frequently trip over problems with either the interpretation or the use of the current Directive and the Data Protection Act 1998 that […]
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 […]