Britain's new Internet Law: Death of the Startup in Britain?
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
http://prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=272545
Allegations of "abusive" behaviour on the part of registrars or end-users could lead an ignorant Secretary of State triggering this instrument.
So what's "abusive"? Well just for starters, registering an expired domain name is. Yes really, that's what the government believes (see the Digital Britain report).
So a company with about 12 employees has gone from being heralded at the UK IT awards last week for "the biggest innovation to come out of the UK since the www from Sir Tim Berners-Lee.".. to fearing nationalisation!
Brown thinks he can run the "Digital Economy" like a Soviet tractor factory. Who would want to invest in this?
What a joke.
BTW: he's one of us.
"things are really frightening in the UK which doesnt have the fundamental constitutional concepts of privacy, freedom of speech, and reasonable constraints on libel"
Only if you believe everything you read on the internet.
No, seriously. This kind of thing is exactly what's needed to make services like i2p (http://i2p2.de) popular enough to go mainstream.
Or another way to look at it, oft-quoted, is: the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
But I think that dismissing the computer/internet laws currently being passed by countries in the EU as being unenforceable, or being easily solvable by technology workarounds is a great fallacy and the most stupid thing in the world to do.
The cat and mouse play between technology workarounds and law cannot go on forever, because eventually you will run out of legal workarounds. This is similar to the cat and mouse play between the police and law breakers. Unless you are in bed with the police, you will eventually get caught.
I think that the only viable alternative is to oppose these laws and hope they don't pass.
This is a cycle that has been happening for millennia. It's not new. Authoritarians come into power, then they amass power, and then they attempt to rule by force. Usually, people first welcome their new authorities, because they want order and they naively expect that authorities are on their side; then they begin to become disenfranchised; and finally, they begin to subvert the authority and eventually counteract it altogether.
The only novel thing here is the level of technology that we're dealing with now -- but that benefits both sides.
Look at China: they've developed probably the most advanced national communications surveillance and filtering technology in the world (depending on how deep your paranoia runs); and while that works for many people, others are still finding ways around it.
Or, look at BitTorrent. Media "authorities" attack centralized distribution; hackers develop decentralized distribution. Authorities attack centralized tracking; hackers develop distributed hash tables. Authorities attack the protocol itself; hackers develop a new protocol. Authorities attack unencrypted communications; hackers develop decentralized, anonymous, encrypted communications.
Eventually this cycle of escalation will lead to distributed networks -- "guerilla" wifi mesh networks are already being used in some places -- and the only way the authorities will be able to counter that will be to shut down wired, wireless, and cellular communications for the great majority of the population.
How long do you think that will remain popular?
i2p only works if you're allowed to access the internet.
# usually steal is used, as here, when the activity is actually mere copyright infringement; stealing requires that the material would no longer be available to the rights holder.
Incidently, I've recently started a Facebook group where anyone can pledge that they won't vote for any MP or candidate who supports this -- http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/wont-vote-for-any-...
See also: Every person in the UK is caught on CCTV a billion times every single day, which is fed into a central database and used by the government. Every email is logged by the government. etc etc etc.
This is the entire business model for "The daily mail" paper in the UK - get people completely scared to death about every single thing so they think the worlds falling apart and they need to buy the paper to keep up with it all. "There's pedophiles on everyones street!" "global warming will kill us all" "the government is spying on everyone" and so on for ever.
You may not be outraged by the curtailment of our freedoms by a man who is unelected and has been booted out of post twice (at least) and who is spearheading a new copyright initiative immediately after staying at the pleasure of a media magnate, said initiative doing nothing for the public domain and everything for vested monopoly interests.
You may not, but those of us who prefer not to enforce the profit of the super-rich by the rule of law, solely for the benefit of those rich, we should be outraged.
Actually the Conservatives broadly support this particular bit of damage. In fact they want disconnection of filesharers to happen sooner: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debate/?id=2009-11-09c.6.8
Furthermore, the Tories are also in with Rupert Murdoch -- they're widely suspected of having done a secret deal with him -- so they'd be likely to go along with any new restrictions on fair use etc that Murdoch wants in order to turn the net into a locked-down pay-per-view digital newspaper. (Murdoch's plans won't work, of course, but that won't stop the Tories pushing through harmful laws).
So while the Tories will be better than Labour in some ways, they're sure to be worse in other ways: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Nice counter-example: Finland just made broadband internet access into a legal right: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/finland.internet.righ...
At some point we'll get the human right to "not be in a cell". And then where will we be?
So you think that being in prison would be perfectly pleasant just as long as you had a broadband connection? Some life you must lead.
There was also some call (Probably from EU) to give criminals in jail the right to a vote. Which I also strongly disagree with.
They're in there to separate them from society. And that includes 'online' society IMHO - hence they should not have net connections.
And presumably they shouldn't be allowed to send letters or have visitors either right? There's a "slippery slope" in both directions.
Going by the stats at http://felonvoting.procon.org/viewresource.asp?resourceID=28... felony disenfranchisement is not that popular in western democracies.
Democracy is fine if the majority are sane, have good morals, etc etc. But the majority of people in the US believe in god :/ The majority watch "American idol" and think the height of cuisine is macdonalds. Doesn't bode well.
Just my 2c anyway...
Benevolent dictatorship ftw.
As an office worker I went between an office of about 4 metres square (16m^2)shared by 2 staff and my house, which when I started was about double that size (including all rooms) and shared with my wife. I was let out my office for lunch but no recreation time.
Now I had significant freedom to go out and about, visit friends and what have you, but, yeah life can be hard.
Broadband should be a right as more government services are becoming accessible only online - my Mum volunteers in many capacities in a rural community where access to services for the elderly is becoming hard because internet (web) access is assumed. If my web access is removed it makes it harder for me to be a citizen (subject really but hey); harder for me to be a consumer, harder for me to be an active part of the workforce.
Wow, congratulations on the stupidest sweeping generalization I've seen all week. I mean, it's not like politics in the US is ever unproductive or ridiculous, right?
In all seriousness, this is pretty scary. There is a fierce dichotomy here. There aren't very many people who believe file-sharing is that morally wrong (or morally wrong to begin with), it is just becoming very illegal.
Things are going to get more and more ridiculous, until we are forced to re-evaluate the very paradigms that hold up our economies. I've said it before, "money" is outdated.
At least until Carmack manages to build rockets that can take us somewhere further away from all the insane people in this planet and their suicidal tendencies.
We also have the freedom of health care for all. You know, we look after each other so people don't die so much.
I'm happy for you that you have more freedom to drink beer. May I kindly suggest that, when exercising that freedom, you try and avoid nationalistic flame wars? This is Hacker News.
Unfortunately they keep coming.
Plus, the OP comment of "Does the UK have any freedoms left" is obviously quite ridiculous.
The OP's comment was clearly a flame of precisely that sort. It wasn't making any constructive commentary on civil liberties issues, just asking a dumb and inflammatory rhetorical question.
I suggest that the only reason you find the OP less offensive than the reply is that you're American and not British. If our internet laws are fair game for criticism, I think your (crazy) alcohol laws and health system must be too :)
Also, what makes you so sure that civil liberties have been "declining" in the UK? There have been steps forward as well as steps back, I don't see any justification for overall pessimism.
The OP wasn't a good comment either, but the response was even worse, which is another way of saying "internet flamewars escalate".
>especially when you're doing it in a dishonest attempt to make British law seem better.
I don't think he was trying to make British copyright law seem better; at least, I didn't read that into the post.
But on a wider scale, they are both also some of the most successful and free countries that have ever existed, and clearly have better human rights records than, for example, Northn Korea, Sudan or Zimbabwe.
But I can sort of see how people would form this opinion of life in the UK based on internet hyperbole.
No real news here, just some silly politicians trying to show muscle, which will ultimately fail and be irrelevant.
I agree the law is stupid and ill thought out and puts the whole idea of innocent until proven guilty out the window, but technology is hard for some people like unelected politicians to grasp. So they mess up, and make stupid laws.
Meanwhile, people just sidestep and make the laws useless and irrelevant.
Well they might have to change their username, or just never visit it, ...
It's not necessarily the case that it will fail. The current government uses laws with enabling clauses that are triggered by statutory instruments. Some of these laws include the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill (which allows wiretapping by authorised authorities) where authorised authorities were extended from the police to local authorities - who use it to spy on people to make sure they're managing bins properly. Another one is the Serious Organised Crime and Policing Act (SOCPA) which even the head of the association of chief police officers (ACPO) has said was excessive - it allows bailiffs to forcably enter your home and remove your goods before a hearing or trial and to sieze all your property once arrested.
My own personal favourite is the terrorism act, which introduced stop and search if police suspect things that may lead to a terrorist act. People get stop and searched at football matches, on their way to work and so on regardless of suspicion of terrorism. These things are all evil and all believed to be irrelevant but still got through. This is no different.
Surely the same argument could be said for any law? Accuse your neighbor of murder, accuse a competitor of money laundering, etc etc.
idk. Things always sound worse when people moan about them on the internet. They'll affect a tiny handful of people. It's more about the government making news stories and appearing "tough on X" rather than anything else.
I've never been stop+searched. :(
I'm going to go out on a limb here and posit that internet start-ups generally do less well without internet access.