Why the DE Act is not in breach of EU law?

I have finally finished my summary of the Judicial Review of the Digital Economy Act. [here]. I have posted it on this blog backdated it to 21st April 2010, since that is the day after the judgement was delivered, and close to when I started it.  It’s a hard read, and I am not sure my summary is much easier. It’s clearly taken a long time to read the judgement and write my review in hours taken and from when I started, for that I apologise. It doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading.

The ruling states that,

  1. the DE Act is not a technical regulation and thus does not need to be notified to the EU Commission as part of the legislative process, although the subsidiary Ofcom regulations will.
  2. the DE Act does not conflict with the EU’s E-Commerce Directive because the ‘mere conduit’ defence is not absolute, it does not require ‘general monitoring’, and copyright protection measures are excluded from the domain of the ECD.
  3. the DE Act does not conflict with the EU or UK Privacy and Data Protection laws because copyright enforcement measures are permitted processing measures under the Law.
  4. the DE Act does not conflict with the EU’s Authorisation Directive since the AD does not prohibit amendment or supplementary regulation, however it does invalidate some aspects of the proposed cost sharing order.
  5. the claimants fail to prove that the DE Act and its parliamentary passage was sufficiently disproportionate to warrant being struck down i.e. that intellectual property rights are balanced against the rights of ISSPs and citizens by Parliament.

The ruling made no comments on the proportionality of any “Technical Measures” since they have not been drafted, agreed or promulgated.

The court made no comment on whether a law requiring “careful balance” on the issues of “fundamental rights” should be passed using the unprecedented accelerated procedures of House of Commons’ Wash-up. This process meant that the possibly 100’s of hours of review time spent by elected politicians was avoided. (The Commons spent under 10 hours considering the Bill.)

Judge Parker refused the claimants the right to appeal, but this has now been granted on all grounds except that the DE Act breaches the E-Commerce Directive by imposing a duty of general monitoring.  This was reported by the Guardian [here] and Linx [here]. …

The Digital Divide in the UK

While researching another blog article, I was pointed at the ONS’ Statistical Bulletin, “Internet Access – Households and Individuals, 2011“. This reports that 77% (up from 73% last year) of UK Households have internet access, and 79% of internet users think they can protect their privacy. (Yeah right!)

They ask those who do not have the internet “Why not?” and the reasons are, price of equipment, lack of skills or lack of need. I’d be interested in those who find the cost of connection too high? …

Some thoughts on censorship and the internet

Earlier this week, the MPAA and BT returned to court to agree subsiduary terms around the court injunction that BT is to use its Cleanfeed technology to block the newsbin2 web site. In considering the events in court and the judgement, I found an article I had written but not posted about the case and the politics, including the governments announcement to back the Hargreaves Review and Ofcom’s reticence in pursuing the use of the Digitial Economy Act’s web site blocking powers.

I have now published the article, called Censoring the Internet as at the 7th August, which is roughly when I finished it. …

Judicial Review of the Digital Economy Act

BT & Talk Talk, the two largest UK internet Service Providers (ISP) went to court towards the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011 to obtain a judicial review of the Digital Economy Act, a law passed in the dying days of the last Labour Government. This law is designed to place duties on internet service providers to act on the instruction and on behalf of copyright holders and to authorise Web site blocking. On the 20th April, Mr. Justice Parker delivered his judgement.

This article is a personal summary of that ruling. The judgement is awfully hard to read and understand. I have an economics degree and nine years of Civil Service training! Actual quotes should be obvious, other representations are in my words, not those of the judgement. In some places I have got lost in the text of the judgement and while my summary is much shorter than the original, it remains pretty long. The impatient or easily satisfied can skip straight to the summary. …

Why did Facebook eclipse Yahoo?

Yahoo had a web site, e-mail and photo sharing. It didn’t have micro-blogging, nor was it able to leverage the market- and mind-share of Facebook’s initial applications publishers.

It was self-obssessed and under takeover threat, but it had great brand value, and most people would accept that it is run be people that will take customer privacy more seriously; their business model treats their users as customers, not commodity (eyeballs).

Yahoo is not a secret garden either, which should make it more attractive, you can use it to share with non-yahooers. Is it just that the deal, “Your privacy in exchange for e-mail and micro-blogging”, is worth it? Admittedly, it’s initial growth was driven by teenager adoption, but why take up with Facebook and not Yahoo?

Yahoo was almost there. Interesting how close you can be and miss! …

Get your own facts

I bumped into Joan Ruddock, the Labour Party incumbent candidate for Lewisham Deptford last Tuesday, so of course I asked her about the DE Bill. She listened and was interested in my views and invited me to continue the conversation. Just goes to show, for those to whom this is important, you need to find out your candidates views. It may not be good enough to read the party manifestos or study their votes. I know of several MPs who didn’t vote on the 3rd reading but who clearly oppose it although I can’t say why they didn’t vote. There were 23 Labour MPs, 18 Lib Dems and 5 Tories who voted against the third reading. …

Internet on the move

In which David first comes across Orange’s adult content filters….

I moved into a rented flat last weekend, it was all a bit exciting because our original plan had been to drive to London with our stuff on the Saturday and drive home on Sunday. We wisely decided not to; the journey to the station, normally 20 minutes took two hours because of the snow. Anyway we got there and moved in. Rented accomodation doesn’t include either phone or broadband so I spoke to BT to get the phones in and since they have lead times it meant that I was without a WiFi LAN at home for the week. It hasn’t been that long since we first got broadband at home but its been very noticeable not having it. …

Data Centre Economies of Scale

Data Centre Economies of Scale

At the Waters:Power09, last week, Bob Giffords argued there are three ‘gravitational’ forces leading to the mega data centres and cloud computing.

  • There’s too much data to move, it needs to stay where its created.
  • Intra system & total latency is still a problem, and hence systems are best co-located with the data.
  • He argues that energy management is a gravitational issue.
 …

Some good news from BT

Did you know that if you authorise your BT Home Hub as a BT FON server, you get 500 BT Openzone minutes/month and the hub will throttle any external users if you need the bandwidth yourself. 500 minutes is more than I buy for my phone, and my phone can connect to it using WiFi, to extend my internet minutes. That’s a piece of good news, although it was harder than I’d want to find it out. …