Digital Economy Bill

[anywebsite]

signed it

 

but my personal prediction is that the reply will say people will only be disconnected as a last resort and then only temporarily and there is a right of appeal so the government are going to ignore you

 

the petition failed to state that the innocent are going to be punished for the crimes of others, that they will have warning letters to intimidate them, their bandwidth throttled, their internet traffic subjected to packet shaping and as a last resort they will be temporarily disconnected and all this will happen before they can appeal and even then without proof it is likely the appeal will fail

 

good idea though, is it possible to update the wording of the petition ?

 

It's not possible to change the wording of any petition once it's been signed, especially when over 35,000 people have signed it.

 

If you look under the 'More details from petition creator', then it does mention those things.

 

You could create another petition about different aspects of the bill, but it's likely to get rejected if it's too similar to an existing petition.

 

I found a 'contact us' page for the government department responsible for this bill, it has a contact form for each of the government ministers in that department - http://www.bis.gov.uk/Contact

[anywebsite]

oh he's getting one, drafting it now

 

businesses and public wifi have the possibility of using equipment with different capabilities to prevent users downloading illegally, they can monitor their own traffic, they can block websites, in short they can act like an ISP but home users generally don't have this capability

 

it's still an unfair imposition on public providers though, a bill passes and st*rbucks price for a mochachocalattegrande has to go up to pay for the extra equipment and staff to run it or council tax goes up to fund the extra equipment and staff training for libraries free wifi and ultimately it's because the rights holder doesn't want to change a business model that allows them to make a product and sell it for orders of magnitude more than it cost

 

It isn't possible to prevent users from downloading illegal content & that doesn't matter who you are, it's not technically feasible. Even China can't do it, never mind some cafe owner that provides it as a service for their customers. The only option for public wifi hotspot owners is to turn it off, or wait until they get disconnected.

 

It's going to create extra unnecessary costs for ISPs too, create more barriers to entry into that market, reduce competition & hold back speeds. They'll need to install expensive equipment that allows them to monitor & throttle individual customers. This is all to enable them to ban & throttle paying customers.

 

So it'll put the price up & the quality down, for everybody's internet connection.

 

Then they plan to block international websites hosting copyrighted content, it's so broad that it could mean anything. It gives the government the power to block any overseas website they want, with little oversight. Sites like Wikileaks would clearly be covered by this law.

[esme]

reply sent

Dear XXXXX,

 

Thank you for your reply, however it has not allayed my concerns.

 

This bill will punish the innocent while allowing the guilty to roam free as it is focussed entirely on modifying the behaviour of the internet subscriber with warnings and punishments, while totally ignoring the person committing the crime, admittedly this may be the same person but no distinction is made for the cases where it is not. It is tantamount to a burglar breaking in to my home and me being sent to jail because the burglar cannot be located, a plainly ridiculous situation I hope you'll agree.

 

Further to your assurance that there will be a full debate of the bill, the bill comes up for a second reading in the house in the 6th April 2010, then there needs to be a committee stage, a report stage, third reading, a consideration of amendments and finally, assuming the bill has not been dismissed, a royal assent. Given that Parliament will be dealing with many other matters at the same time as all this activity on this one bill, that Parliament must be dissolved at midnight on Monday 10th May 2010 unless the government choose to dissolve it at an earlier time and assuming the intent is to make this bill law before this happens, do you honestly feel there is sufficient time to allow for a full debate, change of wording and further full debate of the changes to hopefully deal with the issues raised in this bill in the intervening time ?

 

And if not, then would it not be sensible to postpone further activity on this bill until after an election is held so sufficient time can be given to debating it's issues, rather than push the bill through in the extremely limited time available and effectively curtail the democratic process of debate in order to put a flawed bill on the statute books ?

 

Once this bill becomes an act it will be much harder to correct flaws.

 

On your point that the language used is standard parliamentary language, might I suggest that using more precise terminology could decrease the number of letters you receive from people like myself, who become alarmed at the vagueness and interpretability of such phraseology in acts of Parliament. Phrases such as these have allowed town councils to abuse anti terrorist legislation such as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and allowed them to impose surveillance on ordinary citizens to ensure they were putting their bins out on the correct day, that they actually lived in an appropriate catchment area for the local school or for other trivial purposes for which the act was not intended. Even now the government has not clarified or amended the legislation it has simply handed out a guideline for it's use, guidelines can be ignored, legislation cannot.

 

You state the power to cut off a subscriber has to be justified in a court by a rights owner, the bill does not make this clear so my apologies for missing this, perhaps this could be clarified in the bill before it becomes an act to prevent future misunderstandings. However will this court procedure also be required before initiating the other technical measures available such as bandwidth throttling, packet shaping and site blocking ? Or are these measures left in the hands of OFCOM to decide ? Further will the subscriber be able to have representation at these proceedings ? Who will pay for such representation should the subscriber be found innocent of any wrongdoing and will they be compensated for any "technical measures" already undertaken ?

 

Your point that "anyone who had there connection being used by someone else would also be able to demonstrate that they were not in possession of any illegal material", how do you propose this be achieved by the subscriber ? Just because it cannot be found does not mean it does not exist, how would I, for example, prove the downloaded material is not in my possession ? Under this legislation the subscriber has to prove their innocence rather than the rights holder prove their guilt, proving innocence is a much more difficult thing to do than proving guilt, what has happened to the concepts of "reasonable doubt" and "innocent until proven guilty" ?

 

And as I stated previously there are already mechanisms for dealing with copyright theft via the courts system, new legislation for this should not be necessary, if the pre existing legislation is insufficient then it should be amended rather than a new bill drafted

 

Attempting to block access to websites is doomed to failure, there are already methods to bypass such measures, for example the haystack protocol is currently used to allow the Iranian people to bypass site blocking put in place by their government, this protocol could easily be adapted by illegal down and uploaders rendering site blocking completely ineffectual ( ref - http://blog.austinheap.com/how-you-can-help-iran-20-haystack/ ). Alternatively illegal downloaders could create virtual servers using methods similar to that used by the pirate bay website to decentralise the location of illegal content, they did not actually host the copyright information they maintained a list that allowed illegal downloaders to find it, as it was spread all over the internet and had no central location, turning the list itself into something that has no central location is a trivial exercise. If this technique is used then as long as a single illegal downloader is on line the list would be available to all, there would be no site to block in this case. These are just two ways I can think of, off the top of my head, to defeat site blocking and I'm not particularly clever or devious.

 

You may not consider the hacking of personal WiFi to be a concern, however I disagree, looking at the available networks within range of my laptop I can see half a dozen signals including my own, two of these are clearly identified as connections to Sky and one is a BT HomeHub connected to a BT broadband line, it is highly likely from my knowledge of the local area that these three are high capacity cable connections with high bandwidth capability, probably capable for example of delivering on demand HDTV services, these are extremely attractive targets for hackers for the following reasons

 

1 - The subscriber will not be in control of the security settings and they are unlikely to change.

2 - It is likely the access key follows a pattern which will make hacking the signal easier.

3 - It is highly unlikely that they have MAC address filtering to limit clients, but as I stated previously that will merely slow down and not stop a hacker.

4 - The high bandwidth capability would allow the upload or download of significant quantities of copyright material in a relatively short time even over a slower WiFi connection, more than enough to attract the attention of a rights holder. For example, in around an hour I can legally download a Ubuntu distribution equivalent to an entire audio CD using my WiFi signal and relatively slow broadband connection, however using a high capacity cable connection I could reduce that to a matter of minutes even with WiFi between me and the cable connection.

 

Perhaps you were unaware of how much material can be transferred in a relatively short time in such a manner, I assure you it is significant and so is the threat of an illegal downloader taking advantage of a subscribers WiFi signal while the subscriber remains ignorant of the activity and would be unable to prevent it even if they were aware.

 

I do note with some relief that the incredibly broad powers granted the secretary of state to direct the disconnection of subscribers for "any other reason" that existed in prior incarnations of the bill has been removed, I will wait for the secondary legislation, before commenting on any powers they may be granted and what circumstances they may be used.

 

This bill still contains major flaws, it still directs warnings and punishments at the subscriber rather than the party performing the illegal act, it grants unnecessary extra powers to OFCOM and there is pre existing legislation which covers copyright theft which should be amended rather than producing a new bill to the same purpose.

 

Yours Sincerely...

 

will keep you posted

[anywebsite]

Good letter, I'll write mine tomorrow.

[esme]

being debated now http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=6263&player=windowsmedia not that there's any actual debate, the government seem to be saying there has been considerable debate so it doesn't need any more

 

and the house is practically empty

 

wtf do we have politicians for if they don't turn up and debate the damn issues

[Fivetide]

there was a debtate on constitutional reform without prior scrutiny by parliament a couple of months ago, ten members turned up. the bill time was guillotined (ie passed).

 

and the election's being fought on whether there should be a rise in NI or VAT. ooh.

 

westminster troughsnorters ftw. again.

[esme]

I'm not seeing my MP's face anywhere in the house

 

--EDIT--

 

one hour in I haven't heard the word "WiFi" once

 

--EDIT--

 

one hour 38 minutes from start of viewing and WiFi finally gets a mention, though not home WiFi, this was university halls of residence, internet cafe's and so on

 

apparently our lords and masters are unaware that home users already have WiFi or faster connections than 2Mb/s

[Tony]

Hmm, how organising demonstrators to go to the homes of Alan Johnson and Peter Mandleson and have a mass "let's sit outside on stripey deck chairs looking like we might be hacking their WiFi but they can't really tell one way or the other even though we're not" event?

[Funky_Gibbon]

David Cairns certainly missed the point when he described his constituent's point about the web blocking being like censorship akin to Iran and China as "bonkers". Whilst the legislation might not be intended for something as draconian as that, it wouldn't be the first time that legislation introduced to combat a specific thing was later used in a manner it wasn't intended for. Anti-terrorism legislation for example.

[anywebsite]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/playlive/bbc_parliament/

 

Watching the debate now, it's a bit pathetic, hopefully this doesn't get passed in washup.