I’ve been meaning to write about the Digital economy bill for a while, but life has been getting in the way and it just keeps getting sillier. Plus of course loads of other people are providing excellent commentary faster than I was getting round to it, but I’ve never let being late to the party stop me before.
The things that are wrong with this bill are almost too numerous to mention, it’s obviously written with either no technical understanding at all, or with the deliberate intent to be wide open to abuse. The current government does such things so often I’ve given up trying to work out if they’re deviously evil or just incompetent or even some odd mix of the two. The latest silliness added to this bill oddly doesn’t come from the government benches but from Lib Dem peers who want to be able to force ISPs to block “access to specified online locations“. Now not only is this silly it’s pointless. (it may be worth noting that the Lib Dem peer concerned gets money from a law firm specialising in copyright protection.
It’s pointless because it’s very easily circumvented, the internet was designed to work around points of failure. So if they block a site people will still be able to get to it using proxies, VPNs, the TOR network or various other methods. A lot of work has been done in solving the problem of blocked sites to deal with far more oppressive and organised regimes than this. Plus of course such banned sites will get more publicity than before they were blocked, as any number of banned lists in the past will testify.
It’s silly because very many “online locations” share an IP address with other “online locations”, so the usual way to block access to a site is to block the IP address. This will have huge amounts of collateral damage as such a block will also block access to all the other sites at that address. Think of it as closing down an entire shopping centre just because there’s a single dodgy shop tucked away in the corner. I imagine that the innocent sites blocked in such a manner might be a bit miffed and contemplate taking some action against the ISP’s so blocking them. Depending on how the required court orders are worded it gets sillier still. If the order says block “copyrighttheft.anonymong.org” then the blocked site can get out of that by just changing the name to “copyrighttheft2.anonymong.org” and if they make it more general and block “anonymong.org” well a new domain costs two quid.
Of course there is a way they could block a site by name and not by IP address, all they’d need to do is look in depth at your traffic, rather than just where it’s going, to see what it’s actually doing. Then they could tell which actual site on a shared server you wanted and only stop requests going to the banned site. This is called deep packet inspection and BT are currently in court about it – but on the upside it would cause the ISPs to have records of everywhere you’ve visited, and with only a tiny bit of feature creep what you’ve done on all of those sites. Such transaction records of course being subject to other legislation which requires the ISP to keep them for seven years just in case the government needs them – to stop terrorists of to protect the children or something.
All of this will of course have a cost, particularly as the bill now says that “the Court shall order the service provider to pay the copyright owner’s costs of the application unless there were exceptional circumstances justifying the service provider’s failure to prevent access despite notification by the copyright owner.“. Whilst this cost will be passed onto the end user pushing up your internet bill, the ISPs are also going to minimise the cost by just blocking things on notification rather than waiting for a court order they have to pay for. Ever since Lawrence Godfrey* ISPs have pretty much had to remove/block content on notification this will just make that situation worse. Though I strongly suspect that where someone such as Guido to ask that the BBC be blocked for violating his copyright** he’d probably not get such a helpful response. Ultimately the aim of this clause is to allow large corporate copyright holders to trample all over the net at no cost to themselves and with little or no risk.
For a more legal focused review of this clause you could go worse than reading panGloss‘s take on the matter.
I may attempt to tackle some of the other lunacy in this bill later.
Many thanks to Freya for passing on most of the links referenced above.
* Yeah, sorry about that.
** It’s worth remembering that by default you own the copyright to anything you create – without having to do anything. If some corporate site, or spotty oik in college nicks your graphic/music/content you could in theory get them blocked under this bill (good luck with that though if it’s not a spotty oik in college). This potentially makes this bill an incredible denial of service tool.
