"If you are a subscriber then the Digital Economy Act means we will have to pass on copyright infringement reports we get about your IP addresses; count those reports; and maybe take measures to block or restrict your internet service. If you are a communications provider or service provider we do not have to do any of those things as they only apply to subscribers."
Although it's worth noting this ISP doesn't require you to have unsecured wifi to be a communications provider: "A communications provider is anyone that is providing a communications service to anyone else, whether other people in their house or office, visitors wanting to check their email"
Sounds like just about anyone qualifies as long as they have a wifi network and go to the effort of telling their ISP they're a "communications provider".
On a related subject, does the bill specify audit and logging requirements for ISPs? I would at least like to know that the bits of data that are turning people into criminals are treated with the same respect as credit card information. Also, it seems to me that it would make a profitable business to setup an premium ISP advertising that they keep the minimal records required under law.
Could this also apply to someone running a Tor node on their network?
Tor is a big problem. It gives you anonymity, but, it still requires someone to forward your traffic, or multiple forward hops. You really need a proxy dedicated server like what The Pirate Bay has (you pay for it) which does not keep logs. Otherwise everything is incredibly slow. And I mean 56k speeds slow or worse.
Sorry, I was considering whether running a your own Tor proxy gives you some degree of immunity from prosecution rather than suggesting sending your own torrent traffic out through some other poor souls network connection.
This one of those legal logic puzzles that geeks love to do, but that lawyers roll their eyes at.
He uses a series of statutes to show that if you have public wifi you exist in a legal gray are between subscriber and service provider, and therefore you can't be monitored by your ISP or held accountable for copyright infringement. Good luck with that.
I didn't read this as an exercise as avoiding accountability for copyright infringement, I read it as a thought exercise that picks apart the Digital Economy Bill for the joke that it is.
I would like to fill the House of Commons with all those who voted for the bill and have someone read out said thought exercise to see how many of them remotely understand it.
Do you read the Hansard? Read the comments by Lord Whitty as per the digital economy bill. Ministers/Lords are making the points we want discussed, however in a lot of cases they are ignored due to the power of the whip.
I found myself thinking that too, but unlike some typical logic puzzle situations the underlying events seem sound as well. If you really do provide free public wifi access (from your house or a cafe), how does the law handle random peoples' illegal downloads? I know that in some cases, since they can't be identified the buck stops with you. But you'd be treated much less severely given that you might not be the person causing the harm...
I don't think the buck would stop with you (I think it's a legally grey area still) BUT your opening up yourself to inconvenience if it's used for something outright illegal - because your computers will end up being seized to establish if it was you or not.
And then there's the potential personal guilt of having facilitated someone committing a crime (I guess that is an individual thing but some would feel it)
Lawyers roll their eyes at things like this not necessarily because they think so-and-so is being a smart-ass but because they've learned to understand why a particular law is put in place and who paid for it to be put there. In this case the political and legal establishment have decided they are going to do the bidding of copyright kingpins and this law is just a tool to help them do that. Any judge (or magistrate as the case may be) will throw this kind of crap out because loopholes and the like are for rich shitpokes and corporations, not average citizens with enough time on their hands to pick apart poorly written legislation.
At least in the US, Law is really defined by court precedents, not by some stupid wording.
This is a good thing. Imagine a "Don't murder anyone" law. Without a court to decide what that actually means, I could argue that if I put a timer on a bomb, I didn't murder anyone - the bomb did the killing, and I didn't even trigger it directly. How is a bullet any different except that the delay is shorter? Dumbass didn't get out of the way, I say. No different than someone standing in the middle of a highway. The english language isn't like a programming language - its remarkably open to interpretation as to meaning, hence the need for courts to define what the law means through actual examples.
But the statutes very specifically cover the cases above with wording like "took action to deliberately cause the death of another".
The courts have made the definition even stricter, by allowing things like the death penalty and abortion. Although the individuals involved in those acts deliberately caused the death of someone, it doesn't count as murder.
How can anyone be expected to obey the law if it is not absolutely clear about what your obligations are? Overly general laws that the courts can deal with "later" are a grave danger to society.
Along with following those excellent instructions, you can make it even more rock solid:
If you have rights to register your address as a business then you can easily do this through your own limited company. Make yourself the company secretary and give yourself 1 share of stock. If you are on BT (or similar with a business internet plan), you can easily switch to a business account - which is usually the same price. With BT they automatically enable your new business hub as open on the BT Openzone (Disable it, and unsecure your wifi). Register with companies house with your SIC code as 64200 (Telecommunications). You should be good to go.
I followed the TPB trial,and I have read some things about Irwin Schiff, and what I've seen is exactly what you are saying. Even though some people find loopholes that should allow them to do X, the courts simply dismiss the loopholes as if they weren't there. Ultimately, those who are closest to the enforcement of the laws, make the laws, it's not the the politicians, it's the police. Do not misunderstand me, politicians do make the laws, but what I am trying to say is that it's not the politicians who will interpre them or enforce them, the ultimate responsability to enforce a law falls on the police, if they fail to enforce a certain law, it might aswell not exist. Law is force.
Richard Elmore wrote in 1980: "The emergence of implementation as a subject for policy analysis coincides closely with the discovery by policy analysts that decisions are not self-executing. Analysis of the policy choices matters very little if the mechanisms for implementing those choices is poorly understood. In answering the question, 'What percentage of the work of achieving a desired governmental action is done when the preferred analytic alternative has been identified?' Allison estimated that, in the normal case, it was about 10 percent, leaving the remaining 90 percent in the realm of implementation."
If sanity always prevailed, you would be completely correct. In the real world, however, I've seen the courts take positions that are prima facie insane to anybody who's not a lawyer (and even to some lawyers).
I'm not 100% sure of my own status. I use bethere.co.uk (now part of O2), but I'm a Be Pro customer, which means I can provide access to anyone merely located at my endpoint, rather than residing at my endpoint (which is the case for non-Pro customers). Similarly, as a Pro customer I could be running a business (not just a sole trader) and using this connection as the means for employees to access the web. Doesn't that mean that I'm technically more in the line of provider than subscriber?
FWIW, I run two APs, one with WPA2 and one open. The open one is routed through another machine (DNS / DHCP / etc. server) which keeps track of mappings between IP leases and MAC addresses, but doesn't do any accounting or snooping other than that.
Even if this is legally correct, I expect that they will close down this loophole within a few years. The effects of the Digital Economy Bill have yet to be felt, but one thing that seems certain is that potentially a lot of erroneous allegations or disconnections could take place. Perhaps a more proactive way to deal with this is to build up a legal defence fund for people wrongly accused of copyright violation and to vigorously contest such cases.
In the longer term, and assuming that current trends continue, aggressive enforcement of copyrights will be very good for creative commons media and free/open source software.
It seems unlikely that anyone will be able to buy service as a communications provider in the same fine-grained quantities in which a subscriber can buy it. I don't know how pricing is generally structured for ISPs, but I would guess that if you're buying service as a communications provider you are assumed to have at least x number of customers, and will be charged accordingly.
"It seems unlikely that anyone will be able to buy service as a communications provider in the same fine-grained quantities in which a subscriber can buy it"
It is simple. Assuming the Ts&Cs don't define you as a subscriber, you simply write an official letter to your ISP stating that you are purchasing their service as a communications provider and not a subscriber and that upon receipt of the letter they acknowledge their notification of this.
Pop it in the post with registered mail (so you have proof they received it) and you are done.
Whether it stands up in court, though, is another thing...
"If you are a subscriber then the Digital Economy Act means we will have to pass on copyright infringement reports we get about your IP addresses; count those reports; and maybe take measures to block or restrict your internet service. If you are a communications provider or service provider we do not have to do any of those things as they only apply to subscribers."
Although it's worth noting this ISP doesn't require you to have unsecured wifi to be a communications provider: "A communications provider is anyone that is providing a communications service to anyone else, whether other people in their house or office, visitors wanting to check their email"
Sounds like just about anyone qualifies as long as they have a wifi network and go to the effort of telling their ISP they're a "communications provider".