ICANN'T becomes ICANN?

While I'm here a quick comment on the big news of the week, namely ICANN's rather unexpected decision to open up the top level domain name (TLd) space to auction.

"A complete overhaul of the way in which people navigate the internet has been given the go-ahead in Paris. The net's regulator, Icann, voted unanimously to relax the strict rules on so-called "top-level" domain names, such as .com or .uk.

The decision means that companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names. A second proposal, to introduce domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts, was also approved. "

Reaction to this is as ever on the Internet wonderfully polarised. The bloggerverse and the academics have mostly gone "whoopee!". If I want to bid to set up a .pangloss Tld and I can convince ICANN I can make money out of it by subletting the domain to my many fans :) , why not? The same attitude to internationalised domain names can be seen - not surprising as these do seem fantastically sensible given that , as Emily Taylor of Nominet puts it, ""At the moment, there are one-and-a-half billion people online and four-and-a-half billion people for whom the Roman script just means nothing."

However a rather different set of responses can be detected from lawyers responsible for policing company brands online. To them this just means that instead of buying up - say - nike.com, .co.uk, .biz etc etc - and buying it in English, Cyrillic and Mandarin kanji - they now have to think of buying up unlimited nos of possible permutations, with the possibility of more coming along everyday.

Pangloss thinks the corporate lawyers need to adapt to the new world and that ICANN have got it right. We don't live in the world anymore where the fact that someone has got nike.pangloss tarnishes the brand. We do live in a world where people invariably use Google to look up brands rather than merely typing in imagined URLs (and if a brand doesn't have its legit site at the top of the Google search list then it ought to be sacking some of its brand protection team.).
Furthermore mightn't it be easier once Nike has (as they will) set up their own Tld, for the few non-Google users to to guess us.nike rather than nike.com (or .us or .org or .biz??)

Yes cybersquatting, typosquatting etc still will matter in the "established" Tlds, notably .com and the relevant national country codes. But the whole point of massively expanding the "real estate" of the domain name space should be to create more opportunity for everyone - which in itself should diminish the need for "legitimate" domain name overlap, leaving the field free for the URDP to dispose of the unabashed non-legitimate cyber squatters.

Facebook and privacy

You might be interested to know that my chapter on Facebook, social networking sites and privacy (with Ian Brown of the OII) is now available as a pre print on SSRN. This pretty much crystallises many of the talks on SNSs and facebook etc I've done in the last year or so.

See
Edwards, Lilian and Brown, Ian, "Data Control and Social Networking: Irreconcilable Ideas?" (June, 20 2008). Law and the Future of Data Control Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1148732

THis chapter will appear in Matwyshwn A ed Harboring Data: Information Security, Law and the Corporation (Stanford University Press, 2009).

Apologies for lack of meaty comment - afraid all my efforts are currently going in to the 3rd edition of Law and the Internet which will deo volente be with you in the autumn.

Also, remeber to get in your GikIII 3 submissions!! We've already had some wonderful abstracts involving virtual worlds and games theory, Dr Who and IP rights, autonomous agents as slaves in Roman law etc etc - but we need more!!

The Blip Attention Effect

Is Google making us stupid? Good question, it seems to me..

(Vuia Ray Corrigan)

Stephen Fry on the BC

Cor. Absolutely spiffing essay fromStephen Fry on the future of public sector broadcasting in a digital world.

I do rather love this introductory para on Fry's longtime affection for the BBC.

"The week before we moved, the BBC started a new drama, starring William Hartnell. An old man, whose name appeared to be Grandfather or the Doctor, had a police phone box of the kind we saw in the street all the time in those days. It turned out to be a magical and unimaginably wonderful time machine. My brother and I watched this drama in complete amazement. The first ever episode of Doctor Who. I had never been so excited in all my life. A whole week to wait to watch the next instalment. Never have seven days crawled so slowly by, for all that they involved a complicated house move from Buckinghamshire to Norfolk. A week later, in that new house, my brother and I turned on the good old television set in its new sitting room, ready to watch Episode 2. The TV had been damaged in transit and was never to work again. We missed that episode and nothing that has transpired in my life since has ever, or could ever, make up for that terrible, terrible disappointment. There is an empty space inside me that can never be filled. It is amazing neither of us were turned into psychopathic serial killers from that moment."

Norms for Social Networking :)

Rhodri Marsden of the Independent's CyberClinic has posted his own rather amusing take on Debrett's advice on the etiquette of social networking and where they get it wrong. I agree almost wholly, especially re not mixing business and pleasure (she says, looking ruefully at her Facebook profile which mixes the likes of Lessig and Zittrain with lots of skiffy weirdos and her 21 year old niece currently training to join the Israeli army. Hmmm... )

It's amazing..

.. what you see on TV these days.

The local news just had this story about a shopping mall in Portsmouth where mobile tracking technology by Path Engineering has been installed - which I have tracked to this story from the Register.

"By installing receivers around a shopping centre the company can pick up communication between handsets and base stations, enabling them to track shoppers to within a metre or two - enough to spot the order in which shops are visited. Two UK shopping centres are already using the tech, with three more deploying in the next few months."

As far as one can tell, the tracking is completely non-identifying ; the shopping centre and path both do not know personal mobile phone numbers nor corresponding user names. The TV report showed predictable reactions: why weren't we told; I don't like it; I've got nothing to hide; etc.

So what do people think? Despite the obvious knee jerk reaction, as the info is completely non attributable to identified individuals, I really can't see a problem. You could get exactly the same results (at greater cost) by posting tellers at each shop or destination in the shopping centre to do counts all day, every day - would anyone object to that on privacy grounds?

(Hmm - I suppose yes, if they could identify the shoppers. Technology actually has the privacy advantage here of being blind. Here we're pre supposing CCTV isn't used in some way to identify the mobile shoppers - which despite what El Reg suggests would be extremely difficult to arrange in real time.)

I think it's important here to seperate technophobic squeamishness from real privacy concerns. (This is also not like Phorm where anonymity had been artificially imposed and could easily be "broken". Here the mobile tracking system simply doesn't know your personal phone number or your name.)

Of course you need to seperate it too from a consent-based tracking system which can be abused by forced or mistaken consent to reval significant personal data, like Sniff. Which I'm sure everyone else has blogged enough about by now.


And completely off-topic, in the Guardian today, I nearly choked on my post-swim coffee at the ostensible discovery that gay men and heterosexual women (and straight men and lesbians)apparently have similar shaped brains. If true this could destroy several decades of careful academic work on cultural construction :)

And now Newsnight is trying to tell me that Obama will be made or broken by Internet bloggers. Possibly time to turn off the TV and write some more of the third edition of Law and the Internet instead :)

GikIII 3 is Go!

Via Technollama, I'm very happy to announce..

GIKIII
Oxford Internet Institute
September 24-25, 2008

We are glad to announce the third edition of GikII (appropriately renamed GikIII), which will take place 24-25 September 2008 at the Oxford Internet Institute in, errr... Oxford!

GikII is so cutting edge that it is the nano-blade of workshops, so expect all sorts of challenging papers, tenuous legal connections, l33t powerpoint and keynote skillz, uber-geekery, and a healthy dose of lolcatz. Previous GikIIs explored Facebook privacy settings before privacy had become fashionable; it looked at the legal issues in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, anime, lolcatz, fandom, virtual property and tattoos.

The call for papers

If you would like to participate, email your abstract of no more than 500 words. This should be sent to either l.edwards@soton.ac.uk or a.guadamuz@ed.ac.uk by July 15 2008. We will confirm acceptances by August 1. Abstracts may be accepted after this date depending on whether the workshop is full. Numbers will be limited so book now!

No n00bs allowed.

The Strange Case of the Moral Panic That Didn't Bark

.. or tae see ourselves as others see us..

Via my colleague Mark Telford, this abstract from Philip Jenkins, a criminologist.


Why Do Some Social Issues Fail to Detonate Moral Panics?
Philip Jenkins*
* Department of History and Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State University, 407 Weaver, University Park, PA 16802, USA; jpj1@psu.edu

Abstract
A ‘moral panic’ is characterized by such themes as the novelty of a particular menace, its sudden explosive growth, and the menace it poses both to accepted moral standards and to vulnerable groups and individuals. Some problems, however, apparently have all the features that would generate a self-feeding media frenzy, and, yet, they do not do so. I will explain this absence of panic by examining the issue of internet child pornography. The failure to construct the problem in ‘panic’ terms reflects the technological shortcomings of law-enforcement agencies, which force them to interpret available data according to familiar forms of knowledge, rather than comprehending or publicizing new forms of deviant organization. This lack of awareness then conditions the nature of political investigation and media coverage.
http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/azn016

Does anyone on this list NOT think there has been a moral panic over child pornography? In the US, the Time cover of 96, the CDA, the COPA, et al.... are we and the criminologists on different planets??

Facebook app privacy meltdown deja vu

..or beware! that Facebook app you just downloaded might be stealing your data and all of your friends!

Is this really still news? PG has said it at at least a dozen talks by now (most recently to Ofcom and the OxII).. however the BBC has helpfully written an app to prove the point, and it is a nice clip. Here's their clip.

Lessig 2.0

Pangloss had a highly enjoyable night out last night (indeed she has not totally yet recovered :) to see The Great Lawrence Lessig, who is apparently in Blighty for a few weeks, perform at the IET, giving the annual lecture of the Society for Computers and Law, on "Corruption 2.0". There was a slightly sparser attendance than one might have expected - perhaps because the august members of the SCL weren't too clear what the connection of corruption to cyberlaw, er, was. Neither was Pangloss (though like all true devotees of Larry, she knew of this volte face already because it had been announced on his blog) ; but any opportunity to see Our Greatest Living Forehead perform in his (not patented, but no doubt creative commons licensed) style of matching speech cadences to single word ppts, is too good to miss. Most of London's IT law royalty seem to have agreed, as they were out in force, with everyone to gossip to from Richard Susskind to Chris Reed to blog king Geeklawyer, and Lessig's own anointed heir Jonathan Zittrain (resting for a moment from his own current perpetual whirlwind of booklaunches.)

But enough of the court circular, what of the lecture itself? Well, lo, it turns out that Corruption 2.0 is not that distant a step from Cyberlaw 1.0 after all. Clearly, losing out on the US copyright term extension battle not only to ill informed Congressmen and greenback-handed lobbyists, but also to the presumably (?) better informed and less venal Supreme Court, has irritated Larry more than a little. His thesis is now that whereas Corruption 1.0 - old fashioned bribery - was down to self-interest taking precedence over good policies, Corruption 2.0 is more about ignorance than interest. Today's legislators don't make the right laws, says Lessig, not primarily because of lobbyists and campaign contributions - but because they simply don't understand the technologies well enough to get the law right to govern it. But if there is hope, it must lie, not with the proles as in 1984, but the geeks. Since Corruption 2.0 depends on political ignorance, the answer must be for the geeks - sorry, the digerati? the slashdotii? the technocracy? - to take to the political w0rld.

Now I'm sure this is just the campaigning tip of the iceberg of a much bigger plan, because Pangloss can see a few flaws in this analysis. For a start, in the US election on right now, it is pretty plain that the OTHER great cyberlaw issue of the day (after digital copyright) is indeed likely to be decided by oldfashioned er Patronage 1.0. It doesn't take a political expert to notice that one likely candidate in the election to come is backed financially by the telcos and has no truck with net neutrality - while the other doesn't, and has.

A second problem is that geeks in Pangloss's experience, love yakking about politics but rarely if ever seek office (or even a senior management job.) Nor are they natural baby-kissers and flesh-pressers, especially at the more Aspergers spectrum end of things. Geeks on the whole exercise influence as academics and industry CEOs, rather more than as political animals (in this country, Profs Ross Anderson and Richard Clayton come to mind. ) Perhaps this is really what Lessig actually meant - certainly he was very pleased with the UK Gower Report on IP. which was heavily influenced by academic "friends" and consultees, both before and after the initial consultation was published. The field of law and security - which Lessig also touched on - in the UK, has also recently benefited hugely from academic influence - it is well known the HL Report on Personal Internet Securityof last year owed a great debt to Richard Clayton (but has it actually made it to forming government policy? sadly, not yet). And Richard Susskind's work on courts automation and public sector data reuse has also been, though perhaps less obviously, influential.

At the root of Lessig's fascinating lecture was an unspoken, rather 50s scientificational question - who should rule us, the democratically elected, however foolish or easily lead, or the current meritocratic elite? Of course the situation is never that clear - if the choice is of rule by money, or rule by smarts, Pangloss knows which she takes. Interestingly, Hugh Beale, former English Law Commissioner and now again Prof of Law at Warwick,who gave the Bond Pearce lecture on the Draft European CFR at Southampton I wrote up a week or so back, mentioned in the course of questions, that in his view, an academic article, at just the right time, can make as much policy impact as a Law Commission report. Should we academics stay in our ivory towers and hope for our traditional delivery routes to influence Westminster, or should we storm it ourselves, as advisers if not representatives? So anyway, much food for thought (especially as London votes today on Red Ken vs Boris) and I'm sure the IT law blogosphere is full of consequent buzz today :)-

When all about are losing their's..

This is wonderful. Many moons ago Pangloss gave a paper, loosely on virtual property in online worlds, and used some analogies from personality rights cases featuring unauthorised uses of celebrity images. One fortunate synchronicity was that at the same time, Wendy Grossman, the tech journalist about town, asked her for some advice on the theft of - get this - a life size AI-equipped, animatronic head of Philip K Dick - the reality-bending deceased sf author - which had been programmed with the entirety of PKD's works in the hope it could give answers PKD himself might have while alive. My paper ended up being called, snazzily I thought : "Bring Me the Head of Philip K. Dick: New Forms of Virtual Property"

The head disappeared when its creator, David Hanson, accidentally left it on the overhead rack on an America West plane. Hanson subsequently sued AW for the loss of the head, worth c $350,000. Boing-Boing reports that the suit has just been dismissed in no uncertain manner in a hilarious judgment which is itself intensely self referential.

Am I time travelling, insane or just still in a coma? : ) Reality bites!

Ps this ties up rather well with advertising that I'll be giving an updated version of this talk in Exeter in May at the rather groovy looking Workshop on Virtual Worlds, May 20th, 2008 University of Exeter..
For further information, please contact: A.Harcourt@ex.ac.uk

The European Draft Common Frame of Reference (CFR)

Panloss went to a very interesting lecture yesterday by Hugh Beale of Warwick and formerly the English Law Commission on the publication of the first part of the European CFR project - namely the Draft CFR on Contract (CFRC).

What is the CRC and why should you care? This is a grand plan, which has in various forms been gathering momentum for many years, to distill principles out of the whole of European private law - as derived from the now 27 members of the EU - and create a kind of codified version of those principles. Naturally, given the differences not only between common (England, Ireland) and civil law (everyone else) not to mention linguistic, political and economic differences (the arrival of the Access countries has kind of complicated things:-) this has not been an easy task. One can tell how pleased Hugh Beale and his colleagues (including Eric Clive at Edinburgh, whom Pangloss also saw talking about this a few weeks back - and was very pleased to be given a copy of the Draft CFRC) are to finally show off the first fruit of their labours.

Is this going to impose a European Civil Law Code on you, me and my mum? No, in no uncertain terms. Although aspirational academic work on such a code is ongoing, it is recognised to be politically and probably legally impossible for the EC to take such a supranational stance. Instead the CFR will be used as a "toolbox" which can be explored for stuff like common EU definitions of key legal terms (like "damages" or "termination"); as a kind of model law which EC member states might adopt when reforming their law; and more controversially, as a model the EC might look to when it reforms its law. In many ways, the spur for the completion of this particular part of the CFR has been the EC's ongoing attampts to reform and modernise its consumer law - the so called Acquis, which is currently found in a multitude of Directives.

Still wondering why IT lawyers should be interested? Well one possible thing that might happen next is that the acdemic CFR may be turned into a more limited "political" CFR - espoused officially by the European Commission - which might become available (via an "optional instrument") as a kind of new extra legal system. Rather in the way that a contract cane be governed by, or arbitration can currently be decided under the "the law of the Vienna Convention", say, a business - Amazon say - might sell to all the inhabitants of the EC with the contract, and any dispute arising, governed by the "law of the CFR".

THis is where it gets exciting. At present, one of the big problems about cross border selling is having to worry about the consumer protection laws of every country you sell to. In Europe, Rome 1 (now a Regulation) , on choice of law, dictates that even if Amazon UK (say) dictate that the law of the contract shall be English law, if they're selling to a French (or Finnish or Latvian) person they have to take the risk that if there is a dispute. the "mandatory rules of consumer protection" of France (or Finland or Latvia) will still apply, and over-ride the law they know and had calculated their insurance premiums upon (English).

Sounds a very academic point but businesses , especially SMEs and one-man outfits are highly risk averse. Facing unquantifiable risk, they'll choose to sell at home and not to France or Latvia or Finland. None of this is good for the dream of the low cost, high choice, competitive Single Market for consumers. And in real life the Commission has already noticed that even big players like iTunes (who can afford Finnish and Latvian lawyers) are choosing to sell to some parts of the EU (usually the safer better known Western members) and not to the full 27.

But the "law of the CFR" will be specifically drafted to already include what is seen as at least the minimum EU-wide consumer protection - possibly more than that. So there's no policy reason why Amazon or iTunes shouldn't be able to select "the law of the CFR" as the governing law and NOT have to worry about the law of France, or Finland, or Latvia or whoever next joins the EU.

What about the consumer? Well the idea is also that the consumer will get a choice. When making a contract with Amazon, they'll be presented with the option to accept "the law of the CFR" - or to demand their home consumer law applies. The "CFR" choice will be a Blue Button - so the scheme is the "Blue Button" plan.

Panglos wonders what the point is of presenting the consumer with an option. No consumer she has ever known has rejected a sale because of the governing law - only because it wasn't cheap enough or good enouigh in quality. Consumers will never know enough to make an informed choice about giving up their home law protections. And from the retailer end, the smart money is they won't offer a real choice anyway, but will simply say , if the consumer refuses "the law of the CFR" that they won't accept their order - and we're back to the status quo of partition of markets.

But the "Blue Button" choice apart, the concept of a "law of the EU" as a choice of law seems a brilliant solution to the current Single e-Market impasse - my congratulations to whosever stroke of inspiration this was.

Finally the CFR folks (academic version) very much want feedback on their draft CFRC. It is I believe available at http://www.law-net.eu/ . One piece of feedback Pangloss has already delivered is that she would very much like to see this "toolbox" feed into the review of the Electronic Commerce Directive which has started about now. As every e-commerce lawyer knows, the provisions on when and how an e-contract can be made in the ECD Art 11 are a complete mess, for the simple reason that the ECD drafters were unable politically to harmionise EC basic formation of contract law. The CFRC might provide a way out of this dilemma. Let's hope someone passes the good news on :)

Incitement to terrorism becomes an EU crime?

According to Michael Geist's BNA reports of 21 April 08..

"European Union justice ministers have agreed that using the Internet to publish bomb recipes or call for acts of terrorism to be committed should count as a criminal offence. The 27 member states agreed on Friday to introduce as new offences "public provocation to commit a terrorist offence, recruitment, and training for terrorism" which would be punishable "also when committed through the Internet." [Deutsche Welle]"

The German source adds

"The 27 member states agreed on Friday, April 18, to introduce as new offences "public provocation to commit a terrorist offence, recruitment, and training for terrorism" which would be punishable "also when committed through the Internet."

People found guilty of "disseminating terrorist propaganda and bomb-making expertise through the Internet can therefore be prosecuted and sentenced to prison," the justice ministers said in a joint statement.

The commission's proposal would also allow EU law-enforcement agencies to demand cooperation from Internet providers in order to identify the people making such calls and to ensure that the offending material is taken off-line."

Interesting last para. This echoes what the UK government has already done with The Electronic Commerce Directive (Terrorism Act 2006) Regulations . These apply a 2 day strict notice and take down period under the ECD where the police can ask for take down of pro-terrorist material and ISPs must comply on pain of being seen as endorsing the hosted material.

But the Internet does not stop at the English Channel or even at Turkey. What is the position going to be of an apparently US hosted site like Bombs for Beginners , or this site providing downloads of the Anarchist's Cookbook (which itself recommends instead http://www.pyronfo.com/ for homemade bombmaking, and does not seem to admit where it is hosted?) (And am I committing an offense by linking to either of these??)

The current UK guidance on how the Regulations apply the s 3 notice provisions of the Terroriosm Act 2006 says thusly:

"38. Section 17 [of the 2006 Act] confers extra-territorial jurisdiction in relation to the section
1 offence (encouragement of terrorism), but not to the section 2 offence
(dissemination of terrorist publications). Extra-territoriality is only conferred
in relation to the section 1 offence as it relates to encouragement to
commit Convention offences. These offences are listed in Schedule 1 to
the 2006 Act."

Schedule 1 does not however seem to contain any offences relating to encouragement of terrorism either, by publication of propaganda or educational instructions about bomb making alike. One assumes therefore the UK LEAs cannot issue a take down notice to Wikipedia (or to Le Monde's website in France either.) Is the future new EU legislation intended to allow intra-EU take down notices in the terrorism area? The French may go along with this (zut alors) but one doubts somehow that the US will agree to allow EU police to issue take down notices against their own US-hosted websites though? (What of the First Amendment and the good old Yahoo! case?)

Pangloss is not an expert in the anti-terorism area and would appreciate any helpful comments.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Pangloss has also been informed about Information Security Week 2008 which runs week from 21st April 2008. Some events look quite interesting for Internet Lawyers -- notably

23rd April Debate on the need for an e-crime unit in the UK with Charlie McMurdie, Detective Superintendent, Police Central e-Crime Unit Project ; Philip Virgo, Secretary General, EURIM; Tony Neate, Managing Director , Get Safe Online; Dr David King, Chair, Information Security Awareness Forum (ISAF).

and

22nd April Launch of the PwC Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Information Security Breaches Survey 2008.

Googleopoly

No particular point to make here except this may certainly enhance a few powerpoints:)

Nation of Daleks

Pangloss is far too much of a geek not to mention the Daleks IP case in the High Court even though she has nothing to add to the excellent write up on the IP Kat here. The IP Kat write up also features a link to an adorable video of a cat completely ignoring a toy dalek :)

Internet Libel (not "liable") or Who's the Daddy(place)?

A story I meant to mention from last week - the Telegraph reported what is being called the largest ever Internet libel settlement in the UK, in relation to allegations on a site called "Dadsplace" about Gentoo, a housing development company.

"Gentoo Ltd, formerly the Sunderland Housing Group, became the subject of an attack by "a seriously defamatory, abusive and scurrilous anonymous website at dadsplace.co.uk", according to a statement read in court by the organisation's counsel, Hugh Tomlinson QC, before Mr Justice Eady today."

Eventually after some two years of malicious attacks downloaded "millions" of times, "John Finn, the owner of rival housing firm Pallion and a former local council candidate in Sunderland ...admitted his involvement, agreeing at the time to pay £125,000 towards Gentoo’s legal costs and a total of £21,000 in compensation.. he and Pallion [then] agreed to pay Mr Walls damages of £100,000 to settle his claim for libel and harassment."

The webmasters of Dadsplace were also made subject to injunctions not to repeat the offending statements but do not seem to have been sued for actual damages.

Now interestingly the solicitors for Gentoo - Olswangs - have commented publicly on why they think the settlement was so high. Factors seem to include:
- the length of the slandering campaign - two years
- the quantity of defamatory allegations - made almost daily
- the "extensive steps to publicise the Web site and their other publications" made by Dadspace - so the damage caused to the reputation was very extensive.

They also indicate how difficult it is to investigate a campaign of anonymous libel eg on a bulletin board or mailing list site, involving "months of painstaking investigation involving a combination of high-tech computer forensic work and old-fashioned evidence gathering".

Finally there are some interesting thoughts on Internet libel from Ashley Hurst the Olswang lawyer involved:

"This raises the question of whether reform is required to give the Internet the same badge of respectability that is enjoyed by other forms of media, including the press (regulated by the PCC) and television companies (regulated by Ofcom). However, the Internet is of course an entirely different medium and the answer is far from straightforward, particularly given the global reach of the Internet and the many different foreign laws that can apply. Would extending the remit of Ofcom or the PCC, or developing a voluntary code of conduct, make any difference?"

Pangloss gets an awful lot of requests to provide advice on Internet libel, though she is uncertain if this is because there is so much of it, or because her article on Net defamation (from 2000!!) comes up first in Google UK if you put in "Internet libel". (Bored students may be glad to know this piece will finally be updated in the 3rd edn of Law and the Internet upcoming.)

But most the people who contact her (unike Olswangs, perhaps, who charge :-) are not the alleged victims of libel, but are websites or hosts of some kind (often charitable or one-man outfits) who suddenly receive take down notices out the blue making vague threats of legal action, and then have no idea what their legal risks are. In an Internet culture where flaming is still fairly prevalent, these hosts often feel they have no alternative but to take down, even where they have no idea what if anything illegal or actionable has been said. This is not good for freedom of speech, democracy or indeed the morale of the voluntary/charitable sector. Sabre rattling and fear of legal risk , it seems, often overwhelms common sense and resilience.

Helpfully, the SCL website as well as providing the Olswang interview, also provides some hints to websites as to when they are liable for content posted on their site by third parties.

Pangloss doesn't disagree that a voluntary code relating to offensive content on websites might be of some use for the victims of malicious allegations (though how would it be policed? the PCC model, both of jurisdiction and sanctions, does not readily transfer, she feels, and that's before we come to the fact that web content is just as likely to be uploaded abroad as in the UK.)

But she also wonders if we do not also need to do more to protect individuals and small unincorporated associations who run or host the websites from random take down notices from anyone who is a wee bit disgruntled or wants to stifle perfectly reasonable criticism or debate.

At the very least it would be good to see a responsible body - the CABxs ? ISPA? BERR? - providing some plain language guidance on line, perhaps an advice hotline, and perhaps even an adaptable form response to takedown notices which do not meet the requirements of regulation 22 of the ECD regulations. Some take down notices do not even sometims specify what ( or where) the alleged libel IS. (The title of this piece comes from one just like this Pangloss saw yesterday - where the aggrieved sender of the take down notice knew so little he had spelt "libel" as "liable".)

As`my gift to the world Pangloss may post her own typical response letter tomorrow. After I've checked it's in no way libellous:)

Stamping out child abuse image websites?

Interesting report on the Beeb about how the IWF have identified how many sites trade such images and concluded there are 2,755 such sites worldwide.

"Of these, 80% are judged to be fully commercial operations.

The IWF said this "manageable" number could be eliminated if net firms, governments and police worked together".

A laudable aim and if achieved, quite amazing. It doesn't of course take into account the anecdotally well known fact that serious organised pedophile rings now mainly obtain and swap their wares via closed P2p nets - "darknets" - and that penetrating these is getting ever harder since the arrival of easily used encrypted P2P.

However perhaps this isn't the time to be too cynical (what me?) and as the IWF imply, closing down commercial websites would at least cut off the feed from those not already inducted into the "inner circles" of darknets.

Then perhaps we could start putting more resources into actual child abuse in this country and less into the shadowy scare figure of the online pedophile :)

E-harmony??

A week or so back I mentioned an interesting report from Bill Dutton and associates at the Oxford Internet Institute on married couples who met online and how they behaved online towards each other. The report was sponsored by e-harmony.com, a dating site who promote making better marriages on line.

I just wonder what they think of this :)

OK back to the dissertation salt mines.

Aha! One last insight into the glories of Pangloss's work life - thanks to the good offices of Cory Doctorow I have now received permission from the godlike Randall Munroe of XKCD so that this - my favourite web cartoon evah - will be the cover of the 3rd edition of Law and Internet, coming to you in autumn 08 :) I am very very pleased :) Thanks to both Randall and Cory!

Stupid Idea of the Month

(Thanks to Ian Sorensen for the tip off.) News from way back on April 4th 2008 -

"Registered child sex offenders will have to provide their email addresses to police in a move to stop them using social networking Web sites, the Home Office announced on Friday

Police will pass the addresses on to the sites which will then be expected to monitor usage or stop offenders logging on. Sex offenders will face up to five years in prison if they fail to hand over the details or provide a false email.

The proposal is one of a series of measures announced by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to make it harder for child sex offenders to meet children online."

Oh come on, Jeremy. Anyone heard of hotmail, yahoo, gmail, a 1000 other ISPs? Your average pedophile is at least smart enough to realise that even if conscientiously and truthfully hands over (one? all?) of his email address (es), it doesn't take long to get another.

This really is a bad case of "having to be seen to do something, anything". I feel actually embarrassed for our poor polis who'll have to implement this piss-stupid idea.

The wider question again, is how legitimate is it to ban someone from the Internet (all of it? some of it? is tere any realistically any halfway house?) just because their past or future potential crimes might use the Internet. We` routinely allocate ASBOs and domestic injunctions barring certain persons from eg schools, shopping centres or the homes of ex-spouses, but these are in general (a) limited in geographical area (b) proportionate to the crime and (c) enforceable, in that there is very likely someone who has reason to take note if the area restriction is broken.

Arguably, none of these justifications apply to a total Internet ban. But who cares, it's clear`that considerations of civil liberties simply melt away compared to the votes that can be won by name-dropping the "will no one think of the children line". And not mentioning that by far `and away the majority of the sbuse is by someone known to the child and usually resident in their own home, not by stranger online pedophiles. At least in the US there appears to be a debate about the constitutionality of Internet band - Pangloss has seen little or no sign of this in the UK.

Hell, they could simply plant 3 downloads on the pedophile's hard disc and that'll be them banned from the Net for life shortly :)

Future Strategy of the ICO

As the final part of Pangloss's catch up of vital reports on privacy and DP that all seem to have emerged while I was on holiday (sigh), the ICO's own report on its future strategy on DP enforcement needs read. I refer you in the meantime to cogent comments at Naked Law.

Very broadly, the ICO propose that they "will not focus on enforcement, but on reducing the risk to UK residents of misuse of personal information about them. " This may of course however be all subject to change given the expectation that the current Commisioner Richard Thomas will retire in the not too far distant future.

Thanks also to IMPACT blog who (inter alia) drew to my attention to the large ICO survey on attitudes to privacy which preceded the issue of the strategy paper and came out March 19 08. It's all go :) One of the most remarkable and yet not unexpected findings is that after the HMRC data scandal the British public has officially lost faith in the public sector: "The ICO poll of 1,000 people found that 53% of those asked no longer had confidence in the way banks, local authorities and government departments handled personal information." See Beeb summary here.