Leveson: act in haste, repent at leisure?

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Leveson wanted big news publishers regulated. He proposed very stringent measures against news publishers that did not join a “self regulatory” body. His target was big, powerful news companies that could intimidate or ignore individuals whose rights they violated.

Last weekend, the three main parties negotiated a deal. Websites will be regulated if they publish news, have multiple authors, and run commercially. That covers a lot of small websites and blogs.

Leveson never intended to regulate small-scale and amateur bloggers but this poorly-written law threatens to restrict the power of individuals to debate topical matters in the blogosphere.

Big Brother Watch have proposed an amendment which would exempt “[publishers] who do not exceed the definition of a small or medium-sized enterprise…” from the legislation. The amendment has been put down by Lord Lucas. It needs to garner cross-party support.

If you have a minute today, please email the people who negotiated this consensus deal, and ask them to back off and leave the Internet out of Leveson.

Pecha Kucha Sheffield

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I’m excited (and a little terrified) to announce I’ll be speaking on Digital Ethics at the next Pecha Kucha Sheffield on 21 March. Here’s the pitch:

Times are a’changing, faith in the institutions once depended upon has been rocked to its very core and as our eyes are opened to the realities of the world before us, we are once again, taking back the responsibility of judging right and wrong for ourselves.

For years we seem to have taken our eye off the ball, just accepting the way things are. We happily bowed down to the powers that be and those in the know, only to be shown time-and-time-again that self-governance and unregulated positions of control and power cannot be trusted to act with anything other than their own self-interests at heart.

As our Global consciousness gradually awakens, what matters to us now is ‘fairness’…as people from every walk of life take an ethical lens to every facet of the societies in which we live, the cracks are clear for all to see.

Pecha Kucha Vol #12 is an exploration into the truth behind the issues that influence so much of the lives we live today and the ones we will have to make choices about tomorrow.

I want to talk about the ethical dilemmas our society is encountering as we all get used to living our (relatively) new digital lives. Which hot topics do you think I should squeeze into my 400 seconds?

You can get tickets for the event here. Let me know if you’re coming!

Expanding horizons

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First up, I’ve switched the site to use WordPress’s own excellent Twenty-Thirteen theme, rather than Agregado. The latter served me well for several years however the sidebar hasn’t done what I wanted since Twitter switched off RSS support and the email contact form was a massive spam-magnet. Meanwhile the default WordPress theme, and the Jetpack plugin set, have now evolved to contain many of the features I was hacking in manually before: twitter and RSS integration, email subscriptions, social-media sharing buttons, tweeting new posts, displaying profile info, etc. I’ll likely be tweaking the theme and content continuously over the next couple of months but I’m already much happier with the cleaner look and increased ease-of-maintenance :)

Secondly, until now this blog has been focussed exclusively on digital rights campaigning, however I’m planning to steer it in a more personal direction in future. There will still be plenty of posts about digital rights but from now on I’ll also be using this outlet to deposit thoughts on technology, music, work, life and what I had for breakfast this morning. If you want to filter out any of that extra stuff and get back to the hardcore activism posts you can use the list of categories in the sidebar.

Eight Answers from Digital Region ISPs in South Yorkshire

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Earlier this year I posted eight questions to ask your next ISP. I then invited responses from the ISPs who provide services over South Yorkshire’s new Digital Region network. At the time there were three: Ask4, Origin Broadband and Little Big One. Two of these have now replied so I thought I’d post their answers, with their permission, so that others can benefit from them.

Have a look at my original post for the background behind the questions and the kind of things I was looking for in the answers. Many thanks to @ask4support and @originbroadband for taking the time to reply.

I’d love to know what you make of these answers in the comments!

1. What sort of IP addresses can you provide?

Ask4 Origin
We supply dynamic IPv4 addresses. Our Networks team are investigating future IPv6 implementation but we are unable to comment any further at this point in time. Currently we provide static IPv4 addresses, but are already planning ahead for IPv6.

2. What priorities and limits does your network place on different types of datagram?

Ask4 Origin
We do not impose any limits or priorities on traffic types, however our terms of use state: “allow ASK4 to carry out port scanning traffic shaping traffic monitoring and such other measures as ASK4 may determine from time to time to ensure optimum performance of the Service for all or a majority of users.” This allows us to ensure that our users all experience a fair service. We don’t shape traffic at all, we have looked into Round Robin and a few other systems to give fair sharing but unless we 100% have to we won’t. I can understand that in some networks this would cause issues if VOIP has a lower priority over p2p, but we don’t have these congestion issues.

3. Do you block certain types of traffic or access to certain ports?

Ask4 Origin
We do not block certain traffic types or ports. Our terms of use prohibit the operation of servers on our connections, except for personal use that does not involve any commercial gain. We don’t block anything. Nice easy answer, that one.

4. What network services do you provide to customers?

Ask4 Origin
We provide DNS servers for our customers. We do not currently provide any graphing or performance facilities, there are numerous third party tools that can be used at the customer’s discretion. As standard we only offer these kind of services when people ask. But if you want reverse DNS, additional IP’s, domain name hosting, email, web hosting, FTP server or colocation you only have to ask and we’ll deal with everything on a case by case basis.

5. How good is the support for your service?

Ask4 Origin
We offer a 24/7 Sheffield based call centre, manned by technical
support staff who do not work from scripts. Our support team were
finalists in the 2011 ISPA awards.

We provide support via:
Email – support@ask4.com
Phone – 0114 303 3232 or 0845 123 8710
Text – 07797800545 (customer sends in a text and we respond with a phone call)
Twitter – @ask4support

I’d like to think it’s very good. We’re small and relatively young and I’ll admit we may not get it right every time, but I see our guys going well over the level of service I’ve ever received from an ISP and it makes me proud even though our customers don’t always see quite how much has been done behind the scenes. In terms of channels, we respond to people on Twitter, FB, forums and via email and phone. We’d rather people raised faults (if they occur) either by email or phone, but beyond that we’re quite happy to chat wherever.

6. Do you intercept traffic?

Ask4 Origin
We do not perform Deep Packet Inspection. Nope. We would have to if the authorities have a warrant to obtain such information but until the implementation of the new internet monitoring bill then we will have to keep a log of this. The only time we capture traffic is for fault purposes with the end users permission.

7. Do you censor the connections you sell?

Ask4 Origin
We do not censor our connections unless requested to do so by the
customer.		 No. You can still access pirate bay!

8. How do you handle allegations of copyright infringement?

Ask4 Origin
Record the instance on ASK4′s customer management system against the account with the full notice received from the copyright holder or their agent.

Contact the customer to inform them ASK4 have received a copyright infringement notice and advise them to not share copyrighted material.

Forward the copyright infringement notice to the customer’s contact email address and record this on the customer’s account.

Reported infringements for the same customer will be dealt with in the same way. Personal information will not be released unless compelled to by a competent legal authority.

We pass any infringement notice on to the end user in the hope they modify their behaviour and offer them further security advice to prevent their connection being used for naughty stuff by other people if that’s what’s happened. If we get further ones then we’d have to deal on a case by case basis but we’d be hugely resistant to the idea of limiting people’s connections. As you may be aware RIPE can withdraw IP addresses that have been logged in illegal activity.

Origin Broadband also said:

These are all fine questions, but very techy focussed. I like to know that the companies I use support local supply chains (as we do), support local causes and events (as we do) and hire local people and contribute to the local economy (as we do). That sounded a bit League of Gentlemen doesn’t it? We actually welcome customers who have non Yorkshire accents!

DCMS responds to my comms bill concerns

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I’ve received a response [PDF] from the Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS), via my MP, to my concerns about the forthcoming Communications Bill green paper.

I’m meeting my MP to discuss this in person next month so if you can think of anything else I should mention, or if there’s something I’ve missed, please let me know in the comments.

Dear Paul [Blomfield, MP for Sheffield Central]

Thank you for your letter of 27 April enclosing correspondence from a member of the Open Rights Group (ORG), expressing concerns about website blocking to combat copyright infringement and how the interests of the general public are represented in consultation processes.

The Government has hosted discussions between copyright owners, internet service providers, intermediaries and consumer representation on issues around self-regulatory site-blocking to tackle the widespread problem of copyright infringement. However, I should emphasise that this is an industry initiative which we are helping to facilitate and which the Government is observing with interest.

A self-regulatory industry initiative is not legislation. If it were legislation the Government would have to do all manner of extra things, like debate it in Parliament and hold a public consultation, so it seems they think it’d be more convenient to get this done through informal back-channels. Transparency? What’s that?

The Government claims to be “helping to facilitate” the development of this initiative while “observing with interest”. I suspect this means they are saying to ISPs and search engines, “if you don’t do what we want we’ll legislate to force you to – and you won’t like that one bit.” That would put a whole different complexion on the process than the one implied by this letter, which suggests the process is voluntary, and industry-led rather than government-instigated.

The DCMS uses the term site-blocking, corroborating earlier reports that they want to see entire websites taken down, rather than limiting the measures to any infringing material hosted on those sites. By definition this means the Government wants to censor non-infringing content. In fact this has already happened in the UK. I understand that Virgin Media subscribers can no longer access the Pirate Bay blog, for example, though I should make clear that this was by order of a court.

The Government refers to widespread copyright-infringement as being a problem (despite admitting they have no evidence for this assertion). This gives us a hint as to who might be pulling the strings of this operation. For whom is file sharing actually a problem? Not artists – they have more opportunities than ever to connect with fans and make money. Not ISPs nor search-engines – they’re mere conduits – intermediaries between the fans and the content they love. Rarely do the fans themselves, or the public at large, bemoan their greatly expanded access to media – which means it can’t be the Government’s problem either since the Government exists to serve the people (right?) No, illicit downloading is only a problem for the multinational giants of the music and film publishing-industries, and only because they insist on trying to roll back the calendar to the 20th century instead of grasping the opportunities of the digital age. I expect this is yet another misguided initiative by the BPI et al to restore their erstwhile monopoly over our popular culture.

Lastly, the Government hasn’t identified the consumer representatives with which it has discussed its proposals, however they don’t seem to have included the obvious ones (ORG and Consumer Focus) nor do they seem to have done so recently. Minutes of two DCMS meetings in February, obtained by ORG under the Freedom of Information act, show only industry representatives in attendance.

The Department understands that there are concerns about the impact that an industry-led site-blocking scheme might have on consumers and for the wider implications for internet censorship. It is important to bear in mind that the approach is to use existing legal provisions to take action against sites of concern, and that this entails gaining the agreement of the High Court that such an injunction is appropriate. This means that there is a judicial decision at the heart of the action, providing important reassurance that the interests of all parties will have been carefully considered.

Who represents the consumer interest in a High Court hearing that pits the BPI against BT? The outcome could satisfy both these parties yet still impinge on citizens’ rights to privacy and freedom of expression. Copyright owners can already apply to the courts for injunctions to block infringing content, so why do they need to go further and block entire sites, including any non-infringing content they might be hosting?

Your constituent also draws attention to how the interests of the general public are represented in the discussions between stakeholders about online copyright infringement. ORG and others are invited to participate periodically, but it is also reasonable for the Government to be able to convene meetings between different industry sectors to discuss possible approaches without having to invite bodies with a different agenda. What we are seeking to do is facilitate industry-led solutions, and of course anything that emerges must satisfy the important legal safeguards. These are not secret talks, but the opportunity for frank exchanges of views, and the Government thinks that this is a worthwhile exercise.

The DCMS has offered to brief “others with an interest, such as consumer representatives and open rights organisations” on their plans twice-yearly, and presumably after the fact. Meanwhile the private round-table discussions will continue to “meet regularly as a working group to check on progress that is being made both in the regulatory environment and in terms of industry-led initiatives to reduce the level and viability of online infringement of content.” This implies industry representatives will continue to enjoy preferential access to the process and consumer interests will just have to keep on playing catch-up and guessing games. Why is the DCMS scared of giving ORG, with its “different agenda”, a seat at the same table as the industry lobbyists?

As your constituent is already aware, the Government is currently conducting a review of the Communications Act 2003. The Department will also consider, if appropriate, anything arising from relevant discussions as part of the ongoing review process.

Ed Vaizey MP
Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries

The threat is pretty clear – the review is a stick with which ISPs and search engines will be beaten if they don’t do what the media-publishers want. Is there a carrot too?