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New UK law looking likely. To make website owners responsible for piracy!
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| Richard Butler |
Here's the text from the BBC on the matter;
Controversial elements of the Digital Economy Bill will face further scrutiny even if the bill is passed later, Commons Leader Harriet Harman has said.
Part of the bill, which refers to how copyright holders can block access to websites hosting pirated content, will be subject to further consultation.
Several MPs called for the whole bill to be delayed until after the election.
Despite objections, the bill was given a second reading and will be rushed through its final stages on Wednesday.
The Tories have said "big questions" have been left unanswered while the Lib Dems are seeking greater scrutiny of some aspects.
Closing the debate, Digital Britain Minister Stephen Timms said: "The choice we have is to act on unlawful downloading or not to act. That is the choice the House needs to make.
"I think there is actually very broad agreement across the House about the need for us to act in the way that this Bill sets out."
Ms Harman revealed to Parliament that one element, known as Clause 18, will be subject to "a super-affirmative procedure" - meaning the details of it will require further Parliamentary scrutiny.
Clause 18 was hastily rewritten by the government. It was intended to future-proof the law against new methods of accessing pirated materials.
It grants rights-holders the power to force service providers to block access to websites hosting pirated content.
The Liberal Democrats have called for a similar procedure to be applied to the issue of how public wi-fi will be affected by the bill.
Currently, if the bill passes into law, the owners of publicly-accessed wi-fi will be held responsible for content that is illegally downloaded by individuals using the hotspot.
'Digital disappointment'
The second reading of the bill was somewhat overshadowed by the earlier announcement of the general election and few MPs gathered in the Commons to hear Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw introduce it.
However, a heated debate followed with several MPs, including Labour MP Tom Watson, calling for the more controversial elements of the bill to be removed.
Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt branded the bill a "digital disappointment of colossal proportions".
For the Liberal Democrats, culture spokesman Don Foster condemned the government for allowing a "totally inappropriate" amount of time for debate on such a major piece of legislation.
He said "large chunks" of the Bill were not controversial and needed to become law.
The SNP's Pete Wishart, a former member of Celtic rock group Runrig, told the Commons that internet file-sharing was not unlike a person walking into a record shop and taking whatever albums they liked - for free.
He said: "The cream of the UK's creative industries want to ensure that we have this bill and these measures.
"Then we can continue to have the best creative industry and digital economy."
Earlier Ms Harman said the bill had already been subject to "considerable scrutiny" in the House of Lords, with seven days in committee, "longer than any other bill in this Parliamentary session".
But Mr Watson, a long-standing Labour opponent of the bill, urged the government to rethink rushing through the legislation.
"In the last seven days, 20,000 people have taken the time to e-mail their MPs. They are extremely upset that it won't have proper scrutiny," he said.
Internet piracy
Mr Bradshaw countered that "hundreds of thousands of people in the creative industries feel equally strongly that they need the legislation now".
He told MPs that a framework for dealing with those who pirated content was essential if alternative legal ways of distributing content were to get off the ground.
"It is not ideal that the bill will not enjoy full debate," he acknowledged but said that it had enjoyed "cross-party support".
There has been mounting public opposition to the bill, particularly the plans to give Ofcom the power to cut off the internet connections of persistent pirates.
Mr Bradshaw moved to reassure MPs that such measures would not be introduced for another year, and said he hoped a letter campaign to persistent net pirates would prove sufficient.
If suspensions of net accounts are necessary they will only be "temporary" he added. |
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| Storyteller |
I can't see why it is a problem. There's are only very few websites which are of such a magnitude that they could not be held responsible for what happens on their website. Otherwise it's perfectly manageable to prevent illegal use of content on your platform/website.
If you own a website which is hard to manage you should make sure you have your own terms of agreement (get a lawyer to make you one!) in order for people to user your service. Make them 100% accountable for whatever damages are caused by the content they published on your website.
Of course each case should be judged upon separately if the breach is intentional and if the site owner can be held responsible. |
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| DJ RANN |
| quote: | Originally posted by Storyteller
I can't see why it is a problem. There's are only very few websites which are of such a magnitude that they could not be held responsible for what happens on their website. Otherwise it's perfectly manageable to prevent illegal use of content on your platform/website.
If you own a website which is hard to manage you should make sure you have your own terms of agreement (get a lawyer to make you one!) in order for people to user your service. Make them 100% accountable for whatever damages are caused by the content they published on your website.
Of course each case should be judged upon separately if the breach is intentional and if the site owner can be held responsible. |
For small websites, I don't see it being an issue but it's a huge issue for the larger user content sites. For instance that would basically mean there would be about 90% less content on youtube. There is alkso the data protection act in the UK meaning ISP's could not provide the details of those infringing without a government warrented court order, unless the user waived theri data protection rights at sign up or agreed to updated terms and conditions of the use of that site.
Absolute ing quagmire, and the lawyers are going to make a ton of cash. |
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| Storyteller |
Yes, but it's not fair to say that your own product is not your own responsibility to maintain either.
This is exactly why I think the responsibility of the website owner should be evaluated in each case independently.
Governments everywhere just don't know what to do with the digital age. :) |
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| DJ RANN |
| quote: | Originally posted by Storyteller
Yes, but it's not fair to say that your own product is not your own responsibility to maintain either.
This is exactly why I think the responsibility of the website owner should be evaluated in each case independently.
Governments everywhere just don't know what to do with the digital age. :) |
That's true about govs not knowing but it's not like manufacturing where if you make something that hurts people you're liable. The sites are for the sharing of information - legislation should make clear defininitions between the use of right owned material for art , comedy or educational purposes (etc), and straight up piracy (just as legistaltion exists for intellecutual property.
In a lot of cases the items I'm thinkning of on those sites do nothing hurtful, and in some cases are useful and lucrative to the artist/owner.
I've just got a feeling they are going to clamp down on piracy and in the process up useulf outlets of personal expression. |
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| cronodevir |
No law is going to stop piracy. Only way they could imagine stopping it is by fully implementing i2.0, but even then its only half-ass stopped. Encryption makes monitoring the content impossible. And there is no way to stop encryption, without stopping any and all user generated content on all sectors of the Internet. I see it becoming a situation where computers no longer store the data on their drive, they "log into" the virtual world via a terminal, all data is stored on the servers. And no data is stored locally, in fact, it would be such that there is no local storage. Your "computer" would be a keyboard, a mouse, a monitor, and a network card.
So you would wake up, go to your terminal, you would login by pushing a button which sends a signal to the servers CPU telling it to allocate space for your terminal, once everything is set up, you get another signal back producing the result, the system would do all the computing, ram, and data storage off site [some server somewhere], so you wouldn't have access to the cpu, nor the information stored in ram nor the hard drives, all interaction and "content" would be stopped at the server, and your terminal would only be a "snapshot" of what you have. But no code other than display code would be ran locally, and nothing would be stored, ever read and write access would be requested over the net, and the result sent back.
With that system you could virtually wipe out all virtual piracy, but you couldn't stop analogue piracy. So movies and sound are still fair game [after being paid for by someone, made into copies and sold]...
of course, why stop there? with the new terminals, all of your audio and video needs would be met, so no more physical media, no more zip drives, dvds, bluerays, all virtual processing and information would be done at the hub, and your input/output box in your home would be the access to it, eventually a smaller version would be made to replace cellphones, same system, log in/send signal to the satalite, and it sends back a snapshot of your phonebook and other information
all of this would not be stored btw, so lets say you have two windows opened, firefox and cubase, if you click the firefox tab, you are resent the information and its stored in the pixel information in your monitor [there would be no refresh, it would be static images, and the "clicking" as it were would be via touch screen] movies would be streamed, along with audio., anyways, when you wanted to go back to cubase, it would re-request the information...
anyways...do you get my point? this isn't really going to happen, in all likelyhood, the companies who keep the itnernet maintained would go out of business and the internet would just collapse, before they were able to actually impliment such a secure system as i have described, and unless they implimented all this, they wouldn't even put a dent in virtual piracy... |
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| Aesthetic |
| I can't believe I wasted my time reading your drivel cronodevir |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by cronodevir
virtual piracy |
Aaarrrgh!
Of course no one will ever be able to thwart your attempts at hi-jacking threads. |
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| cronodevir |
What was hijacked? I just summed up the result of every thread ever posted on TA about software piracy.
Someone posts a thread, people argue about whether piracy can be effected in anyway, the logical result is that it can't, thus proving the initial thread useless. |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by cronodevir
Someone posts a thread, people argue about whether piracy can be effected in anyway, the logical result is that it can't, thus proving the initial thread useless. |
I read your post. It's conjecture based on a hypothetical scenario with limited knowledge used to render the hyperbole. It's virtual argument-um; non-sense.
Hijacking was in reference to your somewhat less than stellar track-record. Okay. Your post was on point but far from proving to be accurate or informed. |
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| DJ RANN |
| quote: | Originally posted by cronodevir
What was hijacked? I just summed up the result of every thread ever posted on TA about software piracy.
Someone posts a thread, people argue about whether piracy can be effected in anyway, the logical result is that it can't, thus proving the initial thread useless. |
Piracy can be affected (not effected ;) ) , we've all been through this and you know better by now.
Just so you don't try it - Mininova point in case. The largest site for TV torrents closed it's doors to pirated material 1 month after the pirate bay guys got charged (as they didn't want to take the risk) and no website has taken it's place. Analysis on torrent shares went down by 30% overnight for TV material in USA and have not recovered. No site has taken mininova's place so action by governments on individual sites does work, even if it is by way killing a monkey to scare to chickens.
So no, it's not useless. But you know this (and other info given in the other threads) so please don't troll here anymore. |
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