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Gag The UK Net in 3 Easy Steps
Ponderu writes "BBC News is carrying a story about how easy it is to get a website pulled in the UK. They asked several ISPs how they would react to a sample site and the news is not encouraging. " Very frightening.
Oh please, we here have a crazy enough legal system to bring you to your knees. When a wacko can sue for ten million dollars for tripping over their own shoelaces, what's to stop anyone from sueing you for a web site? Trust me, it's coming soon. You'll have someone crying that they read your site about mowing the grass, and they felt so bad for the grass that they could not work for two years. Therefore for their lost income, pain and suffering, cruelty to plants, they sue you for $200 million. Your only choices are to either spend hundreds of thousands on a defense, or bring the site down. Until there is some sort of loser-pays-fees laws, you must live your life in fear of some crazy crying on TV how you hurt them.
So it's only natural that ISPs will take sites down rather than go through any PR hassle.
Darn submit buttons...
Come on, all it takes is a good victim story.
- First, be a victim of the horrible web site.
- Bring in some tears, tell how you couldn't eat/sleep/poop for days/weeks/years.
- Involve children, they are a great pawn. No one wants to see a child cry.
- Contact as many media outlets as you can. They will assist in sprucing up your story.Darn submit buttons...
Come on, all it takes is a good victim story.
- First, be a victim of the horrible web site.
- Bring in some tears, tell how you couldn't eat/sleep/poop for days/weeks/years.
- Involve children, they are a great pawn. No one wants to see a child cry.
- Contact as many media outlets as you can. They will assist in sprucing up your story.
- Accept nothing less than $10 million.
- Lawyers, you can never have too many.
Suddenly that web site reviewing movies (or something innocent) is in the position of defending itself, trying to convince the public into believe they really aren't pedofiles, racists, carpenters, etc. And voila, the web site is gone.
- Accept nothing less than $10 million.
- Lawyers, you can never have too many.
Suddenly that web site reviewing movies (or something innocent) is in the position of defending itself, trying to convince the public into believe they really aren't pedofiles, racists, carpenters, etc. And voila, the web site is gone.
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
The BBC clearly sees this as a mainstream, political, non-technical issue, which is an interesting change in attitude.
Any fule can see that it's the medium that is innocent; the net is a dumb medium, and it's only the messages that are conveyed that carry any intent, malicious or otherwise.
Surely, what we need to do in the UK is organise shutdowns of *other* media. Get your phone company to call you, and when they do, get someone sat next to you to verbally call you a thief/liar/rapist, loudly enough for the message to be conveyed to the phone. Then insist that the phone company have it's lines removed for carrying defamatory material. Do this with all media. Ring in to TV and radio shows, getting people in the same room as you to carry the same message. Get everything shut down! When there's nothing left to carry commercials and adverts, all media will be reinstated.
It's worth a try, surely!
In Europe, the equivalent of the first amendment is enshrined in the 'European Convention on Human Rights', and if our government breaks any part of it, we can take them to court in European High Court.
However, the government was not involved in these cases, it's just the case that most ISP's have sufficient protection in their contracts to allow them to drop a site for pretty much any reason.
As the law is still not particularly clear yet on whether an ISP can be held responsible for the content is hosts, most ISPs are much more willing to drop a customer than face an expensive court battle.
I must admit, I'm suprised this has been moderated as high as it has been...
Suggestion : UK /.ers start calling ISPs now. Complain about random pages that don't actually mention you. The ISPs will presumably at least check the pages before yanking them, which will start absorbing significant amounts of time. The ISPs will quickly start pressurising the DTI -- the govt will have the choice of changing the law of waving goodbye to UK-based servers.
I'm sure there are things wrong with this idea, what have I missed ?
\a
--
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I had honestly been considering going on the Linux Beer Hike, but have decided no thanks to this article and listening to Johnny Rotten this past weekend.
I have always been of the opinion that I refuse to visit a country where rights are trampled on, especially when it comes to free speech. So, I won't be visiting China anytime soon. Nor will I be going back to see Australia. Now Merry Ole England is out.
Yeah yeah yeah... "what's it matter what I do?" - I know some of you are saying that. I hear that stuff all the time. But, as the saying goes, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Or, as I say to friends of mine who make fun of me when I say I am boycotting something, "fuck you".
From what the article describes, this situation is crystal clear. The UK says that ISPs are responsible (after being informed). So, if you "buy" a server from an African ISP, it's outside of the UK jurisdiction. Someone who feels insulted can't sue in the UK. They might want to sue in whatever African country your ISP is holding office though.
-- Abigail
- That remains to be seen. It might very well be that if people in the US start sueing, they're backed up by the justice system.
- UK != Europe.
-- AbigailThe ISPs "censor" the material because they have to. The law (I didn't understand whether it's an actual law, or based on existing cases) in the UK is that if the ISP has been made aware of the insulting material, the ISP is responsible. The ISP then has two options: take the site down, or be sued and defend in court that what the person wrote wasn't insulting. Given that lawyers ask more per hour than what the typical customer pays for a year of Internet access, guess which option an ISP takes? Would you go to court to defend someone who only pays you $15/month, knowing that if you lose, you might have to pay several $100k in damages?
Don't attack the ISPs. Attack the UK law. And don't be so sure it'll never happen in the US. As said before, the first amendment isn't going to help you.
-- Abigail
That if I own a web server I shouldn't be allowed to take down whatever I want to?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
'Free speech' and 'the 1st amendment' are complete red herrings in this debate. The 1st amendment applies only to Congress, and *not* private business. Corporation can censor whatever and whenever they like on *their* systems/equipment/whatever.
The problem with the recent Godfrey vs Demon ruling is the application of libel laws and the way they allow you to sue not only the originator of the libel, but also the publisher and distributor.
The result of this is that when faced with a choice to sue (a) the writer of the libel or (b) the distributor of the libel, it's generally the case that the distributor has the deeper pockets. Therefore, they get sued, not the author.
Because of this, if a newsagent carries a newspaper that contains a defamatory article, you can infact sue the newsagent, or the publishing company, or the author. In the past, such cases have generally resulted in the publisher being sued, although the newsagent (distributor) has been sued on occasion.
However, in the case of the Internet, it's the ISP's who have the cash, and so they are the ones who get sued.
Having said that, the case that started all this, ( Godfrey vs Demon ) related to a USENET posting. This posting was not from a Demon customer, but ended up on Demon's servers in the natural course of things. Demon, upon getting a notice to remove the article, ignored it. Demon have now, in effect, been treated as the publisher of a USENET article that did not originate from them, and since it was deemed libellous, they've paid out a sum not unadjacent to 1/4 million pounds.
THe situation now is that Demon are paranoid about USENET postings and will suspend your net access for even posting a link to an article the is defmatory/libellous, as that is also deemed as publishing.
Whilst ISP being responsible for their users' web sites is acceptable - there is no freedom of speech, you are using the resources of a private company and they are under no obligation to let you make potentially business-damaging allegations on their equipment - there is now an air over extreme over-cautiousness, which will hopefully be moderated back down to something more sensible given time.
The real problem is USENET. There is no way an ISP can be responsible for a USENET feed, 99% of which does not originate from their customers, and for which there is no real method of control for content based cancelling of litigation-inviting messages.
-- I'm drinking myself to sleep again...
It's all to easy to imagine this being true of just about any ISP - we are just as prone here to having threat of a lawsuit scare an ISP into taking down almost anything.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Closest thing I can think of off hand would be Stand - however they're more about gaining sane crypto and e-commerce legislation.
...
The worrything thing is that I live in the UK and work for one of the *big* ISPs and I can't think of anything
The story summary here overstates the problem a bit, implying that you can get _any_ site pulled. But the cases listed in the article refer only to sites where there is apparently defamatory things said about _yourself_. Now, of course, this isn't good, but it is also hardly anything new. This happens all the time in the United States, as well. There've been a few incidents where a student has posted obviously absurd things about teachers/other students (he is the antichrist, I want to kill him, etc.) and the site has been pulled, along with the student being suspended.
The sample site they used is hilarious, though. I can never get enough Simpsons references. "This is the largest automobile I could afford."
Because, as the saying goes, you might get it.
ISPs have so far pretty much had the best of both worlds, with most of a common carrier's freedom from responsibility for content and none of their obligation to take any and all traffic. That idyllic period may be ending.
People who look at the British and German cases, and lesser ones that have happened in the USA, tend to propose common-carrier status for ISPs. ISPs, on the other hand, know better. The common carrier's immunity for responsibility for the traffic they carry stems directly from their obligation to take any and all comers willing to pay the tariff. If an ISP actually were to fall under common-carrier law, some very unpleasant things would happen. Like, for instance, spam.
Keep in mind that at present there is very little legal basis for the 'law of cyberspace'. System administrators, under peer pressure, keep limits on net abuse not because it's the law but because being too slack with abusers is a good way to end up firewalled. Common-carrier status would change that fundamentally by setting a legal standard for refusing packets and users alike: as long as there isn't a law against it, you have to carry it.
Of course, the response to that is a huge upswing in abuse, to which the only remaining response is to -- you guessed it -- make certain actions on the Net illegal.
The legislative process being what it is, you can bet that lawmakers' ideas of what should be illegal won't agree much with the existing Internet's cultural norms. Lawmakers, for instance, don't seem to have any objection to spam; they don't do e-mail anyway (that's for flunkies to do, with the weekly abstracts presented on nice crisp paper.) It shouldn't be necessary to enumerate the things that our Lords and Masters don't like that we want to keep safe from them.
Bad as the situation with defamation claims may be, always keep in mind that it could be lots worse.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
try the Netherlands, especially xs4all.nl. They used to be called hacktic.. in the old days. And ofcourse there's no better way to get a dutchman stubborn than to tell him to do something.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
As far as I understand the situation, it's not law per se, but legal precedent. The guy who sued Demon Internet and got a ruling from the judge that Demon were libel for the content on their servers forced the emergence of a huge 'grey area', that urgently needs sorting out - hopefully when the libelled magazine mentioned earlier takes their case to the European Court of Human Rights.
j.
Absit Invidia
Here is one part of the article that makes no sense to me:
"To do this, he first runs the trace route (tracert) program which comes, for example, with Windows 95."
Windows 95 doesn't have nslookup, but a ping would do just as nicely, and get done more quickly.
And then I begin to wonder about a site like The Register... Could Rambus(t), Inc. have the site pulled because of their (admitted) daily beatings on the company?
When I worked for an ISP, various departments got a few complaints about the content of a few sites. We did nothing about them unless they drew excessive traffic, usually porn and warez. We didn't care about anything else, and if we were ever asked about so-and-so's fat stack of Atari and NES ROM's... "We never knew about it".
The bottom line is that no ISP should have to police its own users.
--
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E2 IN2 IE?
The Outcast case revolves around the fact that the ISP pulling the site did so on the grounds that the site might be defamatory. However I know of another, albeit slightly different, case in the UK, where a site was dropped by the ISP under a different kind of pressure. The site in question, that of a fetish club, was dropped by the ISP because the owner of a competing club, bombarded the ISP with faxes, letters, emails et.c claiming the owners of the first club owed him money. This was after a court case over the same supposed issue which the second owner lost. But the ISP just didnt have the guts to ignore the guy, and dropped the site completely. They still dont have new hosting.
The second owner has dropped a campaign of rather nasty personal harassment in the meantime, mainly because he has succeeded in winning his little 'dirty tricks' campaign.
But its a worrying trend. It looks as though UK ISP's aren't prepared to back up their customers. In fact they're prepared to shit on them if someone else says so.
Does anyone know of a UK ISP with guts willing to back their clients? If emmett is reading, what are Outcast doing now? Have they found a reliable ISP, one with guts? Or do we wind up moving all our UK websites to the States, just to protect ourselves and our sites?
Im so pissed off that Demon folded against G*dfrey. They may have fucked us all over in the process.
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
It bloody is a big deal. It engenders a climate where any UK-hosted site is at risk. Outcast didnt have defamatory material. It was just enough to suggest that they might defame in the future, and they lost their site, and possibly business.
If I pay for a site, then I have a contract with the ISP. If they renege on that contract at the wave of my competitor's hand, then I should be able to do something about it. But, no. You think its fine to allow my competitor an easy sabotage tool. Gee I hope it happens to you.
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
I demand that this jingoism and its implicit assumption that America is unique in guaranteeing the right to free speech be removed immediately from this webserver.
:wq
Actually it'd be putting the net back in the hands of just the techies. Maybe alt.sex would become readible again.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The recent demon et al. decisions, which hold ISP's responsible for defamatory material on their servers.
There was no decision - Demon settled out of court. No legal precedent has been set. I've seen several posts get this wrong here, but I can't be bothered to reply to all of them :)
Consider this analogy:
Arbitrage, for the uninitiated, as applied in the stock market means to exploit a pricing inefficiency in the marketplace by making a trade that closes the inefficiency. Arbtriage can be riskless--ie, if a merger is announced at $3 per share, and the stock is trading at $1.50, buying at $2 gives you a riskless return. That's why these differences tend not to exist very long.
The key to arbitrage is availabilty of information--if everyone in the world knows at the same moment that a stock trading at $1.50 should be valued at $3, the price will immediately become $3.
Why this is relevant:
What the internet allows is arbitrage over a wide range of "markets" (including the financial markets). Because information can be served or accessed from anywhere, countries are having difficultly enforcing "legal inefficiencies" that stand in the way of what the users want.
For instance:
--DeCSS banned in US? Serve it from a box in a country with no extradition treaty with the US
--UK ISPs remove content at the hint of a threat? Host it in the US, where laws offer better protection to ISPs.
--Gambling illegal in US? Host it from the Bahamas.
--Pricing discrepancy between Buy.com price for a 19in Monitor and retail store pricing? 800 orders.
--No porn in Australia? A data center in Santa Clara, CA, is the new home for Aussie porn.
Now maybe this is entirely self-evident, based on the design of the internet. And sure, there are ways that nations or companies could combat this, should they really want to.
But as long as there is one country with relatively open interpretations of laws that are strict in other countries, and as long as the technology of the internet continues to allow users to access that "forbidden" content relatively easily, this phenomenon seems likely to continue. Of course, governments could decide to inspect every inbound and outbound packet from their country--but it's not easy.
Maybe instead of tax havens, there will be "Net Havens." Some might call this a "race to the bottom," but I think on balance more people will end up with access to the expression/commerce they desire. I think that's a good thing. And the countries that tend to be more lax in enforcing restrictions on speech/commerce will likely benefit from more internet traffic/hosting business.
net exactly sure but the poster could still get prosecuted rather than the ISP
.oO0Oo.
we had case here of a UK citizen who ran a porn site in the US. He got prosecuted because he uploaded content to it from the UK and thus the judge deemed him to have published it in the uk even though it was hosted outside
libel would be the same, the libel occurred when you typed it not when i read it
it's an arcane law really from the days when printers needed to read your copy in order to print it. It makes publishers err on the side of caution. It's an outdated law but I don't see it changing any time soon.
quote from the article :
"It's no way to make Britain the best place in the world for e-commerce."
As usual money talks. Our cities are run only for the shops not the shoppers - same with the net in the state's opinion.
the only freedom you have is to spend money in shops.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
We can't be fooled into thinking we have the lock on freedom of speech in the US of A.
Check out what happened last year in Brooklyn at the art museum, or check out the success rate of keeping up any kind of "hacker's" site. Not that they know what "hacker" means anyway.
The degree of misunderstanding that corporate bigwigs and governo-crats display toward the REAL net is shocking. Hello, COPA. Believe me, they will find a way to censor us. And it won't be pretty.
--
"I think there is a world market for, maybe, five computers." __ IBM Chairman, 1943 __
Excellent point.
If an ISP actually were to fall under common-carrier law, some very unpleasant things would happen. Like, for instance, spam.
True. But spam can be legislated against. In the areas where common carriers already carry spam (faxes, phones) we do have legislation. We probably would have it for the Internet by now if not for the limited success of the various anti-spam systems, which provide just enough restraint to keep the pressure for legislation from being overwhelming.
If you really don't want your stuff to be open to false accusations and paranoia, or if your stuff really is inflamatory, simply host it on your own box.
If someone were to dislike your content and complain to your ISP, the ISP would probably find something in its contract that lets it kill the connection between your server and the Internet. Unless you are on the backbone, you have to respect your upstream.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The advantage we have right now is basically that the Internet is still a bit of a technocracy - those who understand the technology can use it to circumvent the rules. But for how long? I fear some conservatives will ultimately attempt to ban the Internet once they discover encryption and other methods make it impossible to control completely.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
Besides, as someone pointed out, Geocities has a censorship statement, and given the recent news, I wouldn't be surprised if other hosts did the same.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
Please remember that the demand for removal is a civil matter not a criminal one. Here in the US, it appears that it is only sufficient to consume oxygen and emit carbon dioxide for someone to file a lawsuit against you for something or other (like the sun came up or a stock went down). As such, the actions of most stateside ISPs would be the same as those in GB. The question, though, is weather or not you can file a counter suit for damages against the complaining party for the fact that your site was removed. If so, then the merits of any libel will have to be shown in a court of law for you not to recover damages. One would hope that the fact that somebody got their poor little feelings hurt would not be sufficient for the site removal to be enfourced and the counter-suit dismissed. Personally, I am very offended at the IRS site this time of year. Can someone point me to their ISP???
The first amendment says "Congress shall make no law..". It is designed to protect people from the government, not from other people.
In the U.S. there is no right to a web page. The only thing the first amendment protects our speech against is the government passing laws.
However, an argument can be made that the laws that allow frivilious lawsuits and bully ISPs into making changes like this limit free speech. But people would be even less happy if their right to sue was taken away.
I don't know how things work in the UK per se, but this is something that even if they had a first amendment, it would not address. The ISPs censored the material - not the government.
1) The RIP bill which is going through parliament at the moment which would basically allow the authorities to demand anybody's security keys and allow covert monitoring of ISPs.
2) The new tax laws which came into effect this month (IR35), which basically mean that self-employed programmers pay more tax than any other industry (~ 50% of their _company's income).
3) The recent demon et al. decisions, which hold ISP's responsible for defamatory material on their servers.
Quite how the government sees the situation as inviting to e-commerce companies is beyond me.
Remember, this is a country with an official secrets act, and no free speech protection.
The USA has broadly similar powers that the Official Secrets Act grants the UK government. All countries have certain information that is protected for reasons of national interest. The US is not significantly more open than the UK in this respect.
The lack of a formal right to Free Speech in the UK is detrimental, but it really isn't the issue here. The issue is that UK libel laws are stricter than the US laws. This isn't all bad. For example, it is much harder in the UK to use media power to unfairly smear and attack an individual. In the US you can use media power to libel someone and then hide behind a Free Speech defense, even when the victim doesn't have equal access to the media to put their side of the story.
Sailing over the event horizon
It's much easier to appreciate the First Amendment with such a contrast case available!
-- Diana Hsieh
-- Diana Hsieh
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