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UK Wants ISPs To Be Responsible For Third Party Content Online
An anonymous reader writes "A key UK government minister, Ed Vaizey (Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries), has ominously proposed that internet service providers should introduce a new Mediation Service that would allow them the freedom to censor third party content on the Internet, without court intervention, in response to little more than a public complaint. Vaizey anticipates that Internet users could use the 'service' to request that any material deemed to be 'inaccurate' (good luck with that) or privacy infringing is removed. No doubt any genuine complaints would probably get lost in a sea of abuse by commercial firms trying to attack freedom of speech and expression."
You need to think of this from the child's point of view! We are doing this to protect THEM!
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
All sites promoting religion are inaccurate, many government sites are inaccurate and Mr Vaizey himself makes assertions which would be widely deemed as inaccurate.
This is inaccurate, nobody with any "talent" is going to perform for a moron like Mr Vaizey. I demand this inaccurate blog posting be removed at once!
I am reminded of the world of Farenheit 451 and the plethora of Sci-Fi books and movies in which the Nazis won World War II. The free world is shackled with fascism on every level, censorship is enforced with capital punishment, and the secret police are in your head.
If truth really is stranger than fiction I can see Germany invading England again in the future to free the world of a great threat against freedom. In the end it will be like D-Day, but in reverse with a coalition of forces eating buttery croissants before leaving Normandy for the shores of England.
. It's all there. A means by which a LEGITIMATE concern over SPECIFIC kinds of information is removed after a REGULATED PROCESS between parties. He's talking about asking the Daily Mail to remove that story where they accidentally labelled you a paedophile. Or that other one where your address is listed as the local supermarket. Or that other one where someone has posted a sample of the text messages you sent your wife. Or maybe even those pictures you forwarded to your entire address book accidentally.
This is a good thing. Aren't we always harping on about Facebook/Google deliberatly violating our privacy? This guy is suggesting a mechanism whereby that kind of privacy violation can be limited, and everyone immediatly leaps to censorship hysteria.
I would like to complain about Ed Vaizey's opinion about public forums. Where do I go to censor him?
The ______ Agenda
I may disagree with the veracity of your attribution, but I will defend to mild inconvenience your right to repeat a famous misquotation.
Voltaire didn't actually say that.
"The most oft-cited Voltaire quotation is apocryphal. He is incorrectly credited with writing, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” These were not his words, but rather those of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, written under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre in her 1906 biographical book The Friends of Voltaire."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire#cite_ref-18
Didn't these guys get elected on the promise of LESS censorship and LESS civil liberties violations?
The only thing they have done so far on that score is to cancel the planned national ID card (and they only did that because it was costing so much money, not because they cared about civil liberties)
Is there ANYONE we can vote for in western countries like Australia, New Zealand, EU countries, US etc that will actually do something about giving people back the civil liberties they lost in the 10 years or so since some idiots crashed a couple of planes into some skyscrapers?
Is there ANYONE we can vote for that will do something GOOD when it comes to IP law and not just listen to the big end of town
Why?
Take a private citizen. There are, in some places, specific requirements for specific private citizens to report certain felonies, (i.e. a schoolteacher being required to report suspected child abuse) but they don't translate to those same entities having to report all misdemeanors, traffic violations and torts. So why should the standard for ISPs be so much all or nothing.
There are also other cases where specific knowledge limits are observed by law. Somewhat to my shame, I once participated in a program where local law enforcement dogs were trained to sniff out drugs. I personally planted drugs in various containers (i.e wrap the brick of dope in three layers of oil soaked plastic, and stick it in the middle of a half full coffee container, seal it, put it on the highest kitchen shelf, wipe down the area, then see if the dog can alert on it when the handler didn't know where I hid it either and couldn't give the dog subconsious cues.). This included attending a controlled burn and such, so if I were to testify that I smelled Cannabis, it would count as expert testimony, and that testimony could not be impeached with questions about how I happened to know for sure that what I smelled was pot, say from an opposing lawyer. Most citizens can't make that claim - they either have to admit they know what pot smells like from illegal use, or all they can say is they thought whatever they smelled might be pot. I could theoretically be compelled to testify if subpoenaed, but most people can't. That pesky 'truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth' bit means, in the US at least, you don't generally have a legal obligation to say what you don't know to be true, but only suspect.
In addition, most ISPs don't employ someone who could make a determination, say, whether a person in an erotic photo was of legal age or a year or two under, or whether those nuclear bomb diagrams have anything classified in them (or would even work) or not. Most ISPs don't employ anyone who is a recognized specialist in copyright law either. Yes, it can be argued that common knowledge should cause employees to suspect a current piece of popular music or TV show is copyrighted and a violation is likely taking place, but expecting that to translate to knowing the status of 30 year old TV shows or music is another story. There's also the normal limits of age and obscurity - a typical 20 year old may have no reason to know whether Woody Herman recorded that file in the 1990's or the 1930's, and a typical 50 year old may have no idea who A Flock of Seagulls or Front 242 was, let alone whatever's popular now. If a person has no idea if the music comes from a commercial source and not a garage band sharing its own files, how can the law demand that person follow up on suspicions they may simply not have?
Who is John Cabal?
It's a debate. They're discussing the nature of internet privacy. Here's why this is a good idea; here's why it's a bad idea.
By talking openly and by being willing to say something stupid, they can avoid putting the stupid stuff in the actual legislation.