Myths Persist About Running Public Wi-Fi in the UK (arstechnica.co.uk)

If you're running a Wi-Fi hotspot in the U.K., Ars Technica found most of the available legal advice online was either "ill-informed" or "invented", and "the same wrong advice repeated by multiple sources -- including vendors offering to help clients ensure compliance with the 'rules.'" An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: If you run a public Wi-Fi service, can you be held responsible if someone uses it to infringe copyright, defame someone or commit a crime? Ars Technica examines the situation under English law on intermediary liability, as well as looking at data protection law and obligations (or not) to store traffic data for law enforcement.

According to Ars, much publicised "guidance" for would-be Wi-Fi operators indicates that an operator would be liable, but the legal experts who spoke to Ars are far less convinced.

Comments

Wow - the original article is poorly written.

[queazocotal]

It quotes many other articles and then says 'but these are wrong'. (admittedly with sources) but doesn't contain a list of actual requirements.

Another very relevant factor is not what the law says, but what the police think the law says.
It's not a huge amount of comfort that you're right, when you're getting the door kicked in.

Re:Wow - the original article is poorly written.

[jrumney]

There are no actual requirements. Just a bunch of companies claiming that there are, and by the way, they can sell you a package that takes care of all their claimed requirements for a nice premium over the price of the router and bandwidth you need to provide the actual service, and collect your users' data for their own marketing purposes (ie, for sale to spammers) to boot.

Wrong question.

[SuricouRaven]

What a legal expert asks: "Can an operator, after legal process, be held liable for a crime committed via a hotspot they run?"

What the operators ask: "Even if I cannot eventually be held liable, is there a risk that the police will come break down my door, arrest me, and steal away all our computers before they realise that I am not not responsible for the crime they are investigating? Or that I will face a civil suit which, even if I win, will still cost me tens of thousands of pounds in legal fees?"

Law can be an expensive matter. Pyrrhic victory is a very real possibility.

The safest approach is to contract with a specialist public hotspot provider like The Cloud to run the spot. They have the legal experts on hand to address anything that might come up, and they can provide the best possible shield for the premises owner - they are the ones who actually run the service, the IP address is registered to them, so they are the ones who get any legal troubles. They generally also authenticate users (typically by requiring a phone number to SMS a login code to), which lets them keep the police off their backs. It's more expensive than just hooking up a basic wifi router though, especially for a small business that just wants to run a single point and doesn't have the negotiating power that a chain or franchise could bring to the table.