Not as silly a suggestion as I think was intended. I seem to recall there's been some work done on ship-mounted satellite launching systems - they offer flexibility in launch sites (some latitudes are better than others for some orbits) and no problems with protests from people living downrange of the launcher.
Yes, I made those definitions up, just as the compiler of the law dictionary you referred to did. I made them up based on:
The law degree I took, which included compulsory study of both Roman Law and the Law of Contract
The three years' vocational training - a year of Law Society Finals and two years as an articled clerk - I underwent in order to get my practising certificate, and.
Four years' practice as a solicitor specialising in legal issues relating to engineering, IT and technology.
You can rely on the dictionary if you want: that's your prerogative. I would, however, recommend that you didn't, if only because the pressure of space imposed by the composition of a dictionary definition necessarily degrades the signal somewhat. I haven't looked this up, but I believe infallibility isn't even a done deal for the Pope, let alone someone with a book contract and a deadline to meet. As I mentioned in my original post, both Atiyah and Treitel on Contract are very, very good reference works.
What I offered was a set of working definitions, translated out of legalese. I also pointed up some of the errors the compiler of the dictionary fell into. If that wasn't sufficiently clear to you from the header and other things I wrote, I do most sincerely apologise.
In return for which, I'd be grateful if you'd let me know what Podunk means!
[cheek]And if you're calling yourself "grammar nazi" you really need to stop verbing your nouns. "Referenced"? What's wrong with "referred to"?[/cheek]
I had hoped to avoid getting down to this level of technical detail in this thread, but here goes:
The test for liability, at UK law (US law is *probably* very similar, but check before relying, m'kay?) is whether, but for the allegedly wrongful act the harmful consequences would not have occurred.
If the answer on the evidence before the court is that it wouldn't have, then you've proven a causative link between the act and the harm and the person who did the act is one step nearer being found liable (the other steps needn't concern us here).
In your example, the claimant would have to show which of the individuals named wrote the shonky bit of code, and furthermore that without that change to the code his hard disk would still have partitions and a FAT on it (for example).
The task is, essentially, more or less impossible as a practical paying proposition (even without your introduction of one or more completely anonymous contributors).
This sort of thing - and quite a lot of OSS and Free software is like your example - is why I keep saying that writing/contributing to free software is fairly safe - any litigation against you would be a fairly poor proposition from the Claimant's point of view.
I ain't a US-qualified lawyer, but I doubt that US v. Microsoft will be affected. It isn't a relevant factor in litigation between two parties, even when one of those parties is the government, that some third party acted like an arsehole to help one of the parties in the fight.
I hold no brief for Microsoft. I use some of their stuff, and less with each upgrade cycle. I think their business practices as presented to the court are morally repugnant, and I'm unimpressed with the quality of their stuff.
That out of the way, lots of people are saying fair play to Oracle because they were shafting MS. Others have said that the practice is so common in business as to be unremarkable, even laudable in the present business environment.
It appears that there is nothing illegal in what has been done: well, OK so far. IANAUSQL, so my opinion on the subject in this case is more or less worthless.
What I don't buy is that this sort of thing is ethical or laudable. We're talking about competing not by trying to provide a better service at a lower price, but by stitching up the competition.
It might be lawful and commonplace and it might be done for a laudable aim, but frankly, those are not reasons to approve. To hold otherwise is to say that the end justifies the means, which simply Will Not Do, My Dears.
Calm down there. As you say, you're not a lawyer. I am, and I was offering a correction to your non-expert suggestion. You've about as much cause to get angry as I would if an expert in C criticised a program I wrote as poor work.
The solution you're now offering is slightly amended, but it still doesn't help.
The real protection for an author of free software is the fact that he doesn't have a contract (unless he imposed license conditions, and possibly not even then) and is virtually impossible to sue in tort for technical legal reasons that I won't go into here.
Sticking an.org in between the author and the consumer doesn't achieve anything, any more than the use of a distributor and retailer does for the maker of any other defective product: the primary liability - taking your example - for Linux is with the person who made up the particular distribution at issue, as you say.
The source code written by Torvalds and co. can't do any harm by itself - it's the executable version made up by the distributor that does the damage, if any. (Maybe, but I doubt it, the distributor could go back and have a pop at the author of a piece of faulty source that introduced a fault in the kernel, but the responsibility of one expert coder to another is at best limited since experts are supposed to be able to look after themselves)
With a piece of freeware where there is a clearly identifiable author, the person responsible for its quality is that author in the first instance. If someone else - say your hypothetical.org - takes additional responsibility by publishing it, then that adds another potential defendant. It doesn't get you around the fact that the author was liable to start with.
What you really want is this:
Your author is pretty much safe anyway, since he's pretty hard to sue.
To remove the last vestiges of doubt, he should include in his source, any executable he releases and any licence he releases with either of these, a statement to the effect that he can't be responsible for the effects of using the program on a system he knows nothing about. He should go on to say that anyone who wants to be sure that the program will be safe to use should take and rely on advice from an appropriate professional, and if they don't, it's their own look-out. (Take advice from a lawyer local to you about the exact wording to use).
Now that would work, requires no central.org, requires about three minutes of effort on the part of the author (once he's got good wording in place) and covers you if someone gets their copy other than from the.org. UCITA and indeed the general law allow you to exclude liability: trying to pass the buck to some third party won't do it.
License: That's pretty much it. License is what lawyers say when they mean permission. Permission can be general ("go right ahead") or limited ("Well, you can, but don't do X, Y or Z"). It can be given gratuitously ("With our compliments, sir") or in contract ("You have permission provided you give or promise to give me X")
Warranty: In simpler terms, a promise that a thing is or will be so made in the context of a contract. In common parlance, that a product meets or will meet a particular standard. It's a word for a particular class of contractual term - there is a technical distinction between "warranty" and "condition", but even lawyers get sloppy about this.
Contract: A deal. That's all it really means. Where two (or more) people agree to affect legal relations between themselves, there's usually a contract. A piece of paper with small print on it and a signature at the bottom is not a contract: it's (very, very strong) evidence of what the people who signed it agreed. A simple exchange of promises or goods will do as a contract, provided both parties meant it.
Contract Law: I really could spend all day pointing out the goofs in that definition. Contract law is the law that says when the court will get involved in a contract: the rest is technical detail. One principle of english contract law is that there has to be consideration before the court will get involved. That is, if you made a promise to me, I have to show that I gave something in return before the court will order you to perform on your promise. There are, of course, other principles, but you can find those in any decent textbook on the subject. (I recommend either Atiyah's or Treitel's - Atiyah for the overview and Treitel for the technical detail).
The stuff about Roman Law is basically horseshit from start to finish. Consensus ad idem is a latin tag used in common-law courts as a (pompous) shorthand for "both parties meaning the same thing by this bargain and intending it to be a contract of a kind the law will intervene in" and is a modern (ie post 1000 AD) coinage.
"caveat emptor" is a latin proverb meaning "let the buyer beware", and it only appeared in a few Roman forms of contract. Roman contracts, you see, were governed by particular formalities rather than a general theory, and each had its own rules. (There was only one worth looking at in detail, sponditio, and the rest of it was elaborate forms of conveyancing since most Roman deals were done on spit and a handshake since - having a couple of million slaves to grow food and mine ore for them - they never invented the commodity future.)
By way of support for the foregoing: I'm not a US-qualified lawyer, but from the little I understand of the US regime:
Any liability can be excluded by contract subject to a court finding that the exclusion is reasonable in all the circumstances; and
"All the circumstances" includes the relative wealth and ability to bear the risk of the party excluding liability.
Accordingly, an author of free software is going to have an easier time of disclaiming liability than, for example, Microsoft. Whether very large commercial software providers ought to be able to exclude such liability in whole or in part is, of course, a political question that I'm not going to digress on here.
... but the character of the solution proposed makes your IANAL somewhat redundant, I'm afraid.
The proposal you're making is for a body to offer an indemnity to authors of free software.
The trouble is that an indemnity doesn't affect the primary liability, so anyone dim enough to try and sue over the quality of free software (I've commented on this elsewhere and why it's almost certainly a fairly pointless proposition, financially if not legally and probably legally as well) is going to take a long hard look at the "straw man" that's undertaking to be responsible.
The minute it becomes apparent that this body is not worth powder and shot, they go off and sue the bearer of the primary liability.
I can assure you, if what you were proposing was possible, every corporation in the jurisdiction where it was allowed would be doing it. As it is, most corporate structures operate through a trading subsidiary which is so arranged as not to have any substantial assets, so that an incoming claim, if sufficiently disastrous, doesn't impact on the wealth of the corporate group entity too much. All they risk is their current trading assets that they can't license in from elsewhere in the group.
And even that is not perfect protection against a really determined creditor, but that's stuff from the Advanced Manual.
Essentially, this workaround doesn't work. If you want a body that offers indemnity against liability, you look in the book under "insurance companies", that being their main line of business. Alas, the thieving capitalist swine insist on being paid for assuming the liability...
Not from the UK you can't. Or at least, not without Official Approval.
The Outer Space Act 1986 (and when you see a title like that in the index of statutes you just have to go look it up!) provides that you're not allowed to launch anything into space (I forget the precise definition) from UK territory without a government license.
[TOUTING]Anyone planning a stunt like this, do please get in touch for more detailed advice...[/TOUTING]
Can a maker/distributor of free software be sued for damage done by a lack of quality in the finished product?
Maybe. But it would hardly be worth doing.
Trying to keep this as general as possible - so that it will be a reasonable first approximation in as many jurisdictions as possible - there are two routes to liability for the author of the software.
The first is in contract. He's OK if the software is totally free - you have to have given consideration before a contract becomes enforceable, which is what lawyers call "paying for things". Bear in mind that the law regards a promise as a thing of value, so a promise to pay is good consideration for a contract to be formed.
When I say "totally free", by the way, I mean no licence or anything. The promise not to do whatever is forbidden by the licence amounts to good consideration for a contract.
Usually, the law implies into contracts a term that the work done under it will be done with reasonable skill and care in all the circumstances. What is reasonable skill and care for a piece of software that's going to be given away free? Exactly. And when you consider that the nature of software is that there'll be a few bugs in it even with the most expensive stuff, there are some real obstacles to suing a freeware author in contract.
The second route is in tort, and that's even hairier. You have to prove that the author could reasonably have foreseen that his work could have come into the hands of an identifiable person or class of persons who could have suffered loss by using it, such loss being of a foreseaable kind. Frankly, that's too much to get over for an ordinary claimant. The freeware author has *no idea* where his work is going to go and what's going to be done with it.
The next step for the claimant is to show that the author didn't take reasonable skill and care in all the circumstances to make his software safe to use on the claimant's system. Frankly, that's impossible in the freeware circumstance. What's reasonable for a guy working out of the goodness of his heart is basically a lot less than a court would require of a company working for a billion-a-year turnover. Naming no names, of course, but you're beginning to understand why there are some *serious* disclaimers inside some shrink/clickwraps, no?
I'm not even going to try and explain pure economic loss arguments, Murphy v Brentwood and Hedley Byrne v. Heller here. Suffice to say that these too would make life very hard indeed for someone suing in a commonwealth jurisdiction.
On top of all of the above, your freeware author is likely to be judgement-proof anyway. That is, once you've gone to all the good time and trouble of suing him, he declares bankruptcy and you've spent all that money on lawyers and court time for precisely jack result.
There is one *big* limiting factor here, and it's that women have tended not to regard computers as a sufficiently big deal to spend time and effort studying them. And, here in the UK at least, some 55-60% of new entrants to the legal profession are women.
So, in about five years time, all the guys in my class at law school will have partnerships and be forming their own departments. Of them, most will have owned computers solely for playing games, downloading porn and generally dicking about with no real understanding.
They'll be the first wave of a generation that at least uses computers. Slightll less than half (by that stage - maternity leave slows down or stops a woman lawyer's career, except for the absolute brightest) will be women, whose IT-use demographic will drop the average level of tech involvement.
Basically, then, the rise of technological awareness in the legal profession will, after about five or six years, mirror the rise in tech awareness in the general population with a slight bias toward the line of the graph for women.
In other words, don't count on it.
Certainly at the moment there are individuals who know what they're doing with the software and hardware - they're informed and intelligent users of the kit. I go a bit further, in that I can do most of my own maintenance and am perfectly happy to put together a complete system for my own use, albeit that I'm happier messing with the physical bits inside the case than with the software.
As for the rest, well, it does what's required, the secretary knows how to make it do it, and all they need do is call IT if there's a problem.
There appears to be. While I'm more of a lawyer-with-some-geek-skills-picked-up-here-and-th ere, I appear to be doing OK and I'd be making more if I could stand London.
As a lawyer, your epilegal skills - languages, science, IT stuff, what-have-you make no difference to your status as a courtroom lawyer, and your practising certificate would (if you qualified in the UK) look exactly the same as mine. What it does do is give you knowledge of an industry that you can specialise in serving, and a real head start, not least because people in the hi-tech industries are used to having to use words of one syllable to their lawyers and accountants. With me, I understand quite a lot and can generally ask intelligent questions about the rest: the relief (especially with the engineers) is palpable.
I also get clients calling me for tech support queries - apparently I'm cheaper than *Unnamed major software producer*'s support helpline (higher hourly rate but quicker on the draw) and more likely to give a useful answer.
As to whether your should become a lawyer, the advice is this: don't do it for the money. Those who do make bad lawyers - bad for their clients and for society at large. Believe it or not, relative the to the effort and worry involved, most things are better paid.
As it happens, the best rewards I get are from the work I don't charge for, the pro bono stuff. Even if I quit the life to go dig ditches for a living (and at 1am after seventeen hours on a pig-awful deal for a client you don't like it can look a bloody attractive proposition) I'd keep that up if I could. And if you have trouble believing that, stay the hell out of my profession.
Well, no, not really. There's no reciprocal enforcement treaty between the UK and the US or any of the individual states - there's some judicial comity on enforcement, but not without review of merits.
Those TOS are pretty much a dead letter under UK law, since they occur way too late to be incorporated in any contract on first viewing and almost certainly fall foul of our Unfair Contract Terms Act as to any subsequent viewing.
Of the treaties/international organisations you mention, none have any bearing on a US firm, in New York, suing a UK subject in England. The treaties, in so far as they provide for anything, provide for common international standards or remedies in the infringer's home country for wrongs committed against foreign nationals.
What they don't do is give the NY courts jurisdiction to do a damned thing to me over here in England (see above as to enforcement without review of merits).
And they can't sue on that contract anywhere but in NY since it expressly provides exclusive jurisdiction (that is, not only do we have to litigate in NY, but we're not allowed to litigate it anywhere else).
For the record, IAAL, but a UKQL not a USQL, and the above is a statement of how futile I think the ILJ TOS actually are for any reader outside the US, not advice you should act on.
Although anyone dim enough to take serious decisions that might cost them money or liberty on the basis of/. postings is probably beyond help anyway.
... in respect of which the world's press remains eerily silent. Go here (it's one of the documents linked from the UK legislature's pending bills page, and is entirely official) and marvel at what the media will ignore.
And yes, it does exactly what it looks like: makes it legal, but not a hundred per cent legal.
(It is, however, like all Private Members' Bills - ones not supported by a government department - almost certainly doomed.)
On the terms of use point, they've got this squirrelled away and almost completely invisible - I couldn't see it linked to from anywhere but the homepage and it's easily missed, so I don't know who they think is going to be bound by it.
Or, for that matter, how they think the provision of something freely distributed before sight of terms amounts to consideration, but they clearly know NY law better than I do.
Hey ho. Let 'em go ahead, sue me in NY. See if I care. Because they excluded the jurisdiction of the UK court they'd have to enforce the judgment in...
(And that, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly why any journal claiming to be for the internet as a whole has to look outside the US. Nothing further, your honour.)
Agreed. I'd rate this as "quite good, as far as it goes", which is not very far at all.
I've bookmarked it though, since it's:
Free, and
Quite a handy noter-up of current US issues with enough citation and reference to make a handy starter-for-10 in researching a point, although it remains to be seen what the archiving is going to be like.
There's a more serious criticism, though, and that's that it's almost entirely US-focussed. (it would be entirely, but for that piece on the EU directive, which in any event is aimed squarely at a US reader.
This, frankly, won't do for a publication aimed at internet issues, which by their very nature involve consideration of issues of Private International Law.
On balance, I'd say/. was actually slightly more useful...
Well, IAAFL, and I specialise in this sort of technically- and technologically oriented work.
For the record, I know what those terms mean, and the meaning of many, many others. For the ones I don't know, I know where to look and/or who to ask. In any event, the criticism is about as meaningful in this context as my upbraiding C++ programmers generally for not knowing about LPR Corrosion Rate Measurement techniques, mitochondrial DNA or structural mechanics: these things are unnecessary to someone selling their services as a code-writer unless and until it impacts on the task at hand.
As for the need for "such laws", it's there, no matter what field of human endeavour you consider. I regret very much to inform you of this, but human beings are, from just below the average on down, at least one and usually more of: venal, corrupt, greedy, mendacious and stupid.
This means that just under half the people you'll ever deal with are, frankly, shitheels. It is for this reason that you need - when dealing with anyone whose bona fides you are not absolutely sure of - the protection of a legal system that will enforce contracts and punish/compensate for wrongs done. Unless and until the human race cleans up its act, laws will be needed.
People being what they are, laws tend to end up being extensive and, while usually simple in detail, complex in their overall effect. Just like, in fact, high-level programming languages. A modern and developed legal system, necessary for the reasons outlined above, creates a need for professional lawyers in exactly the same way as a modern and developed technology of computing creates a need for computer programmers.
I mean, in theory, if I needed a small application written and there was nothing out there that did precisely what I wanted, I could get a few books on appropriate programming languages and set to with a compiler and hope in my heart (occasionally, I do, for small things - I happen to enjoy doing it).
In practice, I'd go see someone with the appropriate expertise and get them do it for me.
It's the same with lawyers. There's nothing to keep you from drafting your own contracts and suing people in your own name. In practice, it's easier - and, if you're in business and you can use your time to make money - more cost-effective to hire someone with the expertise who has already, at his own expense, acquired the necessary skills and knowledge to do the job and do it more effectively and efficiently than an absolute beginner.
As for the proposal of a consurtium of geeks to write the laws relating to technology, it's not a bad idea as far as it goes. As a practical matter, the consortium should include a few lawyers simply to supply the necessary expertise in how best to frame laws and make them workable.
Don't hold your breath for this to happen any time soon, though. The politicians have gotten themselves a near-total monopoly on making laws, and don't look likely to give up on it any time soon.
It is legal for anyone above the age of consent (16) to be in pornographic material.
In fact, quite a lot of pornography isn't even obscene under current law. Obscene is defined at UK law as "tending to deprave and corrupt, having regard to the class of persons into whose hands it might come", and juries - no doubt influenced by 30 years of page 3 girls in the media murdochiana - have sensibly come to the conclusion that smiling/pouting young ladies with their lungs hanging out aren't likely to deprave or corrupt anyone, provided sales are restricted to adults.
Strangely it is illegal to show an erect penis in Britain... not that it overly bothers me.
Well, not illegal as such. It's just that it's accepted by the police and Customs & Excise that provided that any depiction of peni complies with the "Mull of Kintyre" rule (look at a map of the Mull!) they aren't going to even try a prosecution. Again, I doubt a jury is going to be too upset by pictures of young gentlemen au naturel.
Obscenity these days, given what passes for community standards here in the UK and how they'd likely be applied by a jury, basically means animals, nasty s&m, scatophilia and anything visibly non-consensual. The depiction of children is covered by separate legislation.
It is, alas, a common police/investigative tactic throughout the world to turn up and gain access to premises on the mere threat of a search warrant.
In fact, in most jurisdictions, at least some form of prior judicial scrutiny is required before agents of the state can violate privacy in search of evidence. (And if they claim they don't, ask for full details of the enactment/statute under which they derive their power and take a careful note of what is said, in writing and at the time.)
When faced with police pressure, you should always insist on seeing a warrant/court order before permitting any intrusion - don't back down unless and until they threaten physical harm. It makes life so much more fun for the nice officer when he has to explain himself to the judge later.
Of course, your mileage may vary as to how effective judicial scrutiny of police action ever is...
There's a common misconception in that post, which I'll correct here.
It's trademarks that have to be aggressively defended to maintain their value.
Copyright subsists in a creative work - of the appropriate kind, but let's not get into that level of detail here - from the moment it's created until the appropriate time limit (life plus term for human authors, straight term for corporate authors, term length varies according to jurisdiction you're in) expires: end of story. (The US has an additional wrinkle in that you need to register your copyright in order to claim a particular variety of enhanced damages for breach, but this doesn't affect the copyright itself.).
A copyright holder can choose to sue or not sue over breaches of copyright as he pleases without affecting the underlying validity of the copyright.
What difference this makes to your opinion of l'affaire Metallica is your own concern, however. Personally I think they're wasting a great deal of time and money on a futile exercise, whatever the rights and wrongs of Napster. But hey, us lawyers have to eat too...
IANAUSQL, but intent is not a part of the tort of libel.
What follows is the UK version, with the little I understand of US Libel law:
To prove libel you have to show that the offending material was published, defamatory, and not true. This is a simplification, and here in the UK the defendant has to prove that the libel was true, rather than the burden of proof being on the Claimant.
Publication seems to be a no-brainer here, since the censorware - I've never seen one of these things running, but I imagine they return a message saying "inappropriate content" - is distributed to anyone prepared to pay.
Defamation is a simple issue: anything that tends to lower a person in the estimation of right-thinking members of the public as represented by the jury. Not a problem here. The suggestion that a college is a porn site is clearly a nasty thing to say.
The falsehood of the statement isn't hard to deal with either.
The trick then is showing whether there's some or no justification for the libel. In the US, there's a "public figure" defence, which covers a libeller for all but outright barefaced malicious lying. There's also a possibility of some sort of "public interest" defence, in that the ware has to be absolutely guaranteed not to let little Johnny see anything inappropriate (although it has to be said that the only effective protection for children from porn is to teach them to be as disgusted by it as they ought to be) although I doubt the argument that it wouldn't be cost-effective to make the software smarter would wash in court.
That's as may be, but assuming the censorwaremongers don't get out on that score, they would have to pay general, special and possibly punitive damages. General damages is the sum the jury thinks adequately compensates the plaintiff, in so far as money can do it, for the harm suffered where that harm isn't just loss of money. Special damages are the sums that the plaintiff has had to spend or has lost as a result of the harmful act. Punitive damages are there to punish the tortfeasor, and while I can rattle off the criteria for English Law, the various US jurisdictions seem to operate on entirely different principles.
The reason why this sort of thing is never going to get off the ground (absent, say, open-source free censorware*) is that the censors are in it to make money.
Brief digression on subject of making money: money in less money out equals money made.
Back to the thread. Coding additional filters, heuristic routines, human eyes over a database of sites: all these things (and all equivalent measures) cost money, money that we have to add to the "money out" side of the "making money" equation.
So we are almost certain never to see intelligent censorware.
It's not clear to me what gives the judge the power to transfer domain names, though.
The judge doesn't have power to do anything save as between the parties to the litigation in front of him: this is basic to litigation in common-law jurisdictions (as Boston is).
What his honour has to do, therefore, is order the party holding the Domain Name Registration to transfer it to the other party to the litigation, if that's the way it comes out at trial or whatever other final order is made.
It's been a couple of weeks since I checked back on the progress of the RIP bill, but the last note I took of it was that Straw* had moved an amendment for an administrative provision allowing a Commissioner to delegate authorisations to his staff and Ann Widdecombe** had moved a few of her own prior to it going to the Lords:
adding an element of intent to the offence of forgetting one's password - which is what the Clause 49 offence actually is -and generally made it slightly less objectionable (in the sense that dogshit in the gutter is slightly less objectionable than dogshit on your bedroom carpet),
adding a requirement that the ISPs be represented on the technical approvals board for the built-in wiretaps;
Gathering together all of the various Commissioners for Spooks and Bugging as a single "Investigatory Powers Commission" (a dead letter. The Interception of Communications Commission has heard four complaints in fifteen years, and resolved them all against the complainant); and
requiring the government to state annually in parliament what it has spent on grants toward maintaining interception facilities with the post office, ISPs and telecoms providers generally
The Lib Dem's have had their own crack at emasculating the decryption warrant offences, but for the life of me I can't tell what their draft clause is actually driving at.
As for the Govt railroading the bill through (using the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 to pass it into law notwithstanding it having failed in the Lords) I don't think this is a serious possibility. Constitutional issues aren't my specialty (IMBALBIANACL) but I seem to recall that they can only do this on the second try at getting the bill through parliament. There'll have been a general election by then, so who knows. Generally, the government can only really get away with a Parliament Act steamroller if it's needed to deliver on a manifesto pledge, but that's convention rather than settled law.
Andrew D
*Straw: the Right Honourable Jack Straw MP PC, Secretary of State for the Home Department and Government Minister responsible for defecation on UK subjects liberties and rights from a great height
**Ann Widdecombe: Holder of the rare distinction of being the UK's ugliest politician, also known as "Doris Karloff". She's the shadow Home Secretary - basically HM's Loyal Opposition's spokesthing on matters falling within Straw's brief.
I think I better speak up here: the RIP Bill is currently just that, a Bill. That is, a proposal for legislation that may or may not make it through parliament.
The proposals in it that cause all the alarm are:
The requirement on ISPs to install monitoring kit in their routers and servers and so on to make internet wiretapping possible.
The provisions making it a criminal offence to refuse to divulge the means of decrypting encrypted data seized pursuant to a properly-obtained search warrant.
The provision that basically makes it lawful for the police to install bugs and wiretaps without a judicial warrant. (it's a grey area at the moment, with the weight of judicial opinion against it)
Of the above, the second isn't too bad. It's no worse than the police being entitled to use an angle-grinder to open a safe full of seized evidence. The problems lie in the fact that as drawn it makes forgetting your password potentially a criminal offence, it isn't subject to judicial scrutiny beyond the original warrant, and there are tipping-off offences (you aren't even allowed to tell your lawyer about it outside certain limits) included.
The other two are horror stories on their own, though. The regulation of bugs and taps has been taken the wrong way (it should have been resolved in favour of protection of privacy) and the ISPs are defecating in rage at the amount the means-of-interception provision will cost them if it is ever implemented.
On the sunny side, we've already beaten this lot once (it was originally in the Electronic Communications Bill, which became the Electronic Communications Act 2000 earlier this month) and no doubt we'll do it again.
And just to help anyone who wants to make a fuss about this, complaints, comments and suggestions about what ought to be done with the Bill (like, for example, binning it and starting again, not "sticking it where the sun don't shine", sore though the temptation may be) should be directed to our esteemed Secretary of State for the Home Department, the right honourable Jack Straw, MP. Whose constituency office is just around the corner from where I sit and type this, and I may well pay him a visit and see if I can bore him into submission...
Slashdot Mirror
Not as silly a suggestion as I think was intended. I seem to recall there's been some work done on ship-mounted satellite launching systems - they offer flexibility in launch sites (some latitudes are better than others for some orbits) and no problems with protests from people living downrange of the launcher.
Unnecessarily touchy, I feel.
Yes, I made those definitions up, just as the compiler of the law dictionary you referred to did. I made them up based on:
You can rely on the dictionary if you want: that's your prerogative. I would, however, recommend that you didn't, if only because the pressure of space imposed by the composition of a dictionary definition necessarily degrades the signal somewhat. I haven't looked this up, but I believe infallibility isn't even a done deal for the Pope, let alone someone with a book contract and a deadline to meet. As I mentioned in my original post, both Atiyah and Treitel on Contract are very, very good reference works.
What I offered was a set of working definitions, translated out of legalese. I also pointed up some of the errors the compiler of the dictionary fell into. If that wasn't sufficiently clear to you from the header and other things I wrote, I do most sincerely apologise.
In return for which, I'd be grateful if you'd let me know what Podunk means!
[cheek]And if you're calling yourself "grammar nazi" you really need to stop verbing your nouns. "Referenced"? What's wrong with "referred to"?[/cheek]
I had hoped to avoid getting down to this level of technical detail in this thread, but here goes:
The test for liability, at UK law (US law is *probably* very similar, but check before relying, m'kay?) is whether, but for the allegedly wrongful act the harmful consequences would not have occurred.
If the answer on the evidence before the court is that it wouldn't have, then you've proven a causative link between the act and the harm and the person who did the act is one step nearer being found liable (the other steps needn't concern us here).
In your example, the claimant would have to show which of the individuals named wrote the shonky bit of code, and furthermore that without that change to the code his hard disk would still have partitions and a FAT on it (for example).
The task is, essentially, more or less impossible as a practical paying proposition (even without your introduction of one or more completely anonymous contributors).
This sort of thing - and quite a lot of OSS and Free software is like your example - is why I keep saying that writing/contributing to free software is fairly safe - any litigation against you would be a fairly poor proposition from the Claimant's point of view.
Just to get some boilerplate out of the way:
That out of the way, lots of people are saying fair play to Oracle because they were shafting MS. Others have said that the practice is so common in business as to be unremarkable, even laudable in the present business environment.
It appears that there is nothing illegal in what has been done: well, OK so far. IANAUSQL, so my opinion on the subject in this case is more or less worthless.
What I don't buy is that this sort of thing is ethical or laudable. We're talking about competing not by trying to provide a better service at a lower price, but by stitching up the competition.
It might be lawful and commonplace and it might be done for a laudable aim, but frankly, those are not reasons to approve. To hold otherwise is to say that the end justifies the means, which simply Will Not Do, My Dears.
Calm down there. As you say, you're not a lawyer. I am, and I was offering a correction to your non-expert suggestion. You've about as much cause to get angry as I would if an expert in C criticised a program I wrote as poor work.
The solution you're now offering is slightly amended, but it still doesn't help.
The real protection for an author of free software is the fact that he doesn't have a contract (unless he imposed license conditions, and possibly not even then) and is virtually impossible to sue in tort for technical legal reasons that I won't go into here.
Sticking an .org in between the author and the consumer doesn't achieve anything, any more than the use of a distributor and retailer does for the maker of any other defective product: the primary liability - taking your example - for Linux is with the person who made up the particular distribution at issue, as you say.
The source code written by Torvalds and co. can't do any harm by itself - it's the executable version made up by the distributor that does the damage, if any. (Maybe, but I doubt it, the distributor could go back and have a pop at the author of a piece of faulty source that introduced a fault in the kernel, but the responsibility of one expert coder to another is at best limited since experts are supposed to be able to look after themselves)
With a piece of freeware where there is a clearly identifiable author, the person responsible for its quality is that author in the first instance. If someone else - say your hypothetical .org - takes additional responsibility by publishing it, then that adds another potential defendant. It doesn't get you around the fact that the author was liable to start with.
What you really want is this:
Now that would work, requires no central .org, requires about three minutes of effort on the part of the author (once he's got good wording in place) and covers you if someone gets their copy other than from the .org. UCITA and indeed the general law allow you to exclude liability: trying to pass the buck to some third party won't do it.
OK, cut down from the dictionary version:
License: That's pretty much it. License is what lawyers say when they mean permission. Permission can be general ("go right ahead") or limited ("Well, you can, but don't do X, Y or Z"). It can be given gratuitously ("With our compliments, sir") or in contract ("You have permission provided you give or promise to give me X")
Warranty: In simpler terms, a promise that a thing is or will be so made in the context of a contract. In common parlance, that a product meets or will meet a particular standard. It's a word for a particular class of contractual term - there is a technical distinction between "warranty" and "condition", but even lawyers get sloppy about this.
Contract: A deal. That's all it really means. Where two (or more) people agree to affect legal relations between themselves, there's usually a contract. A piece of paper with small print on it and a signature at the bottom is not a contract: it's (very, very strong) evidence of what the people who signed it agreed. A simple exchange of promises or goods will do as a contract, provided both parties meant it.
Contract Law: I really could spend all day pointing out the goofs in that definition. Contract law is the law that says when the court will get involved in a contract: the rest is technical detail. One principle of english contract law is that there has to be consideration before the court will get involved. That is, if you made a promise to me, I have to show that I gave something in return before the court will order you to perform on your promise. There are, of course, other principles, but you can find those in any decent textbook on the subject. (I recommend either Atiyah's or Treitel's - Atiyah for the overview and Treitel for the technical detail).
The stuff about Roman Law is basically horseshit from start to finish. Consensus ad idem is a latin tag used in common-law courts as a (pompous) shorthand for "both parties meaning the same thing by this bargain and intending it to be a contract of a kind the law will intervene in" and is a modern (ie post 1000 AD) coinage.
"caveat emptor" is a latin proverb meaning "let the buyer beware", and it only appeared in a few Roman forms of contract. Roman contracts, you see, were governed by particular formalities rather than a general theory, and each had its own rules. (There was only one worth looking at in detail, sponditio, and the rest of it was elaborate forms of conveyancing since most Roman deals were done on spit and a handshake since - having a couple of million slaves to grow food and mine ore for them - they never invented the commodity future.)
By way of support for the foregoing: I'm not a US-qualified lawyer, but from the little I understand of the US regime:
Accordingly, an author of free software is going to have an easier time of disclaiming liability than, for example, Microsoft. Whether very large commercial software providers ought to be able to exclude such liability in whole or in part is, of course, a political question that I'm not going to digress on here.
... but the character of the solution proposed makes your IANAL somewhat redundant, I'm afraid.
The proposal you're making is for a body to offer an indemnity to authors of free software.
The trouble is that an indemnity doesn't affect the primary liability, so anyone dim enough to try and sue over the quality of free software (I've commented on this elsewhere and why it's almost certainly a fairly pointless proposition, financially if not legally and probably legally as well) is going to take a long hard look at the "straw man" that's undertaking to be responsible.
The minute it becomes apparent that this body is not worth powder and shot, they go off and sue the bearer of the primary liability.
I can assure you, if what you were proposing was possible, every corporation in the jurisdiction where it was allowed would be doing it. As it is, most corporate structures operate through a trading subsidiary which is so arranged as not to have any substantial assets, so that an incoming claim, if sufficiently disastrous, doesn't impact on the wealth of the corporate group entity too much. All they risk is their current trading assets that they can't license in from elsewhere in the group.
And even that is not perfect protection against a really determined creditor, but that's stuff from the Advanced Manual.
Essentially, this workaround doesn't work. If you want a body that offers indemnity against liability, you look in the book under "insurance companies", that being their main line of business. Alas, the thieving capitalist swine insist on being paid for assuming the liability...
Not from the UK you can't. Or at least, not without Official Approval.
The Outer Space Act 1986 (and when you see a title like that in the index of statutes you just have to go look it up!) provides that you're not allowed to launch anything into space (I forget the precise definition) from UK territory without a government license.
[TOUTING]Anyone planning a stunt like this, do please get in touch for more detailed advice...[/TOUTING]
Can a maker/distributor of free software be sued for damage done by a lack of quality in the finished product?
Maybe. But it would hardly be worth doing.
Trying to keep this as general as possible - so that it will be a reasonable first approximation in as many jurisdictions as possible - there are two routes to liability for the author of the software.
The first is in contract. He's OK if the software is totally free - you have to have given consideration before a contract becomes enforceable, which is what lawyers call "paying for things". Bear in mind that the law regards a promise as a thing of value, so a promise to pay is good consideration for a contract to be formed.
When I say "totally free", by the way, I mean no licence or anything. The promise not to do whatever is forbidden by the licence amounts to good consideration for a contract.
Usually, the law implies into contracts a term that the work done under it will be done with reasonable skill and care in all the circumstances. What is reasonable skill and care for a piece of software that's going to be given away free? Exactly. And when you consider that the nature of software is that there'll be a few bugs in it even with the most expensive stuff, there are some real obstacles to suing a freeware author in contract.
The second route is in tort, and that's even hairier. You have to prove that the author could reasonably have foreseen that his work could have come into the hands of an identifiable person or class of persons who could have suffered loss by using it, such loss being of a foreseaable kind. Frankly, that's too much to get over for an ordinary claimant. The freeware author has *no idea* where his work is going to go and what's going to be done with it.
The next step for the claimant is to show that the author didn't take reasonable skill and care in all the circumstances to make his software safe to use on the claimant's system. Frankly, that's impossible in the freeware circumstance. What's reasonable for a guy working out of the goodness of his heart is basically a lot less than a court would require of a company working for a billion-a-year turnover. Naming no names, of course, but you're beginning to understand why there are some *serious* disclaimers inside some shrink/clickwraps, no?
I'm not even going to try and explain pure economic loss arguments, Murphy v Brentwood and Hedley Byrne v. Heller here. Suffice to say that these too would make life very hard indeed for someone suing in a commonwealth jurisdiction.
On top of all of the above, your freeware author is likely to be judgement-proof anyway. That is, once you've gone to all the good time and trouble of suing him, he declares bankruptcy and you've spent all that money on lawyers and court time for precisely jack result.
There is one *big* limiting factor here, and it's that women have tended not to regard computers as a sufficiently big deal to spend time and effort studying them. And, here in the UK at least, some 55-60% of new entrants to the legal profession are women.
So, in about five years time, all the guys in my class at law school will have partnerships and be forming their own departments. Of them, most will have owned computers solely for playing games, downloading porn and generally dicking about with no real understanding.
They'll be the first wave of a generation that at least uses computers. Slightll less than half (by that stage - maternity leave slows down or stops a woman lawyer's career, except for the absolute brightest) will be women, whose IT-use demographic will drop the average level of tech involvement.
Basically, then, the rise of technological awareness in the legal profession will, after about five or six years, mirror the rise in tech awareness in the general population with a slight bias toward the line of the graph for women.
In other words, don't count on it.
Certainly at the moment there are individuals who know what they're doing with the software and hardware - they're informed and intelligent users of the kit. I go a bit further, in that I can do most of my own maintenance and am perfectly happy to put together a complete system for my own use, albeit that I'm happier messing with the physical bits inside the case than with the software.
As for the rest, well, it does what's required, the secretary knows how to make it do it, and all they need do is call IT if there's a problem.
Market for geeks-turned-lawyers?
There appears to be. While I'm more of a lawyer-with-some-geek-skills-picked-up-here-and-th ere, I appear to be doing OK and I'd be making more if I could stand London.
As a lawyer, your epilegal skills - languages, science, IT stuff, what-have-you make no difference to your status as a courtroom lawyer, and your practising certificate would (if you qualified in the UK) look exactly the same as mine. What it does do is give you knowledge of an industry that you can specialise in serving, and a real head start, not least because people in the hi-tech industries are used to having to use words of one syllable to their lawyers and accountants. With me, I understand quite a lot and can generally ask intelligent questions about the rest: the relief (especially with the engineers) is palpable.
I also get clients calling me for tech support queries - apparently I'm cheaper than *Unnamed major software producer*'s support helpline (higher hourly rate but quicker on the draw) and more likely to give a useful answer.
As to whether your should become a lawyer, the advice is this: don't do it for the money. Those who do make bad lawyers - bad for their clients and for society at large. Believe it or not, relative the to the effort and worry involved, most things are better paid.
As it happens, the best rewards I get are from the work I don't charge for, the pro bono stuff. Even if I quit the life to go dig ditches for a living (and at 1am after seventeen hours on a pig-awful deal for a client you don't like it can look a bloody attractive proposition) I'd keep that up if I could. And if you have trouble believing that, stay the hell out of my profession.
Well, no, not really. There's no reciprocal enforcement treaty between the UK and the US or any of the individual states - there's some judicial comity on enforcement, but not without review of merits.
Those TOS are pretty much a dead letter under UK law, since they occur way too late to be incorporated in any contract on first viewing and almost certainly fall foul of our Unfair Contract Terms Act as to any subsequent viewing.
Of the treaties/international organisations you mention, none have any bearing on a US firm, in New York, suing a UK subject in England. The treaties, in so far as they provide for anything, provide for common international standards or remedies in the infringer's home country for wrongs committed against foreign nationals.
What they don't do is give the NY courts jurisdiction to do a damned thing to me over here in England (see above as to enforcement without review of merits).
And they can't sue on that contract anywhere but in NY since it expressly provides exclusive jurisdiction (that is, not only do we have to litigate in NY, but we're not allowed to litigate it anywhere else).
For the record, IAAL, but a UKQL not a USQL, and the above is a statement of how futile I think the ILJ TOS actually are for any reader outside the US, not advice you should act on.
Although anyone dim enough to take serious decisions that might cost them money or liberty on the basis of /. postings is probably beyond help anyway.
... in respect of which the world's press remains eerily silent. Go here (it's one of the documents linked from the UK legislature's pending bills page, and is entirely official) and marvel at what the media will ignore.
And yes, it does exactly what it looks like: makes it legal, but not a hundred per cent legal.
(It is, however, like all Private Members' Bills - ones not supported by a government department - almost certainly doomed.)
On the terms of use point, they've got this squirrelled away and almost completely invisible - I couldn't see it linked to from anywhere but the homepage and it's easily missed, so I don't know who they think is going to be bound by it.
Or, for that matter, how they think the provision of something freely distributed before sight of terms amounts to consideration, but they clearly know NY law better than I do.
Hey ho. Let 'em go ahead, sue me in NY. See if I care. Because they excluded the jurisdiction of the UK court they'd have to enforce the judgment in...
(And that, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly why any journal claiming to be for the internet as a whole has to look outside the US. Nothing further, your honour.)
Agreed. I'd rate this as "quite good, as far as it goes", which is not very far at all.
I've bookmarked it though, since it's:
There's a more serious criticism, though, and that's that it's almost entirely US-focussed. (it would be entirely, but for that piece on the EU directive, which in any event is aimed squarely at a US reader.
This, frankly, won't do for a publication aimed at internet issues, which by their very nature involve consideration of issues of Private International Law.
On balance, I'd say /. was actually slightly more useful...
Well, IAAFL, and I specialise in this sort of technically- and technologically oriented work.
For the record, I know what those terms mean, and the meaning of many, many others. For the ones I don't know, I know where to look and/or who to ask. In any event, the criticism is about as meaningful in this context as my upbraiding C++ programmers generally for not knowing about LPR Corrosion Rate Measurement techniques, mitochondrial DNA or structural mechanics: these things are unnecessary to someone selling their services as a code-writer unless and until it impacts on the task at hand.
As for the need for "such laws", it's there, no matter what field of human endeavour you consider. I regret very much to inform you of this, but human beings are, from just below the average on down, at least one and usually more of: venal, corrupt, greedy, mendacious and stupid.
This means that just under half the people you'll ever deal with are, frankly, shitheels. It is for this reason that you need - when dealing with anyone whose bona fides you are not absolutely sure of - the protection of a legal system that will enforce contracts and punish/compensate for wrongs done. Unless and until the human race cleans up its act, laws will be needed.
People being what they are, laws tend to end up being extensive and, while usually simple in detail, complex in their overall effect. Just like, in fact, high-level programming languages. A modern and developed legal system, necessary for the reasons outlined above, creates a need for professional lawyers in exactly the same way as a modern and developed technology of computing creates a need for computer programmers.
I mean, in theory, if I needed a small application written and there was nothing out there that did precisely what I wanted, I could get a few books on appropriate programming languages and set to with a compiler and hope in my heart (occasionally, I do, for small things - I happen to enjoy doing it).
In practice, I'd go see someone with the appropriate expertise and get them do it for me.
It's the same with lawyers. There's nothing to keep you from drafting your own contracts and suing people in your own name. In practice, it's easier - and, if you're in business and you can use your time to make money - more cost-effective to hire someone with the expertise who has already, at his own expense, acquired the necessary skills and knowledge to do the job and do it more effectively and efficiently than an absolute beginner.
As for the proposal of a consurtium of geeks to write the laws relating to technology, it's not a bad idea as far as it goes. As a practical matter, the consortium should include a few lawyers simply to supply the necessary expertise in how best to frame laws and make them workable.
Don't hold your breath for this to happen any time soon, though. The politicians have gotten themselves a near-total monopoly on making laws, and don't look likely to give up on it any time soon.
In fact, quite a lot of pornography isn't even obscene under current law. Obscene is defined at UK law as "tending to deprave and corrupt, having regard to the class of persons into whose hands it might come", and juries - no doubt influenced by 30 years of page 3 girls in the media murdochiana - have sensibly come to the conclusion that smiling/pouting young ladies with their lungs hanging out aren't likely to deprave or corrupt anyone, provided sales are restricted to adults.
Well, not illegal as such. It's just that it's accepted by the police and Customs & Excise that provided that any depiction of peni complies with the "Mull of Kintyre" rule (look at a map of the Mull!) they aren't going to even try a prosecution. Again, I doubt a jury is going to be too upset by pictures of young gentlemen au naturel.
Obscenity these days, given what passes for community standards here in the UK and how they'd likely be applied by a jury, basically means animals, nasty s&m, scatophilia and anything visibly non-consensual. The depiction of children is covered by separate legislation.
Hear Hear
It is, alas, a common police/investigative tactic throughout the world to turn up and gain access to premises on the mere threat of a search warrant.
In fact, in most jurisdictions, at least some form of prior judicial scrutiny is required before agents of the state can violate privacy in search of evidence. (And if they claim they don't, ask for full details of the enactment/statute under which they derive their power and take a careful note of what is said, in writing and at the time.)
When faced with police pressure, you should always insist on seeing a warrant/court order before permitting any intrusion - don't back down unless and until they threaten physical harm. It makes life so much more fun for the nice officer when he has to explain himself to the judge later.
Of course, your mileage may vary as to how effective judicial scrutiny of police action ever is...
There's a common misconception in that post, which I'll correct here.
It's trademarks that have to be aggressively defended to maintain their value.
Copyright subsists in a creative work - of the appropriate kind, but let's not get into that level of detail here - from the moment it's created until the appropriate time limit (life plus term for human authors, straight term for corporate authors, term length varies according to jurisdiction you're in) expires: end of story. (The US has an additional wrinkle in that you need to register your copyright in order to claim a particular variety of enhanced damages for breach, but this doesn't affect the copyright itself.).
A copyright holder can choose to sue or not sue over breaches of copyright as he pleases without affecting the underlying validity of the copyright.
What difference this makes to your opinion of l'affaire Metallica is your own concern, however. Personally I think they're wasting a great deal of time and money on a futile exercise, whatever the rights and wrongs of Napster. But hey, us lawyers have to eat too...
IANAUSQL, but intent is not a part of the tort of libel.
What follows is the UK version, with the little I understand of US Libel law:
To prove libel you have to show that the offending material was published, defamatory, and not true. This is a simplification, and here in the UK the defendant has to prove that the libel was true, rather than the burden of proof being on the Claimant.
Publication seems to be a no-brainer here, since the censorware - I've never seen one of these things running, but I imagine they return a message saying "inappropriate content" - is distributed to anyone prepared to pay.
Defamation is a simple issue: anything that tends to lower a person in the estimation of right-thinking members of the public as represented by the jury. Not a problem here. The suggestion that a college is a porn site is clearly a nasty thing to say.
The falsehood of the statement isn't hard to deal with either.
The trick then is showing whether there's some or no justification for the libel. In the US, there's a "public figure" defence, which covers a libeller for all but outright barefaced malicious lying. There's also a possibility of some sort of "public interest" defence, in that the ware has to be absolutely guaranteed not to let little Johnny see anything inappropriate (although it has to be said that the only effective protection for children from porn is to teach them to be as disgusted by it as they ought to be) although I doubt the argument that it wouldn't be cost-effective to make the software smarter would wash in court.
That's as may be, but assuming the censorwaremongers don't get out on that score, they would have to pay general, special and possibly punitive damages. General damages is the sum the jury thinks adequately compensates the plaintiff, in so far as money can do it, for the harm suffered where that harm isn't just loss of money. Special damages are the sums that the plaintiff has had to spend or has lost as a result of the harmful act. Punitive damages are there to punish the tortfeasor, and while I can rattle off the criteria for English Law, the various US jurisdictions seem to operate on entirely different principles.
The reason why this sort of thing is never going to get off the ground (absent, say, open-source free censorware*) is that the censors are in it to make money.
Brief digression on subject of making money: money in less money out equals money made.
Back to the thread. Coding additional filters, heuristic routines, human eyes over a database of sites: all these things (and all equivalent measures) cost money, money that we have to add to the "money out" side of the "making money" equation.
So we are almost certain never to see intelligent censorware.
*Not meant entirely in jest.
The judge doesn't have power to do anything save as between the parties to the litigation in front of him: this is basic to litigation in common-law jurisdictions (as Boston is).
What his honour has to do, therefore, is order the party holding the Domain Name Registration to transfer it to the other party to the litigation, if that's the way it comes out at trial or whatever other final order is made.
It's been a couple of weeks since I checked back on the progress of the RIP bill, but the last note I took of it was that Straw* had moved an amendment for an administrative provision allowing a Commissioner to delegate authorisations to his staff and Ann Widdecombe** had moved a few of her own prior to it going to the Lords:
The Lib Dem's have had their own crack at emasculating the decryption warrant offences, but for the life of me I can't tell what their draft clause is actually driving at.
As for the Govt railroading the bill through (using the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 to pass it into law notwithstanding it having failed in the Lords) I don't think this is a serious possibility. Constitutional issues aren't my specialty (IMBALBIANACL) but I seem to recall that they can only do this on the second try at getting the bill through parliament. There'll have been a general election by then, so who knows. Generally, the government can only really get away with a Parliament Act steamroller if it's needed to deliver on a manifesto pledge, but that's convention rather than settled law.
Andrew D
*Straw: the Right Honourable Jack Straw MP PC, Secretary of State for the Home Department and Government Minister responsible for defecation on UK subjects liberties and rights from a great height
**Ann Widdecombe: Holder of the rare distinction of being the UK's ugliest politician, also known as "Doris Karloff". She's the shadow Home Secretary - basically HM's Loyal Opposition's spokesthing on matters falling within Straw's brief.
I think I better speak up here: the RIP Bill is currently just that, a Bill. That is, a proposal for legislation that may or may not make it through parliament.
The proposals in it that cause all the alarm are:
Of the above, the second isn't too bad. It's no worse than the police being entitled to use an angle-grinder to open a safe full of seized evidence. The problems lie in the fact that as drawn it makes forgetting your password potentially a criminal offence, it isn't subject to judicial scrutiny beyond the original warrant, and there are tipping-off offences (you aren't even allowed to tell your lawyer about it outside certain limits) included.
The other two are horror stories on their own, though. The regulation of bugs and taps has been taken the wrong way (it should have been resolved in favour of protection of privacy) and the ISPs are defecating in rage at the amount the means-of-interception provision will cost them if it is ever implemented.
On the sunny side, we've already beaten this lot once (it was originally in the Electronic Communications Bill, which became the Electronic Communications Act 2000 earlier this month) and no doubt we'll do it again.
And just to help anyone who wants to make a fuss about this, complaints, comments and suggestions about what ought to be done with the Bill (like, for example, binning it and starting again, not "sticking it where the sun don't shine", sore though the temptation may be) should be directed to our esteemed Secretary of State for the Home Department, the right honourable Jack Straw, MP. Whose constituency office is just around the corner from where I sit and type this, and I may well pay him a visit and see if I can bore him into submission...
AndrewD