Britain's new Internet Law: Death of the Startup in Britain?

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/20/britains-new-interne.html

by mindstab • 17 years ago

59 67 17 years ago

boingboing.net

andre• 17 years ago

do people have any more freedoms left in UK?

joeter• 17 years ago

liberalized gambling laws

Slashed• 17 years ago

I will answer your question as a Londoner - Unfortunately, no. Though, now I live in Dublin and I already got a first letter from my ISP, warning me about using P2P networks. Gee, what a bunch of *holes!

bumblebird16• 17 years ago

At least we can drink a pint of beer before we're 21. Keep your "freedom".

We also have the freedom of health care for all. You know, we look after each other so people don't die so much.

philwelch3• 17 years ago

sigh

I'm happy for you that you have more freedom to drink beer. May I kindly suggest that, when exercising that freedom, you try and avoid nationalistic flame wars? This is Hacker News.

foldr10• 17 years ago

We still have the freedom to ignore stupid rhetorical questions, fortunately.

But I can sort of see how people would form this opinion of life in the UK based on internet hyperbole.

acg• 17 years ago

pierrefar• 17 years ago

The text of the bill: http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2009-10/digitaleconomy/d...

plaggypig• 17 years ago

This Bill is even worse than feared - see London based Telnic's (.tel registry) response to the government informing them that the statutory instrument to seize managerial control of domain registries applies to them:

http://prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=272545

Allegations of "abusive" behaviour on the part of registrars or end-users could lead an ignorant Secretary of State triggering this instrument.

So what's "abusive"? Well just for starters, registering an expired domain name is. Yes really, that's what the government believes (see the Digital Britain report).

So a company with about 12 employees has gone from being heralded at the UK IT awards last week for "the biggest innovation to come out of the UK since the www from Sir Tim Berners-Lee.".. to fearing nationalisation!

Brown thinks he can run the "Digital Economy" like a Soviet tractor factory. Who would want to invest in this?

What a joke.

russell• 17 years ago

Things are bad here with the DCMA, but things are really frightening in the UK which doesnt have the fundamental constitutional concepts of privacy, freedom of speech, and reasonable constraints on libel. Charlie Stross, a UK SF writer, has a blog today on this topic. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/imbecile...

BTW: he's one of us.

bumblebird16• 17 years ago

FWIW:

"things are really frightening in the UK which doesnt have the fundamental constitutional concepts of privacy, freedom of speech, and reasonable constraints on libel"

Only if you believe everything you read on the internet.

jrockway• 17 years ago

The statement you quoted is technically true, however. That doesn't mean that the UK exercises all the authority available to it or that the US does not pass illegal laws.

hristov• 17 years ago

Well that 50,000 pound fine is still half of the maximum fine imposed by US law.

weavejester• 17 years ago

Just a small nitpick; whilst the US has better freedom of speech laws and more reasonable libel laws than the UK, the UK (along with most EU countries) does have stricter privacy laws.

cmelbye• 17 years ago

I honestly never thought I'd say this, but this bill makes our DMCA look awesome. Politics in Europe are so unproductive and ridiculous, I really hope that it doesn't spread to the United States and other countries that still have some personal freedoms.

dirkstoop• 17 years ago

Judging all of European politics by what's happening in the UK right now is like judging American cuisine by one meal served at McDonalds (which admittedly, a lot of Europeans tend to do).

Nice counter-example: Finland just made broadband internet access into a legal right: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/finland.internet.righ...

bumblebird16• 17 years ago

I think making net access a human right is ridiculous. What next? Criminals asserting their human legal rights to have 1MB net connection installed in their cells.

foldr10• 17 years ago

>Politics in Europe are so unproductive and ridiculous, I really hope that it doesn't spread to the United States and other countries that still have some personal freedoms.

Wow, congratulations on the stupidest sweeping generalization I've seen all week. I mean, it's not like politics in the US is ever unproductive or ridiculous, right?

bumblebird16• 17 years ago

Linkbait. Why would this be anything concerning startups? Why would it discourage startups from starting up in Britain? How will it impact current startups? It won't.

No real news here, just some silly politicians trying to show muscle, which will ultimately fail and be irrelevant.

mindstab• 17 years ago

How? It makes it really really easy to be knocked offline which I suspect would make it hard to continue work on a startup. For instance

bumblebird16• 17 years ago

People working on startups are resourceful. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to find free wifi/3g/get cable/adsl from another provider etc etc etc

I agree the law is stupid and ill thought out and puts the whole idea of innocent until proven guilty out the window, but technology is hard for some people like unelected politicians to grasp. So they mess up, and make stupid laws.

Meanwhile, people just sidestep and make the laws useless and irrelevant.

_b8r0• 17 years ago

This bill very specifically concerns startups. Want to create a disruptive service? (e.g. You create a site to allow people to rate insurance sites) - well with this different businesses that say they're in the same industry can accuse you of infringement (e.g. insurance price comparison sites) and have you shut down providing they can convince the secretary of state, meaning that if you have a competitor then you may be screwed if you don't screw first.

It's not necessarily the case that it will fail. The current government uses laws with enabling clauses that are triggered by statutory instruments. Some of these laws include the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill (which allows wiretapping by authorised authorities) where authorised authorities were extended from the police to local authorities - who use it to spy on people to make sure they're managing bins properly. Another one is the Serious Organised Crime and Policing Act (SOCPA) which even the head of the association of chief police officers (ACPO) has said was excessive - it allows bailiffs to forcably enter your home and remove your goods before a hearing or trial and to sieze all your property once arrested.

My own personal favourite is the terrorism act, which introduced stop and search if police suspect things that may lead to a terrorist act. People get stop and searched at football matches, on their way to work and so on regardless of suspicion of terrorism. These things are all evil and all believed to be irrelevant but still got through. This is no different.

bumblebird16• 17 years ago

So you think that an insurance company can accuse another startup insurance comparison website of infringement, and get them shutdown?

Surely the same argument could be said for any law? Accuse your neighbor of murder, accuse a competitor of money laundering, etc etc.

idk. Things always sound worse when people moan about them on the internet. They'll affect a tiny handful of people. It's more about the government making news stories and appearing "tough on X" rather than anything else.

I've never been stop+searched. :(

pbhjpbhj8• 17 years ago

If your startup is domestically based or requires important people to have home internet access, and that access can be completely removed if your kid downloads (or is suspected of downloading) something that big-media say is infringing their copyright, then can you see how that might disrupt your online activity.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and posit that internet start-ups generally do less well without internet access.

RevRal• 17 years ago

This is why we need to overthrow some government and establish a hacker nation. I think something similar happened in the movie Igor....

In all seriousness, this is pretty scary. There is a fierce dichotomy here. There aren't very many people who believe file-sharing is that morally wrong (or morally wrong to begin with), it is just becoming very illegal.

Things are going to get more and more ridiculous, until we are forced to re-evaluate the very paradigms that hold up our economies. I've said it before, "money" is outdated.

cabalamat5• 17 years ago

Y'know, a hacker nation would have an awesome economy, at least its internet / high tech sector.

uriel• 17 years ago

Who knows, this might work: http://seasteading.org/

At least until Carmack manages to build rockets that can take us somewhere further away from all the insane people in this planet and their suicidal tendencies.

foldr10• 17 years ago

It's really irritating when people write the title to make it sound as if a bill which hasn't gone through parliament yet is already law.

cabalamat5• 17 years ago

Given that both the government and the main opposition party broadly support these measures, it's probable that something along these lines will become law, unless there is widespread public opposition. There will be a general election in Britain within the next 8 months, so it may well happen after then.

Incidently, I've recently started a Facebook group where anyone can pledge that they won't vote for any MP or candidate who supports this -- http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/wont-vote-for-any-...

bumblebird16• 17 years ago

Where would the modern internet be without groups of people getting completely outraged by things that they shouldn't really worry about.

See also: Every person in the UK is caught on CCTV a billion times every single day, which is fed into a central database and used by the government. Every email is logged by the government. etc etc etc.

This is the entire business model for "The daily mail" paper in the UK - get people completely scared to death about every single thing so they think the worlds falling apart and they need to buy the paper to keep up with it all. "There's pedophiles on everyones street!" "global warming will kill us all" "the government is spying on everyone" and so on for ever.

pbhjpbhj8• 17 years ago

Where would the modern internet be without groups of people getting completely outraged by things that they shouldn't really worry about.

You may not be outraged by the curtailment of our freedoms by a man who is unelected and has been booted out of post twice (at least) and who is spearheading a new copyright initiative immediately after staying at the pleasure of a media magnate, said initiative doing nothing for the public domain and everything for vested monopoly interests.

You may not, but those of us who prefer not to enforce the profit of the super-rich by the rule of law, solely for the benefit of those rich, we should be outraged.

thaumaturgy2• 17 years ago

This is fantastic. It's great news.

No, seriously. This kind of thing is exactly what's needed to make services like i2p (http://i2p2.de) popular enough to go mainstream.

Or another way to look at it, oft-quoted, is: the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

scscsc• 17 years ago

This has been on the tip of my tongue for a long while, so I might as well go ahead and say it now. I am ready to acknowledge the power of technology as much as anyone hanging around here.

But I think that dismissing the computer/internet laws currently being passed by countries in the EU as being unenforceable, or being easily solvable by technology workarounds is a great fallacy and the most stupid thing in the world to do.

The cat and mouse play between technology workarounds and law cannot go on forever, because eventually you will run out of legal workarounds. This is similar to the cat and mouse play between the police and law breakers. Unless you are in bed with the police, you will eventually get caught.

I think that the only viable alternative is to oppose these laws and hope they don't pass.

thaumaturgy2• 17 years ago

Why not do both? Oppose the laws, protest the laws, and when that doesn't work, then develop new technology to get around the laws.

This is a cycle that has been happening for millennia. It's not new. Authoritarians come into power, then they amass power, and then they attempt to rule by force. Usually, people first welcome their new authorities, because they want order and they naively expect that authorities are on their side; then they begin to become disenfranchised; and finally, they begin to subvert the authority and eventually counteract it altogether.

The only novel thing here is the level of technology that we're dealing with now -- but that benefits both sides.

Look at China: they've developed probably the most advanced national communications surveillance and filtering technology in the world (depending on how deep your paranoia runs); and while that works for many people, others are still finding ways around it.

Or, look at BitTorrent. Media "authorities" attack centralized distribution; hackers develop decentralized distribution. Authorities attack centralized tracking; hackers develop distributed hash tables. Authorities attack the protocol itself; hackers develop a new protocol. Authorities attack unencrypted communications; hackers develop decentralized, anonymous, encrypted communications.

Eventually this cycle of escalation will lead to distributed networks -- "guerilla" wifi mesh networks are already being used in some places -- and the only way the authorities will be able to counter that will be to shut down wired, wireless, and cellular communications for the great majority of the population.

How long do you think that will remain popular?

pbhjpbhj8• 17 years ago

Did you miss the part about having your internet accessed revoked if a super-rich media giant catches you trying to sniff their money. i2p, tor, etc. will simply be interpreted by the rights holders as "is trying to steal(sic#) copyright material" and users will have their whole families internet access removed without trial or need to provide evidence.

i2p only works if you're allowed to access the internet.

# usually steal is used, as here, when the activity is actually mere copyright infringement; stealing requires that the material would no longer be available to the rights holder.

Britain's new Internet Law: Death of the Startup in Britain?

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