The BBC reports that certain ISPs in the UK must block access to the Pirate Bay, but supplies few details. The International Law Office has detail:
The claimants relied on Section 97A of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, which requires ISPs to take measures to block or at least hinder access to infringing websites.
1988? This legislation has been lurking around since before the Internet. Never mind scary new legislation: one wonders what is lurking in old legislation, waiting to be used. Says section 97A:
The High Court (in Scotland, the Court of Session) shall have power to grant an injunction against a service provider, where that service provider has actual knowledge of another person using their service to infringe copyright.
All it takes is reams of vague legislation and the right interpretation to be made.
Update: As Dave points out in the comments, it seems that section 97A was added by The Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003, in 2003. My point about old legislation is weakened but this post was also intended to shed light on how Pirate Bay was blocked. It really is Nomic.
To be fair, they’re not psychic; it is the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 as amended by The Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003.
And when you see a section number with a capital letter in it, it’s 500-1 on that it’s a later amendment, not a section in the original bill.
Kinda pointless. As I understand it, pirate bay has gone to magnet links now which means the whole site could be stored as a relatively small file. A file which could, of course, be torrented and published as a tiny magnet link on any given website.
Given that Rob is concerned that the original legislation was passed before the internet, I think it’s worth pointing out that the internet was alive and kicking long before 1988.
Simon Jester: I know that, I was being slightly flippant. But there weren’t ISPs in the UK before 1990 (as I linked) and sharing music and movies wasn’t really going on. Well, it might have been on Usenet but I doubt government ministers were aware of it.
The point being that amendments can be retrospectively added to anything to change its function for current requirements (ie, to shut the peasants up) ?
JohnB: the underlying point, I suppose, is that the volume of legislation is so great that it renders meaningless the concept of rule of law. Not only is the volume great, it is constantly changing. So you can’t understand current law and can’t make meaningful predictions.
Until this case I had no idea it was possible to get ISPs to block access to web sites because of the links they shared. But it has been in law since 2003, awaiting the right court case.
What else is possible? Assumptions about what is and is not allowable under law need to be assigned lower probabilities of being correct.
Yes. Agreed. I think.
And also I have read, and it seems logical and inevitable, that copyright concerns and laws will be used to get control over the internet media which has contributed so significantly to the exposure, and significant neutralising, of the underhand methods used to control the masses by MSM.
Is a cat & mouse game now to download, the local governments ban something an then the downloaders find out an easy way of bypassing it. ive been using http://www.netprivacy.co.nr easy to switch on when one needs to, all these new moves are, are just a slight deterrent.