back to article LibDems back copyright takedowns

Two LibDem peers have tabled an amendment allowing the Courts to grant injunctions against ISPs - blocking off sections of the internet found to host infringing material. It's similar to the DMCA-style proposal punted by the BPI in the new year, which we exclusively revealed. Injunctions are already a legal tool against …

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  1. irish donkey
    Thumb Down

    Cancelled due to lack of intrest

    Political parties would not be able to implement such rules if the electorate took any notice.

    I would love to know how many Lords were 'Guiding' this legislation through for a consultation fee!

    Money makes the world go round. I guess that why the freetards will lose because they do it all for nothing.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Big Brother

    Abandon hope all ye..

    If this is passed it will result in widespread sensorship of the internet. WikiLeaks for example could be completely blocked simply because the MoD or some othercontent provider with an axe to grind cries copyright.

    This has to be the most short sighted and potentially most damaging proposal ever to have been shat out by a Liberal Lord =OC His party should diss-own him.

  3. Peter Galbavy
    Badgers

    All parties are for sale

    All parties need donations in the run up to a general election. The LibDems are no exception. I wonder which interest group bought this amendment ?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Explain to me

    Why are the LibDems doing a NuLabour here?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    At Least

    At least the lib dems want to give powers to the courts. Mandy wants powers granting to the government with no court involvement at all. It seems Mandy like the european legal system of "administrative certainty" we don't have that here, we have common law and Mandy doesn't like that. He doesn't like the idea of his legislation and powers being tested by the courts. The man wasn't elected, he isn't accountable to the lower house or the electorate. He must be stopped.

    Funny isn't how Labour have spent decades fighting to reduce the power of the upper house and then suddenly they give far too much power to one member of that house. A man who has already been proved to be corrupt. Fascinating.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Before too long the whole thing will be blocked

    Eventually the whole internet could end up being so restricted that the only websites that ISPS allow access to are Amazon, Ebay and whoever else can put up enough cash to shut up the local politicians.

    TorrenthostA - moves to system B, so site B is blocked, so they move to c, and so on and so on and so on.......

    Short sighted. Stop the content producers from ripping off the general public, and copyright infringement will be insignificant. If I have to sit through one more "anti piracy" advert when I am in the cinema having paid nearly TWICE the price, the bloody film will be when it hits blueray/dvd and made to feel like some sort of criminal, I'm going to probably just whinge some more... Lets face it, nobody reads those "strongly worded letters" anymore.

  7. Pete 2 Silver badge

    I must buy a new dictionary

    As my Concise Oxford is obviously way out of date. According to that, liberal is defined as (among others)

    "... favouring individual liberty, free trade ..."

    Similarly, they seem to have missed out on Democrat, too: " ... advocate of democracy..."

    Presumably all the new definitions of all these words we thought we knew the meaning of have been changed. Is there anywhere that we can go to find what these old words now mean, or does copyright protection prevent anyone from seeing or "dictionary-ising" them now?

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    snapshot of current internet

    It seems to me that most MPs have only a very brief experience of the internet, seeing in its current incarnation. Perhaps it is because so many are fairly technically illiterate that they have not been paying attention to the last 10 years of the internet and how it has changed both through technology and court action.

    A question that should be asked is why so much time and effort is going towards a civil crime on the internet, yet there are criminal laws that are being totally ignored by this bill.

  9. Funkster

    Can anyone tell me

    who I should be writing to to complain about this? Can I write to this Lord directly and expect some response or would I be wasting my time?

    Bunch of crooks they are.

    1. Patrick Seurre

      You could always try...

      You could always try using this website:

      http://www.writetothem.com

      I believe this site allows you to write directly to lords and your MP. You don't even have to know who your MP is - just your post code.

  10. Paul Crawford Silver badge
    FAIL

    Stupid, stupid, stupid!

    "the Court shall order the service provider to pay the copyright owner's costs of the application unless there were exceptional circumstances justifying the service provider's failure to prevent access despite notification by the copyright owner."

    In other words, at the merest hint of a complaint ISPs will block access rather than face possible costs. Blocking access should only be done via a court order, as in most cases the block will impact on far more than one link/page/file that have been complained about.

    There should also be a significant financial penalty for complaints that are unfounded, frivolous, or considered "fair use" of copyright.

    But this is only part of the horrendous mess this bill is attempting to foist upon us.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How about...

    How about I vote for another party to vote for which is interested of reexamining the copyright legislation?

    ... and changing it from 70 years to say 15?

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Name change...

    They really aren't very liberal are they!

    Generally they're not a bad bunch, but they seem to just love shooting themselves in the foot with some half baked ideas.

    Oh well, wouldn't vote for them anyway, their blind allegiance to Europe is enough to scare me away!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Headmaster

      hmmm

      Yep, not very liberal at all.

      But the "their blind allegiance to Europe" is a bit of a head-scratcher as that's where most of our freedoms are being defended from lately. Oh well, politics isn't about sense these days just jingoistic attitudes....

  13. burkesworks
    FAIL

    Not Liberal

    Er, unless he crossed the floor this morning I think you'll find Lord Howard of Rising is a Conservative peer, not a LibDem one.

  14. Ocular Sinister
    Stop

    I've said it before...

    ...but I'll say it again... Don't vote for the big 2 and a half if you actually want change...

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Digital Economy Death Penalty

    These people are in complete denial. The problem is the 150-year-long copyright terms, not the little people on the internet who unwittingly break that incredibly retarded law. Fix the cause, not the effect. Reform copyrights, don't kill the internet.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    the internet is so last year

    it's all about the anonymous distributed networks this year. untraceable, highly resilient and impossible to identify anyone within them.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Badgers

    Is this badly drafted of very clever?

    "power to grant an injunction against a service provider, requiring it to prevent access to online locations specified in the order of the Court for the prevention of online copyright infringement."

    At least this involves a real court, not just the court of Lord Mandy. If this is how the section is written and it was to be interpreted literally then it seems that it could be used for more than just blocking content hosted by that provider. e.g. BPI goes to court and shows loads of infringing torrents at ThePirateBay (an online location) and walks away with a court order obliging say Virgin Media to block access to it for all its subscribers.

    Is this more dangerous than the previous version?

  18. Maulkin
    Alert

    Not policy

    I should point out that this isn't party policy. See http://www.makeitpolicy.org.uk/ for what the Lib Dems actually propose.

    What seems to have happened is that the Lords are proposing that these sanctions have to be applied through the courts, rather than through a minister. Unfortunately, it's badly worded and could lead to all sorts of problems.

    Current hopes is that this bill will be lost in the wash, but you never know.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Resistance is futile...

    "Consumer opposition to the Bill had all died out, even before the Government's concessions last week."

    This might be because people realise that government is completely out of control and that resistance is futile (as in Borg)...

    But as we know, there is a chink in their armour, and that is the occasional deviant who thinks for himself. Such deviants are now looking to the minor political party that has direct democracy at the heart of its agenda.

    Vote UKIP, and you can resist this crap.

    1. Sarah Bee (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: Resistance is futile...

      UKIP! I always suspected.

      I shall allow that in the interests of political balance, not that I'm obliged to, but my moderating hand is wobbly as I'm shaking with laughter. Or fear. Or both. Mostly laughter.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Pint

        Why laugh?

        Why laugh?

        Do you perceive lack of support?

        Or

        Do you think it is insignificant?

        Or

        Do you think our government sponsored erosion of liberty/democracy is a good thing?

        Or

        Summint else?

        Or...

        Perhaps you do not understand direct democracy...

        As far as balance is concerned, the party that I mentioned is the only different party that is active and has any chance or desire to change things in this country, so mention of LibLabCON is one side of the balance (and we never hear the end of it, down to whether a perceived extra jaw gurn was an indication of an election announcement later this afternoon... (who f**king cares)), and on the other side is UKIP who have to engage in sensationalist behaviour to be less than ignored by the media, as recently occurred with the bank-clerk jibe by Farage of the rather nasty Marxist... Van Rumpuy. Do you remember voting for him to be your president?

        Incidentally, the system of government envisaged by this group has been in use in one European country for nearly 800 years, and this country regards the opinion/rights of the citizens, however weird, to be of more importance than the dangerous and even weirder assumptions of the political elites/government, after all, it is the people that pay for the government. In essence the people control the government, oddly they are the richest and most peaceful country in the world.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          WTF?

          How not to write legislation, [ (c) UK.gov, again]

          120A / 4 reads:

          Where—

          (a) the Court grants an injunction under subsection (1) upon the application of an owner of copyright whose copyright is infringed by the content accessible at or via each specified online location in the injunction, and

          (b) the owner of copyright before making the application made a written request to the service provider giving it a reasonable period of time to take measures to prevent its service being used to access the specified online location in the injunction, and no steps were taken,

          the Court shall order the service provider to pay the copyright owner's costs of the application unless there were exceptional circumstances justifying the service provider's failure to prevent access despite notification by the copyright owner.

          SO (a) means the court has to specify online locations - i.e. URLs - for content accessible "at or via". So Google and Bing are banned automatically the day the first injunction is granted then. Or can the copyright owner pick and choose the locations specified - and therefore discriminate against those it selects in favour of those it ignores?

          (b) surely the "no steps were taken" phrase surely means I as service provider can take the step of saying "We are investigating this and when we discover the verdict of the case in which you have won a conviction for a specific case of copyright infringement at or via the location you have specified, and confirmed that in no way have you discriminated against that location whilst ignoring others, we will require the site operator to remove the specified URL. Please provide the precise and unique URL for the item of content to which your request refers."

          Better still, the bit that says "specified online location in the injunction " is great - that means that until the injunction is granted, one cannot take steps. Until it's granted, it's merely an application for an injunction, not an injunction - but even ignoring the semantics, until the injunction is granted, how do I know whether the applicant has made any amendment to it after sending me their request? I'm not paying lawyers to keep up with them, they can send me appropriate paperwork - and if it becomes a snow job, then DDoS against them is perfectly fair game, cos they are doing it to me.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We shall never know

    We shall never know!

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