All girlfriends are like bluebottles. Some are just a bit harder to swat - Jane Clark
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Digital Economy Bill breaches human rights
A COMMITTEE of MPs and peers has attacked the Blighty government's get tough approach to illegal file-sharing.
The Joint Select Committee on Human Rights said the government's Digital Economy Bill needs clarification because as written it is human rights atrocity waiting to happen. It said that technical measures, which include cutting off persistent filesharers, are not "sufficiently specified", which we think means that they don't like those.
In a statement the committee added that it was concerned that the Bill could create "over-broad powers".
Andrew Dismore MP and chair of the Committee said that the world wide web is creating new challenges for policy-makers. However that does not justify ill-defined or sweeping legislative responses, especially when there is the possibility of restricting freedom of expression or the privacy of individual users.
The Select Committee only looked at parts of the Bill that focus on plans to tackle illegal filesharing and the suggested changes to UK copyright law. It said the bill lacks detail and there was no picture of the scope and impact of the provisions, and that it was concerned about the "technical measures" used to enforce the Bill
The Committee also examined Clause 17 of the bill, which would give the government the power to amend British copyright law at the whims of its best mates in the content industries without having to go back to Parliament to talk about it.
The Committee "remains concerned that Clause 17 remains overly broad and that parliamentary scrutiny may remain inadequate," it said. µ
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well of course it breaches human rights - peter mandelson invented it.
doesnt that say enough?
The clause that permits the Government to amend the copyright law without Parliamentary scrutiny must and should be amended to ensure that no such thing happens.
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acct
This may be an unwelcome comment, but TheRegister.co.uk, specifically Andrew "No Reader Comments Here" Orlowski, apparently thinks that the committee doesn't see any human rights problems in the legislation. Which should MAYBE make some of us worry.
I mean, suppose you criticise the government. Or McDonalds. Or, of course, Microsoft. And then you get thrown off the internet on a trumped-up multiple copyright charge. What's that about?
I think both Microsoft .NET AND Microsoft SQL Server say: as a condition of using the product, you undertake to publish benchmarks only when Microsoft agrees to you doing so, essentially.
I noticed this while installing a long series of Microsoft .NET update versions and patches, some of them correcting the damage done by previous patches, and seeing the licence over and over again. So I hope you don't think that the word "long" represents some kind of a benchmark.