UK regulatory posts
I had to stare at this for a bit to understand it. In a Written Declaration the European Parliament has called on the Member States to coordinate a European early warning system involving their public authorities, based on the existing system for food safety, as a means of tackling paedophilia and sex offending.
They are also talking about applying the Data Retention Directive (Directive 2006/24/EC) to search engines.
Mandelson’s Uncertainty Principle states that the costs to an ISP of processing a Copyright Infringement Report can only be known when that ISP knows how many CIRs it is going to have to process and that Rights Holders will not disclose this number until they know the costs.
If it was as simple as that we might be able to come to some arrangement but of course it isn’t.
The BIS consultation on Costs under the Digital Economy Act is not scheduled until October 2010. Work is going on now to prepare for this and yesterday Ofcom held a meeting with ISPs to take on board their views on the subject.
Just ploughing through the 73 pages of the Ofcom Draft Code of Practice for the Digital Economy Act.
There isn’t much time for the industry to respond here and I’m certainly not in a position to give it a comprehensive review after 10 minutes of scan-through reading.
A few points do immediately jump out of the page at me though.
The next Ofcom stakeholder meeting on the Digital Economy Act (DEAct) is taking place next Tuesday June 1 at 3pm at Ofcom. The meeting will be looking at Ofcom’s work in relation to cost sharing under the statutory instrument, on which BIS is currently consulting.
The DEAct was heavily weighted in favour of rights holders and we should be seriously concerned that the Code of Practice does not adopt a similar bias.
ISPs are intermediaries that pass packets of information over their networks. ISPs neither benefit from, nor
The government published the final coalition agreement this week. The government proposes to:
End the storage of internet and email records without good reason;
This is good. The cost to industry was going to be enormous to do this. This might well also affect the government’s thinking in respect of the Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP). IMP is a whole different can of beans whereby ISPs were going to potentially be asked for all sorts of interception and tracking involvement by the Big Brothers.
Section 8 of the Digital Economy Act requires Ofcom to report on the provision of lawful services, education and information campaigns, levels of copyright infringement and legal proceedings against infringers.
By January of 2011 the regulator must have set up an independent monitoring system so that there is data available to measure the success or otherwise of the Act.
Ofcom is proposing that monitoring should consist of three types of input: collation of existing data (eg existing industry reports, ISP traffic data and existing consumer research), consumer research and direct measurement of activity on file sharing networks.
Independant partners will be commissioned for the consumer market research and the direct measurement work with the tendering process beginning in June.
The market research will be conducted 4 times a year on samples of 5,000 persons each time. It will be interesting to see how accurate this research is. Will people tell the truth? I guess it will just be a contribution to the overall dataset.
The baseline data needs to be in place for the start of next year.
You might be interested in reading my latest guest post over at broadbandgenie.
Mayor of London Boris Johnson has promised full WiFi coverage of London in time for the 2012 Olympic games. It would be ironic if the Olympic Games WiFi coverage was shut down because someone had been caught indulging in online copyright infringement. As Mayor will he be the one having to turn up in court?
ISPA Secretariat met with Campbell Cowie and Chris Rowsell from Ofcom this afternoon to discuss the ongoing work surrounding the DE Act.
Ofcom explained that the Code will look at four areas: process – how a Copyright Infringement Report (CIR) is generated and sent and the notification process; appeals for consumers; dispute resolution between ISPs and RHs; and costs, which BIS will be focusing on.
The Code is due to be published within the next ‘couple of weeks’, though no date has been set. As Ofcom did not anticipate industry to come together and produce an effective code as per the DE Bill/Act, it had been planning what a Code may look like for some time and had not relied on one side of the debate to influence the content.
Due to the short timescales Ofcom has been working to, the Code will be instructional rather than setting out line-by-line what is required. For example, instead of dictating a standard approach for a CIR, those affected will have to tell Ofcom how they will go about it and Ofcom will then approve it or recommend changes.
The Code will initially be limited to ISPs with around 400,000 subscribers – currently 7 ISPs – and not including mobile broadband, but the long-term ambition is to target those ISPs with copyright infringing consumers. So downloaders who migrate to an ISP not included in the soft launch of the Code will eventually be covered as Ofcom follows the traffic. Ofcom has also been tasked with analysing the level of copyright infringement and barriers to innovative and emerging business models and report back to the Secretary of State, and would be actively seeking views on this.
My thanks to the ISPA Secretariat for this feedback.
ISPA Secretariat met with Campbell Cowie and Chris Rowsell from Ofcom this afternoon to discuss the ongoing work surrounding the DE Act.
Ofcom explained that the Code will look at four areas: process – how a Copyright Infringement Report (CIR) is generated and sent and the notification process; appeals for consumers; dispute resolution between ISPs and RHs; and costs, which BIS will be focusing on.
The Code is due to be published within the next ‘couple of weeks’, though no date has been set. As Ofcom did not anticipate industry to come together and produce an effective code as per the DE Bill/Act, it had been planning what a Code may look like for some time and had not relied on one side of the debate to influence the content.
Due to the short timescales Ofcom has been working to, the Code will be instructional rather than setting out line-by-line what is required. For example, instead of dictating a standard approach for a CIR, those affected will have to tell Ofcom how they will go about it and Ofcom will then approve it or recommend changes.
The Code will initially be limited to ISPs with around 400,000 subscribers – currently 7 ISPs – and not including mobile broadband, but the long-term ambition is to target those ISPs with copyright infringing consumers. So downloaders who migrate to an ISP not included in the soft launch of the Code will eventually be covered as Ofcom follows the traffic. Ofcom has also been tasked with analysing the level of copyright infringement and barriers to innovative and emerging business models and report back to the Secretary of State, and would be actively seeking views on this.
My thanks to the ISPA Secretariat for this feedback.
Ofcom seems to have gone very quiet since the initial flurry of consultation meetings following the passing of the Digital Economy Act. This is somewhat concerning in my mind. Ofcom has to produce a draft Code of Practice by the end of May.
The DEAct is such a contentious subject that the last thing we want is to find that this CoP is not objective and is bisassed towards one set of stakeholders over another. It is a lot easier to get changes made before the initial draft than afterwards.
It is also hugely important for Ofcom to remain transparent here and it would make sense to me for the regulator to be asked to identify how many contacts and inputs have been had with each set of stakeholders during the compilation of the draft CoP.
Ofcom responsibilites in respect of the DEAct can be found here. There is one meeting planned for 20th May to present these duties. Doesn’t seem to be to do with the CoP subject matter.
Former Digital Britain Minister Stephen Timms was stabbed today whilst conducting a surgery in his constituency in East Ham. It is sad that this risk must be a by product of public service for MPs.
Whilst I didn’t support what Stephen Timms did with the Digital Economy Act I did recognise that I was dealing with a good and honest man, regardless of whether we agreed with each other on what he was doing.
I’m sure that we all wish him a speedy recovery.
PS I’m sure he would appreciate it if anyone has a CD or two to lend him whilst he is in hospital. Hospital radio must get a bit repetitive. No home made compilations please. Let’s be sensitive now.
Not to mention the mince…
Louise Lancaster is a communications lawyer specialising in interconnect, regulation and public affairs. Having qualified as a solicitor in 1994, Louise held a variety of legal, regulatory and public policy roles in the telecoms industry before forming Ayres End Consulting in 2003. She now provides commercial, strategic and compliance advice to communications providers and trade associations. Her website is at http://www.ayres-end.com/.
It is widely accepted that the routing of calls to ported numbers in the UK is based on an antiquated process. Calls to ported numbers are required to route via the original Range Holder, and then onward to the current service provider (rather than being directly routed to the current SP). To achieve this, the Range Holder and the new service provider must engage in drawn out negotiations to agree conveyance charges and routing plans. These typically take six months to a year, but can take longer.
If I wish to change my service provider I will not want the move to be delayed by an inability to port my number. But
The difficulty of implementing current copyright legislation has been highlighted during this election campaign. In the first place both Labour and Conservatives appeared to use a copyrighted image in their campaign without permission – reported in the Telegraph.
Secondly BPI spokesman Adam Liversage was allegedly caught advising his wife via twitter on how to infinge someone’s copyrighted images.
Thirdly today twitter is chirruping away like crazy about how the French Hadopi organisation is having to rebrand because its logo uses copyrighted font. The Hadopi Law, if you are not familiar with the name is the French three strikes equivalent of the Digital Economy Act.
I’m not an expert on copyright but it seems to me that if the organisations and individuals mentioned above find it hard to not break the rules then what hope everyone else.
We could do with a repository to collect similar stories to build up a body of knowledge in respect of this.
Ofcom held a DEAct definitions meeting with ISPs yesterday afternoon. Although I couldn’t make this one I have discussed the progress made with some of the attendees.
My view is that Ofcom has been given a task, the generation of the draft Digital Economy Act Code of Practice, that is impossible to fulfil to everyone’s satisfaction in the three weeks that the regulator has left to complete it.
The meeting did not nail the major issues in terms of definition of who is and isn’t an ISP or Subscriber. Some of the definitions are highly complex and subject to different interpretations. The natural order of these things, believe it or not, is to brush the problem areas under the carpet and assume that this will be ok.
However in this case using the “carpet technique” potentially leaves huge holes in the legislation that will make it completely ineffective.
For example nobody believes that the intention of the Act is to kill off the WiFi hotspot market. Is a WiFi hostpot operator a subscriber or a Communications Provider? The latter potentially as it is selling/providing services to custmers. It is impossible in a many cases to be able to identify the subscriber on these hotspots so infringement notices go to who?
So whilst it isn’t Parliament’s intention to kill off WiFi hotspots if they don’t do so then these connections will become defacto standard targets for those wanting to continue to download copyrighted material.
Marry in haste and repent at leisure (or words to that effect).
Also good luck to the people at Ofcom because they are, in my experience, by and large intelligent and able folk. We only have to wait 3 weeks to see what they come up with.
On Tuesday in London I chaired a technical workshop focussing on High Definition Voice. The event, run by the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association (ITSPA), was generously sponsored by Cisco and Broadsoft and who also provided some working demos together with ITSPA member YeaLink.
Around 40 or so people from the industry held a very informative discussion. Clearly the vendor community is getting there with support for HD voice. The service provider world has yet to catch up really and in particular the connections to the PSTN are not by and large there yet.
I went along to the Digital Economy Act appeals meeting at Ofcom today. I did so partly out of concern that smaller ISPs were not being given a voice at this important stage of the post DEAct game.
The Ofcom Boardroom (R11.01) was hardly big enough for the 35 or so people there. Organisations represented included ISPA, Timico, Which, Consumer Focus, Ofcom, AAISP, DCMS, Alliance Against IP Theft, UK Music (Feargal), BPI, BT, Mobile Broadband Group, Sky, Premier League, Orange, HSBC, Post Office, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, T Mobile, Communications Consumer Panel, Open Rights Group, Nintendo.
The scope of the meeting was to discuss the Appeals Process for subscribers accused of unlawful copyright
Doing the rounds today is news of the removal of the RSLOG.net site. The italicised text is from their temporary holding page.
“RLSLOG.net was suspended by its German hosting company after removal request from law firm representing Universal Music, although we never hosted any files or copyrighted data on our server. Our site is strictly informative.
We found a new host and moved our site, but it wasn’t powerful enough to handle the site.
We should be back tomorrow on more powerful server.
Check our forums in the meantime: rlstalk.net.”
Now I’ve never been on RSLOG.net. A quick “Google” tells me this about it:
Links. RSS | IRC | Contact · New releases | posts · AuTo.RLSLOG.net · NewTorrents.info · NTi forums · Leecher’s Lair · PornLeecher · Rapidshare King …
It doesn’t look like my kind of site. I then did another quick Google on “NewTorrents.info” and it came up with about 1,950,000 results. That’s a lot of sites promoting free availability of copyrighted material (presumably).
The Government was naive in the extreme to think that filtering websites would go anyway towards solving the problem of unlawful copyring infringement. It is a complete waste of time, effort and money that also establishes a very dangerous precedent.
If this ludicrous law somehow sticks I’d like to see the Government take on Google, Bing (Microsoft) et al and trefor.net. We are all accessories to unlawful activity here.
A friend of mine works in Tech Support for BT. He gets a lot of consumer support calls for broadband. This brief transcript is of one of his calls recently:
Customer: I can’t get my wireless to work
Tech Support: Is your wireless light on the hub holding colour or not?
Customer:I don’t know it’s next door
Tech Support: Oh right could you go back home and check?
Customer: Oh no sorry its my neighbours hub and they are at work
Tech Support: Oh so do they know you use their internet connection?
Customer: No he told me his password once when he was drunk
Tech Support: Do you know that is illegal (long pause). Phone goes dead.
Lets hope that the “customer” hasn’t been using his neighbour’s broadband for unlawfully downloading copyrighted material. Who needs enemies eh?…
DEAct DEBill
This video is doing the rounds. It helps you understand why the web filtering aspect of the Digital Economy Act is a very bad thing.
In a continuation of the farcial speed that the Digital Economy Bill was rushed through into Law I’m told that Ofcom has already conducted two meetings with the 5 largest ISPs to discuss the implementation of the Code of Practice with a third planned for next Wednesday.
I’m also told that Ofcom has also met with 9 Music Industry Rights Holders and 5 from the movie making industry. Perhaps Ofcom could elaborate on this? If this is the case it seems hugely disproportionate in terms of representation. Hugely unfair in fact and feels very familiar with the way the Law was rushed through in the first place.
Despite what seems on the face of it to be a substantial consultation with Rights Holders no attempt appears to have been made to involve any small ISPs, the ISP Association, ISPA, or the London Internet Exchange, LINX. In fact the majority of the organisations that stand to lose out under the Digital Economy Act.
A threshold is likely to be applied in respect of which ISPs must comply with the DEA. This however has not been set yet and without it seems reasonable that all ISPs likely to be affected by it get a chance to participate in the discussion.
Being a reasonable minded person I am able to look at it from Ofcom’s perspective and observe that they have very little time to put together a Code of Practice around a hugely complex and controversial subject. You might say Ofcom has been stitched up just as the ISPs have been. However in this case it just isn’t good enough. I think everyone concerned here should complain to Ofcom in the morning.
The Ofcom Switchboard number is 0300 123 3000 or 020 7981 3000. Ask for Ed Richards, Chief Executive.
Follow on note – check out these posts from Andrew Cormack, Chief Regulatory Adviser, JANET . He was at one of the meetings.
The last month has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster ride for broadband users, ISPs and anyone interested in basic liberties in the UK.
On Friday 19th March The Digital Economy Bill passed from the House of Lords to the Commons. The three readings in the Lords took most of the three months since Christmas. The Commons only spent a few days “deliberating” the Bill. The General Election and “wash-up” process meant that the Bill was effectively nodded through by the Labour and Conservatives.
This is the only time I have ever watched parliament online. I don’t know how many people were viewing the
Check this Ofcom announcement. It basically covers their terms of reference for the Copyright Infringement piece of the Digital Economy Act (was Bill – feels kinda final).
There is going to be a lot written on this between now and the end of the year. There are no surprises at this stage though the statement does confirm that the process has to take no more than 8 months including 3 months for the Code of Practice to be approved by the European Commission.
The draft CoP also has to be in place no later than May. There is an option for stakeholders to jointly propose a draft within this timeframe but I can’t see it happening. I may be wrong.
I’m off to a meeting with a customer the week after next. Nothing unusual in that of course. In fact I like meeting customers. It gives me a chance to find out how we are doing.
This particular customer however provides in room internet services to hotels. They want to know how the Digital Economy Bill will affect them. The reality is that we won’t know until Ofcom has completed its work on the Code of Practice. It is right that they start looking at the subject now though because it does have the potential to harm them in a big way.
Customers downloading copyright material from the internet will be long gone by the time Rights Holders catch up with the ISP. In fact who is the Service Provider in this case? Timico, who owns the infrastructure, or Timico’s customer who has the relationship with the hotel? Or is it the hotel, which has the relationship with the paying guest? Hmm!
I know I keep going on about the lack of understanding of technology and the internet amongst the establishment. Another classic faux pas in this space has happened in the Labour Party Manifesto:
where they talk about a minimum broadband Universal Service Commitment of 2megabytes per second.
Most readers of this blog will be savvy enough to know the difference between megabytes and megabits. The latter is what they really mean, the former is 8 x the speed of the latter.
The point is that this is such a basic mistake that it just serves to highlight the total lack of understanding of technology. It also highlights why many MPs voted in favour of the Digital Economy Bill.
Tesco has been using Freshtel as the underlying provider of its VoIP service. Unfortunately the Australian VoIP company announced in March that it was closing its UK operations – something to do with an operating loss of $1.25m.
Tesco service is now apparently scheduled to be shut down on the 27th April. Nobody knows how many customers are affected but the Tesco was aggressively marketing the service for some considerable time so it could be quite a few.
The biggest problem is that Freshtel, being an Australian company and moreover not being an ITSPA (Internet Telephony Service Providers Association) member, did not have any porting arrangements with anyone in the UK. Ofcom are looking into it but time is short.
I understand that Tesco is talking to both Virgin Media and Cable and Wireless to try and find a solution. If one of them already hosts the Freshtel number range that could be an easy way out.
The situation is however further complicated by the fact that Tesco not only used low cost equipment at the customer premises but it is also locked to the Tesco service so that changing the VoIP service information for a new service provider is not easy or straightforward.
The whole subject of number portability is still an issue in the UK. Large service providers (BT, C&W et al) have no incentive to make it easy. They are the likely losers in the portability game.
Although on the face of it these service providers do say that they are willing to engage with other ITSPs in the interest of the customer the reality is that as large organisations they are a) staffed by teams of lawyers who have their jobs/reputations/companies to protect and b) often reluctant to deal with very small organisations who could go bust at any time and leave them with liabilites. These are actually quite understandable problems for large companies.
Dealing with a member of ITSPA notionally does mean that porting to other companies should be relatively easy but it is still early days and the system is not yet necessarily smooth. ITSPA has been campaigning for a standard porting contract to be made available for everyone in the industry to use. This almost certainly won’t interest the big boys but it could at least make setting up porting arrangents generally easier for everyone else. I’ll report back as I see progress being made here.
The Queen nodded the Digital Economy Bill through last night, in keeping with her custom and practice. It seems that MPs have been getting above their station in taking a similar approach to get it passed into Law (my words not Her Majesty’s).
It would appear that Stephen Timms has offered via twitter to arrange a session between ISPs and the Rights Holders:
“#DEBill Good dialogue, music/film people & Internet people, opposing views,could help find common ground. Much needed. Anyone interested?”
We have to STOP. The information society is grinding life to a halt. There is so much good content out there on tinternet that I am drowning in it.
It is even becoming harder and harder to write relevant blog posts in a timely manner. Points that I might want to get across, links to useful websites etc etc etc have already been distributed, at the speed of light (or copper or air – we don’t all have fibre – believe it or not!) via twitter (mostly) and Facebook.
Don’t you just love the internet. Yesterday’s Digital Economy bill non debate has spawned some highly creative responses, which to a large extent goes to show why we should keep the internet free and open.
Did your MP turn up for the debate? – find out on didmympshoupornot.com.
Also some highly illuminating stats on last night’s action can be found here.
Register opposition to the bill here.
I haven’t made my mind up how to vote yet in this Election. It is the hardest decision I have had to make of all the Elections I have voted in. There is a groundwsell of opinion forming though that people might well vote against the Government that created this mess. This is despite the fact that the opposition by and large seems also hell bent on helping to make it a mess.
My vote will probably stay a secret but it would be interesting to hear others’ views on this.
In an action (not so packed) Parliamentary session yesterday the Government dropped it’s plans for the 50 pence tax on phone lines. So that’s the money that was going to be used to fund rural broadband access gone then.
On the other hand they also dropped plans to hike tax on cider – so that rural dwellers can continue to drink themselves into oblivion over the fact that they can’t get broadband! There is a perverse logic in there somewhere.