UK News

We wrote last year, many times, about the discussions being hosted by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport between rights holders and various intermediaries - which to normal people means companies like Internet Service Providers and search engines. One of the most recent roundtables saw the group of rights holders present search engines with a paper on how they should help tackle copyright infringement.

After two Freedom of Information requests, we have received the proposals [pdf]. Here's the summary of what the rights holders were asking for:

• Assign lower rankings to sites that repeatedly make available unlicensed content in breach of copyright.

• Prioritise websites that obtain certification as a licensed site under a recognised scheme

• Stop indexing websites that are subject to court orders while establishing suitable procedures to de-index substantially infringing sites

• Continue to improve the operation of the notice and takedown system and ensure that search engines do not encourage consumers towards illegal sites via suggested searches; related searches and suggested sites

• Ensure that they do not support illegal sites by advertising them or placing advertising on them, or profit from infringement by selling key words associated with piracy or selling mobile applications which facilitate infringement.

The minutes from the meeting suggest that the search engines were not impressed, and promised to write their own proposals to be discussed at a future meeting.

...Read the full article

Offsite: Google grilled by parliamentary committee

31st January 2012. See article from blogs.ft.com

Google was dragged over the coals by a British parliamentary committee, as the technology company's approach to removing illegal content from its search results again came under scrutiny.

Several members of the joint committee on privacy and injunctions, chaired by John Whittingdale MP, repeatedly attacked Google's representatives as they set out how the search engine seeks to balance legal challenges with freedom of expression.

Ben Bradshaw, Nadim Zahawi, and Lord Mawhinney, all criticised Google for what they saw as its failure to help victims of invasion of privacy, by removing all links to content which a judge has ruled to be illegal in the UK.

...Read the full article

Open Rights Group and Tor have established that UK mobile networks such as Vodafone, O2 and 3 are blocking UK users' access to Tor's primary website (meaning the  Tor Project website, rather than connections to the Tor network) on pre-paid contractless accounts.

Tor helps people stay anonymous online. Some examples of how it has been used include those trying to avoid oppressive state censorship in places such as Iran, through to abuse victims in the UK.

There is a blog post by Jacob Appelbaum with more technical details about the blocking on UK mobile networks over at the Tor blog.

Searching for torproject.org reveals that it is blocked because it falls into the category of anonymiser. (Orange also say that they block content that falls into the anonymiser category - but it does not seem that Tor is blocked on Orange.) It's unlikely that mobile operators are targeting Tor, and more likely that anonymisation tools generally are blocked.

It was initially established that Tor was blocked initially through the new tool blocked.org.uk. openrightsgroup.org are asking for help in monitoring how blocking on mobile networks works by reporting when you come across incorrectly applied blocks.

Open Rights Group will be meeting with mobile operators over the next few weeks to talk about making sure that they can both help parents manage their children's mobile Internet use and avoid clumsy implemented blocking. Some are better at aspects of this than others (Orange provide an overview of the categories they block, for example.) But none implement a transparent and clear policy that puts users in charge.

In an exclusive extract from You Can't Read This Book, the Observer columnist Nick Cohen presents a damning indictment of how the English legal system helps the wealthy and powerful suppress inconvenient truths:

At their best, journalists expose the crimes of the powerful and there were plenty of powerful people worthy of examination in the Britain of the early 2000s. London was awash with money as it competed with Manhattan to be the hub of global finance.

If journalists tried to do what they should do and investigate them, Britain also gave the oligarchs a further privilege: the power to enforce a censorship that the naive supposed had vanished with the repressions of the old establishment. Among the many attractions London offered the oligarchs was a legal profession that served them as attentively as the shop assistants in Harrods food hall.

With an aristocratic prejudice against freedom of speech, the judges imposed costs and sanctions on investigative journalism that would have been hard to endure in the best of times, but were unbearable after the internet had undermined the media's business models. Instead of aiming its guns at the worst of British writing, the law of libel aimed at the bravest.

...Read the full article

A talk on sharia and human rights by NSS Council Member Anne Marie Waters' at Queen Mary College, London was cancelled at the last moment because of an Islamist who made serious threats against everyone there.

The talk was due to take place on 16 January but before it started, a man entered the lecture theatre, stood at the front with a camera and filmed the audience. He then said that he knew who everyone was, where they lived and if he heard anything negative about the Prophet, he would track them down.

The man also filmed students in the foyer and threatened to murder them and their families. On leaving the building, he joined a large group of men, apparently there to support him. Students were told by security to stay in the lecture theatre for their own safety.

Jennifer Hardy, President of Queen Mary Atheism Society, who organised the event said:

This event was supposed to be an opportunity for people of different religions and perspectives to debate, at a university that is supposed to be a beacon of free speech and debate.

Only two complaints had been made to the Union prior to the event, and the majority of the Muslim students at the event were incredibly supportive of it going ahead. These threats were an aggressive assault on freedom of speech and the fact that they led to the cancellation of our talk was severely disappointing for all of the religious and non-religious students in the room who wanted to engage in debate.

The police were contacted about the incident.

Update: Pitiful Security

25th January 2012. See article from freethoughtblogs.com by Maryam Namazie

My One Law for All Co-Spokesperson Anne Marie Waters was to speak at a meeting on Sharia Law and Human Rights at the University of London last night.

It was cancelled by the Queen Mary Atheism, Secularism and Humanism Society organisers after police had to be called in due to Islamist threats. One Islamist filmed everyone at the meeting and announced he would hunt down those who said anything negative about Islam's prophet. Outside the hall, he threatened to kill anyone who defamed the prophet. Reference was made to the Jesus and Mo cartoon saga at UCL.

The University's security guard -- a real gem --arrived first only to blame the speaker and organisers rather than those issuing death threats. He said: If you will have these discussions, what do you expect? Err, to speak without being threatened with death maybe?

A Tory Councillor has been suspended from his job for 20 weeks and will be forced to undertake diversity training, after he called members of the public retards.

Hull City Council received two complaints after Councillor John Fareham used Twitter to insult people who had protested against public spending cuts. He tweeted:

15 hours in Council today very hard hitting day and the usual collection of retards in the public gallery spoiling it for real people.

The council's PC standards committee claimed that his actions breached its code of conduct. Chair of the sub-committee Sheelagh Strawbridge said:

The committee concluded that Councillor Fareham may have caused the authority to breach equality enactments and had brought his office and the Council into disrepute.

The Duchess of York, who faces charges in Turkey for going undercover and secretly filming children at a state-run home for a 2008 documentary, canceled a recent trip to the United States because of the case, a source and her spokesman said.

The United States and Turkey have an extradition treaty and the cancellation raised the question of whether Sarah Ferguson is avoiding the United States because she fears being sent to Turkey.

The duchess was accompanied by one of her two daughters, Princess Eugenie, to film the ITV Tonight program in Turkey. An ITV press statement at the time of the film's broadcast in 2008 said the duchess, as part of a reporting team, had gone undercover in one of Turkey's worst institutions -- capturing images that will shock and horrify. The hard-hitting program was intended to help investigate the treatment of mentally and physically disabled children, ITV said.

Ferguson feels the work she did in Turkey was completely valid and consistent with her ongoing support for humanitarian causes, spokesman James Henderson told CNN. Ferguson is consulting rights lawyers as well as attorneys in Turkey as she decides what to do next, he said.

The Ankara prosecutor's office in Turkey accused the duchess of violating the private lives and rights of five children while filming a program for Britain's ITV network, Turkey's semiofficial Anatolian news agency reported last week.  Discussing the case, the Ankara chief prosecutor asked for a prison term of up to 22 years, six months, Turkish state TV reported.

What Ferguson is accused of in Turkey would not constitute a crime in Britain.

The Home Office confirmed that it has received a formal request for mutual legal assistance concerning Sarah, Duchess of York.

Britain's Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) centre said more can be done to safeguard children who use the Twitter website.

Apparently social networking sites Facebook and Bebo both report far more incidents of illegal activity to Ceop than Twitter does. Perhaps the 140 character tweets are not the most likely communication method for grooming and the like.

Peter Davies, head of Ceop, said:

Providers of online services have a responsibility to safeguard their environment in order to minimise the risk to children and close down opportunities for offenders.

Many companies work closely with us to enhance their ability to do this, including Facebook and Bebo.

The centre does receive reports relating to material on Twitter but it's important to say these amount to a very small proportion of 1,000 reports a month relating to a wide range of online environments.

Twitter have removed illegal images and other content on our request.

We believe more can be done around the moderation of Twitter feeds and the strengthening of Twitter's reporting mechanisms.

It's important that all providers have in place robust and effective reporting mechanisms so that when illegal, offensive or inappropriate material is posted it is quickly removed and reported to law enforcement as necessary.

The High Court has ruled that the Justice Secretary's refusal to grant the BBC permission to have and to broadcast a face-to-face interview with terrorism suspect Babar Ahmad was unlawful.

The BBC and one of its home affairs correspondents, Dominic Casciani, had applied for permission to conduct the interview with Ahmad, who is currently detained at HMP Long Lartin, and is fighting extradition to the USA. The BBC also wished to broadcast the interview. The Justice Secretary refused the permission, which refusal the BBC challenged in a judicial review claim.

Ahmad, a British Muslim, was first arrested in 2003 but released without charge after six days. In July 2004, the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there was insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of a conviction again him in the UK under the Terrorism Act 2000. However, he was arrested again in August 2004 following a request by the US for his extradition. The Home Secretary made an extradition order in 2005, which was followed by long running legal proceedings in the domestic courts and in Strasbourg.

In the meantime Ahmad has remained in detention for over seven years without charge or trial.

...Read the full article

A British student can be extradited to the United States to face charges of copyright infringement over a website he ran offering links to pirated films online, a court has ruled.

Richard O'Dwyer, whose site TV Shack made more than £150,000 in advertising revenues, according to US prosecutors, is thought to be the first person extradited to America on such charges. If convicted in New York, he faces jail.

Speaking after the hearing at City of Westminster Magistrates' Court, the 23-year-old said he felt like a guinea pig for the US justice system. His lawyer argued that his site hosted no illegal content, but merely directed users to where it was held online, and said that his client would appeal the ruling.

The BBFC have rated Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar as 17 for infrequent strong language.

The decision is explained in the Extended Classification Information:

J. EDGAR is a biopic of J.Edgar Hoover, the founder and head of the FBI. It was classified 15 for infrequent strong language.

The BBFC's Guidelines at 12A/12 state The use of strong language (for example, 'fuck') must be infrequent. The film contains only one use of 'f***ing', which would have been permissible at 12A. However, it also contains two uses of cruder language (in this case 'c***sucker') that were more appropriately classified at 15 where the Guidelines state There may be frequent use of strong language. None of the language is personally directed or accompanied by violence, but is spoken in a derogatory manner about political opponents who are not present at the time.

The film also contains some moderate violence during shootouts between police and mobsters. However, the violence is almost always bloodless and lacking in injury detail.

...

The film also contains some mild bad language, such as damn and Jesus Christ. There are a couple of uses of the term negro, although the term is not used in a pejorative sense, simply reflecting the common terminology of the period in which the film is set. The historical nature of the term and the lack of intent to offend is reinforced by sight of Martin Luther King using it himself in a televised speech.

Seems a bit harsh, but the US film censors seemed to agree that J. Edgar went beyond PG-13 and rated the film as R.

Interesting to note the inconsistent use of asterisks in the BBFC piece. It let one 'fuck' through but censored the next. Is this the BBFC keeping the page itself down to a 12 rating?

Jeremy Clarkson, the TV presenter, has been ludicrously criticised for making trivial tasteless comments about the Morecambe Bay cockle picking tragedy in which 23 Chinese migrant workers died.

In a column for The Sun newspaper, Clarkson mocked the sport of synchronised swimming as Chinese women in hats, upside down, in a bit of water, adding: You can see that sort of thing on Morecambe Beach. For free.

Hardly worthy of mention but Tracy Brown, a Morecambe town councillor had a little whinge. She said:

I choose to ignore such comments and treat them with the contempt they deserve. In fact, this is beneath contempt. He is just trying to make himself look big at other people's expense. Many people around here were deeply affected by the tragedy.

But then the tiff escalated to international levels: Ms Dai Qingli, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Embassy, went well overboard. She said:

We deplore and oppose Mr Clarkson's comments, which are insulting and show a woeful disrespect of decency and moral standards. We regret that The Sun has publicised such remarks.

Olympic organisers have set out internet censorship rules for the 70,000 Games Maker volunteers, including a ban on pictures or posts featuring backstage VIPs.

The rules are set out in a document in the Games Makers' area of Locog's website. The document asks people not to mention details about their role, location or about athletes, celebrities and dignitaries.

It says Games Makers should remember to avoid making any public statement on any subject relating to London 2012 without the prior approval of the Locog Communications team - including agreeing to attend any event to speak about any aspect of London 2012.

It sets out how the public realm of social media could pose a risk to the Games in terms of reputation and safety and security.

In a what to do and what not to do section, it warns volunteers:

• not to disclose their location
• not to post a picture or video of Locog backstage areas closed to the public
• not to disclose breaking news about an athlete
• not to tell their social network about a visiting VIP, eg an athlete, celebrity or dignitary.
• not to get involved in detailed discussion about the Games online
• but they can retweet or pass on official London 2012 postings.