BT and TalkTalk challenge Digital Economy Act

[JJMcClure]

BT and TalkTalk challenge Digital Economy Act


This is an interesting one and quite pertinent to the various threads about privacy recently. There are two questions here I think:

1. Should people be allowed to commit a crime behind the 'right' of their privacy?

2. Should a carrier be responsible for what their users get up to on their service? (There are precedents here including Youtube's attempt to comply with US copyright legislation by removing copyrighted music from videos submitted by their users).

I think that if someone is breaking the law using a service that you provide then you are responsible for that and should co-operate with any law enforcement agency and if the punishment for breaking that law is removal of your internet access then that's the law, we don't have a 'right' to access the internet anymore than we do to drive on our roads. That access can be withdrawn from offenders.

[benitez17]

1. I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by this, but I don't believe you have a right to use any service to commit a crime.

2. I don't think they do. First, YouTube isn't a carrier, it's a website offering a service. Regarding actual carriers, I definitely don't think BT is responsible for monitoring what travels over their network. They aren't required to monitor phone calls for mentions of guns or drugs, so I don't see why they have to monitor for copyright violations.

[JJMcClure]

1. I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by this, but I don't believe you have a right to use any service to commit a crime.

BT are saying that it would be an invasion of their user's privacy to monitor for illegal activity like that.

2. I don't think they do. First, YouTube isn't a carrier, it's a website offering a service. Regarding actual carriers, I definitely don't think BT is responsible for monitoring what travels over their network. They aren't required to monitor phone calls for mentions of guns or drugs, so I don't see why they have to be forced to monitor for copyright violations.

Yeah that's true, if you build a road you can't be held responsible if someone uses it for criminal purposes and I guess that an ISP is just providing an internet 'road'. Then again it's the government that build roads and they do actually provide the means to then police the activity on those roads. If I build a tunnel through a hill and charge people for using it and some of those people are using it to smuggle drugs, am I responsible for letting them do it through my tunnel? (No tunnel jokes please) I would have thought I was.

I'm undecided on this but I'm swinging towards thinking that BT should be held responsible for what their users do. BT of course don't want to do anything that would hurt their bottom line, this has got nothing to with 'rights' for them, it's about profit.

[tke71709]

BT are saying that it would be an invasion of their user's privacy to monitor for illegal activity like that.

Which it would be.

Yeah that's true, if you build a road you can't be held responsible if someone uses it for criminal purposes and I guess that an ISP is just providing an internet 'road'. Then again it's the government that build roads and they do actually provide the means to then police the activity on those roads.

But those policing activities don't include stopping every car and inspecting it's contents for illegal goods which is what an ISP would essentially be required to do.

If I build a tunnel through a hill and charge people for using it and some of those people are using it to smuggle drugs, am I responsible for letting them do it through my tunnel? (No tunnel jokes please) I would have thought I was.

So you build a toll road that includes a tunnel through a mountain and someone pays you a toll to drive through the tunnel with drugs in their trunk and you think you should be responsible for that?

How about this example? If someone ships a package of drugs through UPS. Are they responsible for that? Happens all the time, yet I have yet to see anyone from UPS charged.

I'm undecided on this but I'm swinging towards thinking that BT should be held responsible for what their users do. BT of course don't want to do anything that would hurt their bottom line, this has got nothing to with 'rights' for them, it's about profit.

Of course it's about profit but this is one of those situations where rights and profits intersect and where decisions need to be made about balancing rights to privacy and the law.

[benitez17]

BT are saying that it would be an invasion of their user's privacy to monitor for illegal activity like that.

I think it would be an invasion of their privacy. BT would effectively be assuming that everyone who uses their connections to the Internet is a criminal. Let the police get a warrant to monitor the activities of individuals suspected of a crime, just like they have to do for every other crime that I am aware of.

Yeah that's true, if you build a road you can't be held responsible if someone uses it for criminal purposes and I guess that an ISP is just providing an internet 'road'. Then again it's the government that build roads and they do actually provide the means to then police the activity on those roads. If I build a tunnel through a hill and charge people for using it and some of those people are using it to smuggle drugs, am I responsible for letting them do it through my tunnel? (No tunnel jokes please) I would have thought I was.

I don't see why you would be responsible. Does DHL or the Post Office consider themselves responsible for the contents of every package they ship? I don't know about the UK, but there are private toll roads in the US, and the owners aren't responsible if a drug dealer uses one of them to deliver some product.

I'm undecided on this but I'm swinging towards thinking that BT should be held responsible for what their users do. BT of course don't want to do anything that would hurt their bottom line, this has got nothing to with 'rights' for them, it's about profit.

I see it as others trying to force BT to do their job for them without compensating BT. I agree that their true motive is probably profit based, but that doesn't mean that they are wrong.

[tke71709]

Great minds think alike

[benitez17]

Great minds think alike

I agree.

This is what happens when it takes half an hour to get around to actually submitting a reply.

[JJMcClure]

But those policing activities don't include stopping every car and inspecting it's contents for illegal goods which is what an ISP would essentially be required to do.

That wouldn't be necessary, it wouldn't be hard to monitor file types and bandwidth useage and identify suspicious profiles. MI5/MI6 monitor all your phone calls but they're not actually listening to them, their surveillence is triggered by the use of keywords.

The tunnel analogy would work better if I'd said that I'd been approached as the tunnel owner by an anti-drugs law enforcement agency who asked for my help and I refused it because I know that people would stop using my tunnel if they thought they might get searched or have to pass some other type of scan. I guess it's a question of context, no one minds getting searched before they get onto a plane do they, no one screams about their 'privacy' being ignored because that's an issue of their own safety but really it's the same thing. Customs regularly search the bags of innocent travellers, no one complains because that's a familiar situation so I think that if ISPs had been monitoring our behaviour since the inception of the internet, we wouldn't blink about this new law either.

Of course it's about profit but this is one of those situations where rights and profits intersect and where decisions need to be made about balancing rights to privacy and the law.

I think 'rights' are meaningless. They're basically an idea, that usually benefit the originator of the idea, that isn't real unless it can be enforced and using the word rights just muddies the waters in any debate. People might 'want' their privacy, but they have no 'right' to it. Don't want to get monitored? Don't use an ISP that monitors you.

Besides, why would BT be any more trustworthy than any other large company, they might be monitoring traffic already. Let's face it, knowing what their customers are surfing for would be profitable info for them wouldn't it.

[tke71709]

I think 'rights' are meaningless. They're basically an idea, that usually benefit the originator of the idea, that isn't real unless it can be enforced and using the word rights just muddies the waters in any debate. People might 'want' their privacy, but they have no 'right' to it. Don't want to get monitored? Don't use an ISP that monitors you.

If you don't believe in the very concept of rights then there is no point in having this conversation because nothing that is said will ever change your mind.

Maybe someday we'll all end up in the utopian world that Mr Orwell envisioned for us.

[JJMcClure]

Maybe someday we'll all end up in the utopian world that Mr Orwell envisioned for us.

You're actually contradicting yourself here if you think that rights are discrete and unquestionable (and let's not get into where rights contradict each other). 1984 could only happen if someone decided they had the right to know everything you do AND were able to enforce that right. i.e. taking away your perceived right for them not to know everything you do because you were unable to enforce your right.

See how arbitrary rights are? At the end of the day rights boil down to who has the power to enforce them and that makes them utterly meaningless, rights are just people getting their own way.