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Britain's new Internet Law: Death of the Startup in Britain?
- andre 17y agodo people have any more freedoms left in UK?
- joeter 17y agoliberalized gambling laws
- Slashed 17y agoI will answer your question as a Londoner - Unfortunately, no. Though, now I live in Dublin and I already got a first letter from my ISP, warning me about using P2P networks. Gee, what a bunch of *holes!
- bumblebird 17y agoAt least we can drink a pint of beer before we're 21. Keep your "freedom". We also have the freedom of health care for all. You know, we look after each other so people don't die so much.
- philwelch 17y agosigh I'm happy for you that you have more freedom to drink beer. May I kindly suggest that, when exercising that freedom, you try and avoid nationalistic flame wars? This is Hacker News.
- bumblebird 17y ago... and that's why I flagged this article. As well as the "European startups don't work hard" rubbish. Unfortunately they keep coming. Plus, the OP comment of "Does the UK have any freedoms left" is obviously quite ridiculous.
- shiranaihito 17y agoIn other news: http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/13/1347.asp http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/13/1347.asp
- foldr 17y agoWhy are you taking the parent to task for this rather than the OP?
- philwelch 17y agoIt's a fair question. To me, it's a positive thing to criticize the decline of civil liberties in one country, but a negative thing to respond to that criticism with a "at least we're better than another country" flame. It's not productive at all to play the "my country is less bad than yours" game.
- foldr 17y ago> It's a fair question. To me, it's a positive thing to criticize the decline of civil liberties in one country, but a negative thing to respond to that criticism with a "at least we're better than another country" flame. The OP's comment was clearly a flame of precisely that sort. It wasn't making any constructive commentary on civil liberties issues, just asking a dumb and inflammatory rhetorical question. I suggest that the only reason you find the OP less offensive than the reply is that you're American and not British. If our internet laws are fair game for criticism, I think your (crazy) alcohol laws and health system must be too :) Also, what makes you so sure that civil liberties have been "declining" in the UK? There have been steps forward as well as steps back, I don't see any justification for overall pessimism.
- philwelch 17y agoAnd if there were an HN article about American alcohol and health care policies, I'd criticize them along with you. The OP wasn't a good comment either, but the response was even worse, which is another way of saying "internet flamewars escalate".
- foldr 17y agoBut it was the OP who broadened the topic of discussion by asking if there were "any" freedoms left in Britain. That naturally invites comparisons outside the area of copyright law. >especially when you're doing it in a dishonest attempt to make British law seem better. I don't think he was trying to make British copyright law seem better; at least, I didn't read that into the post.
- foldr 17y agoWe still have the freedom to ignore stupid rhetorical questions, fortunately. But I can sort of see how people would form this opinion of life in the UK based on internet hyperbole.
- Alnoor 17y agodo people have any jobs left in usa? lol
- acg 17y agoRelated: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950338 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950338
- pierrefar 17y agoThe text of the bill: http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2009-10/digitaleconomy/documents.html http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2009-10/digitaleconomy/d...
- plaggypig 17y agoThis Bill is even worse than feared - see London based Telnic's (.tel registry) response to the government informing them that the statutory instrument to seize managerial control of domain registries applies to them: http://prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=272545 http://prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=272545 Allegations of "abusive" behaviour on the part of registrars or end-users could lead an ignorant Secretary of State triggering this instrument. So what's "abusive"? Well just for starters, registering an expired domain name is. Yes really, that's what the government believes (see the Digital Britain report). So a company with about 12 employees has gone from being heralded at the UK IT awards last week for "the biggest innovation to come out of the UK since the www from Sir Tim Berners-Lee.".. to fearing nationalisation! Brown thinks he can run the "Digital Economy" like a Soviet tractor factory. Who would want to invest in this? What a joke.
- russell 17y agoThings are bad here with the DCMA, but things are really frightening in the UK which doesnt have the fundamental constitutional concepts of privacy, freedom of speech, and reasonable constraints on libel. Charlie Stross, a UK SF writer, has a blog today on this topic. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/imbeciles.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/imbecile... BTW: he's one of us.
- bumblebird 17y agoFWIW: "things are really frightening in the UK which doesnt have the fundamental constitutional concepts of privacy, freedom of speech, and reasonable constraints on libel" Only if you believe everything you read on the internet.
- jrockway 17y agoThe statement you quoted is technically true, however. That doesn't mean that the UK exercises all the authority available to it or that the US does not pass illegal laws.
- hristov 17y agoWell that 50,000 pound fine is still half of the maximum fine imposed by US law.
- weavejester 17y agoJust a small nitpick; whilst the US has better freedom of speech laws and more reasonable libel laws than the UK, the UK (along with most EU countries) does have stricter privacy laws.
- tomjen2 17y agoInteresting, even if you where accused in front of the star chamber (abolished 1640 because it took away too many rights) you couldn't be put to death. So in some way, this legislation is actually worse.
- cmelbye 17y agoI honestly never thought I'd say this, but this bill makes our DMCA look awesome. Politics in Europe are so unproductive and ridiculous, I really hope that it doesn't spread to the United States and other countries that still have some personal freedoms.
- dirkstoop 17y agoJudging all of European politics by what's happening in the UK right now is like judging American cuisine by one meal served at McDonalds (which admittedly, a lot of Europeans tend to do). Nice counter-example: Finland just made broadband internet access into a legal right: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/finland.internet.rights/ http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/finland.internet.righ...
- bumblebird 17y agoI think making net access a human right is ridiculous. What next? Criminals asserting their human legal rights to have 1MB net connection installed in their cells.
- foldr 17y agoIt's not much different these days than giving them the right to send and receive mail, I don't see why you think it's so silly.
- bumblebird 17y agoBecause it negates the whole point you put them in prison. At some point we'll get the human right to "not be in a cell". And then where will we be?
- foldr 17y ago>Because it negates the whole point you put them in prison. So you think that being in prison would be perfectly pleasant just as long as you had a broadband connection? Some life you must lead.
- bumblebird 17y agoLinkbait. Why would this be anything concerning startups? Why would it discourage startups from starting up in Britain? How will it impact current startups? It won't. No real news here, just some silly politicians trying to show muscle, which will ultimately fail and be irrelevant.
- mindstab 17y agoHow? It makes it really really easy to be knocked offline which I suspect would make it hard to continue work on a startup. For instance
- bumblebird 17y agoPeople working on startups are resourceful. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to find free wifi/3g/get cable/adsl from another provider etc etc etc I agree the law is stupid and ill thought out and puts the whole idea of innocent until proven guilty out the window, but technology is hard for some people like unelected politicians to grasp. So they mess up, and make stupid laws. Meanwhile, people just sidestep and make the laws useless and irrelevant.
- iuygfhn 17y agoSuppose you called your site say "hacker news" and some local councilor decided that "hacker" was offensive - under this law they can simply delete your domain registration.
- bumblebird 17y agoThen you'd post about it on twitter+reddit and the whole baying mob of sheep that compose the modern internet would track down said councilor and make their life a living hell forever.
- Renai 17y agoNot everyone is so popular, and not all audiences are so political.
- RevRal 17y agoThis is why we need to overthrow some government and establish a hacker nation. I think something similar happened in the movie Igor.... In all seriousness, this is pretty scary. There is a fierce dichotomy here. There aren't very many people who believe file-sharing is that morally wrong (or morally wrong to begin with), it is just becoming very illegal. Things are going to get more and more ridiculous, until we are forced to re-evaluate the very paradigms that hold up our economies. I've said it before, "money" is outdated.
- cabalamat 17y agoY'know, a hacker nation would have an awesome economy, at least its internet / high tech sector.
- uriel 17y agoWho knows, this might work: http://seasteading.org/ http://seasteading.org/ At least until Carmack manages to build rockets that can take us somewhere further away from all the insane people in this planet and their suicidal tendencies.
- foldr 17y agoIt's really irritating when people write the title to make it sound as if a bill which hasn't gone through parliament yet is already law.
- cabalamat 17y agoGiven that both the government and the main opposition party broadly support these measures, it's probable that something along these lines will become law, unless there is widespread public opposition. There will be a general election in Britain within the next 8 months, so it may well happen after then. Incidently, I've recently started a Facebook group where anyone can pledge that they won't vote for any MP or candidate who supports this -- http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/wont-vote-for-any-mp-who-supports-mandelsons-digital-economy-bill/ http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/wont-vote-for-any-...
- bumblebird 17y agoWhere would the modern internet be without groups of people getting completely outraged by things that they shouldn't really worry about. See also: Every person in the UK is caught on CCTV a billion times every single day, which is fed into a central database and used by the government. Every email is logged by the government. etc etc etc. This is the entire business model for "The daily mail" paper in the UK - get people completely scared to death about every single thing so they think the worlds falling apart and they need to buy the paper to keep up with it all. "There's pedophiles on everyones street!" "global warming will kill us all" "the government is spying on everyone" and so on for ever.
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoWhere would the modern internet be without groups of people getting completely outraged by things that they shouldn't really worry about. You may not be outraged by the curtailment of our freedoms by a man who is unelected and has been booted out of post twice (at least) and who is spearheading a new copyright initiative immediately after staying at the pleasure of a media magnate, said initiative doing nothing for the public domain and everything for vested monopoly interests. You may not, but those of us who prefer not to enforce the profit of the super-rich by the rule of law, solely for the benefit of those rich, we should be outraged.
- Alnoor 17y agoGod save the Queen
- thaumaturgy 17y agoThis is fantastic. It's great news. No, seriously. This kind of thing is exactly what's needed to make services like i2p (http://i2p2.de http://i2p2.de) popular enough to go mainstream. Or another way to look at it, oft-quoted, is: the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
- scscsc 17y agoThis has been on the tip of my tongue for a long while, so I might as well go ahead and say it now. I am ready to acknowledge the power of technology as much as anyone hanging around here. But I think that dismissing the computer/internet laws currently being passed by countries in the EU as being unenforceable, or being easily solvable by technology workarounds is a great fallacy and the most stupid thing in the world to do. The cat and mouse play between technology workarounds and law cannot go on forever, because eventually you will run out of legal workarounds. This is similar to the cat and mouse play between the police and law breakers. Unless you are in bed with the police, you will eventually get caught. I think that the only viable alternative is to oppose these laws and hope they don't pass.
- thaumaturgy 17y agoWhy not do both? Oppose the laws, protest the laws, and when that doesn't work, then develop new technology to get around the laws. This is a cycle that has been happening for millennia. It's not new. Authoritarians come into power, then they amass power, and then they attempt to rule by force. Usually, people first welcome their new authorities, because they want order and they naively expect that authorities are on their side; then they begin to become disenfranchised; and finally, they begin to subvert the authority and eventually counteract it altogether. The only novel thing here is the level of technology that we're dealing with now -- but that benefits both sides. Look at China: they've developed probably the most advanced national communications surveillance and filtering technology in the world (depending on how deep your paranoia runs); and while that works for many people, others are still finding ways around it. Or, look at BitTorrent. Media "authorities" attack centralized distribution; hackers develop decentralized distribution. Authorities attack centralized tracking; hackers develop distributed hash tables. Authorities attack the protocol itself; hackers develop a new protocol. Authorities attack unencrypted communications; hackers develop decentralized, anonymous, encrypted communications. Eventually this cycle of escalation will lead to distributed networks -- "guerilla" wifi mesh networks are already being used in some places -- and the only way the authorities will be able to counter that will be to shut down wired, wireless, and cellular communications for the great majority of the population. How long do you think that will remain popular?