Complaining brits...
Wait a second... Ah well we'll just put up with it instead. Anyone for a nationwide firewall?
Posts by Neil
3 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Nov 2008
Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users
Why the IWF was right to ban a Wikipedia page
Tuesday 9th December 2008 14:56 GMT 
A few things...
I'm sorry but calling wikimedia a hypocrite and trying to compare wikimedia user access control to censorship is a weak argument at best. The author is simply trying to bulk out his argument here like any good lawyer would in my opinion.
As for arguing the legality of the image. Yes it may very well be illegal here. But the law is actually unclear.. If we receive a take down notice as an ISP we would be considered to be "on notice". If we then do not acknowledge and remove it whilst it is in dispute (whatever it is) and it is proved to be illegal it is possible we can be taken to court for 3rd party copyright infringement for example in the case of copyright infringement. But actually it is still up to our client to prove the contents legality. If we notify them of a the take down request and we keep the disputed item up whilst he defends his content. As per our terms & conditions if we are sued we can then pass the legal & judgment cost onto the client however he may not be able to pay by this point unless he was a business with the means. End result the ISP is likely to lose out financially. This is why most ISP's don't question take down notices.
In the UK at least can be tracked to the "Demon Internet vs Godfrey" case where a user complained to Demon asking them to take down a defamatory remark made against his name on a usenet group. Demon did nothing, usenet is then replicated all over the world so it could no longer effectively be taken down. Demon was successfully sued in the high court for 3rd party libel (Something like that, I can't remember the exact charge). Since it was a high court judgment it set a UK precedent, whether you agree with it or not. As you can see this whole legal area is a bit of a mess. There's no way your average member of public can fight this unless they really want to spend a lot of money in court.
The real issue which has angered the internet community is that content can and will be increasingly censored in the UK without any notice or any details of what is being filtered by ISP's. There is no transparency and no mandate for them to do so even if the ISP's are acting in good faith in this case.
My personal problem with this situation is with Virginmedia. We happen to get transit with them. Over a week ago we noticed that traffic directed down virgin to en.wikipedia .org was hitting a blank page. Further investigation showed they had started broadcasting wikipedias english prefix (their ip) as on their own AS. This means essentially that virgin are now claiming to be controllers of wikipedias server. This as far as I'm concerned is impersonation. Since BGP is a protocol based on "trust" we trust them to provide us with correct routes to other areas of the internet. Also since they claim to own the ip address it appears to only be 1 hop away from us which is therefore automatically higher priority than any of the routes sent to us by our other providers who give the true number of hops to the servers (About 5-10 or so over to America). Unless we filter their route we our traffic will continue to hit this invalid server. This fundamentally breaks BGP. I believe RIPE frown heavily on this kind of practice.
Finally the other problem is of course censorship is utterly useless. Content is replicated so many times all over the place it is impossible to suppress. Your only really suppressing it from the law abiding majority. The people your trying to really hinder can easily circumvent these inconveniences.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
