Posts by Lakanal

God bless this mess: Study says UK's Christian beliefs had 'important' role in Brexit

Interesting that Switzerland also had its own Reformation and is fiercely independent.

But are the UK and Switzerland against integration because they are Protestant, or are they Protestant because they are against integration?

Former Autonomy boss Mike Lynch 'submits himself' for arrest in central London

Re: 10 million pounds bail

That's about what Carlos Ghosn actually did.

US government tells internet body to hurry the funk up on privacy

Not very practical, even in countries which have pre-action discovery processes. Anonymity is at the root of many internet harms.

Internet overseer continues wall-punching legal campaign

El Reg is too credulous about the EU privacy bodies' views. From what is reported, the German courts refused an injunction for lack of urgency. Showing urgency is a sine qua non for an interlocutory injunction.

It is up to ICANN to decide the matters to which would-be registrants must consent in registering a domain and consent is a ground for data processing. Also, the EDPB's attempt to confine ICANN's legitimate interests to the technical management of DNS is imaginative but unfounded. ICANN has a legitimate interest in preventing fraud and - yes - IP infringement (such as cybersquatting).

Web site owners are not to be equated with "citizens" - they are economic operators against whom consumers are entitled to regulatory protection. This is why Article 5 of the Electronic Commerce Directive requires online operators to make publicly available a slew of identification data.

UK.gov's Brexiteers warned not to push for divergence on data protection laws

The GDPR is a prime example of why the EU will continue to lag behind the US commercially. Instead of recognizing that the Cloud renders the old fortress Europe approach under the existing Directive quite impractical, the Commission's solution was to extend the EU's (paper) jurisdiction over the entire world. The UK should have good data security standards, but the laxest possible controls on the processing of non-confidential data. There is of course a need to enable data flows from fortress Europe to the UK, but subject to that the frivolous data protection industry should be kept as small as possible. What I tell you about me is not my data - it is yours.

Republicans' net neutrality attack written by… you guessed it, the cable lobby

Politicians are lobbied by both sides. This is not necessarily a corrupt process, but a necessary interaction between citizen and government. Google has the deepest pockets in this game.

To my mind, "net neutrality" is a brilliant piece of naming-as-propaganda. It is actually a kind of nationalisation.

Mandarins plotted to water down EU data protection regs

The EU's Data Regulation was always misconceived

When the first draft of the EU Reg was leaked I thought it showed very well why Europe is so uncompetitive. Data protection (apart from data security rules) has done very few people any good and imposes massive costs.

It also proceeds from a strange Continental notion that data that you have about me are my data. Actually they are your data. If you seek to conceal your drug addiction but choose to be seen coming out of a treatment centre, hard luck if the press publish the fact (yes, that's you Naomi Campbell, no doubt a keen reader of The Register: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3689049.stm). It was difficult to explain to US colleagues that private data in the EU are not confidential data, but non-confidential data on an elastic that I can zap back if I do not like what you are doing with them. It is a concept basically hostile to the open society.

Top German data cop slaps down Facebook's real name policy

Re: There is an important reason behind that Real Name thing..

This is assuredly incorrect. If you consent to the deal and consume Facebook's services, you are bound by the deal. Of course, if you misrepresent your identity to Facebook, they might be able to get out of the deal - but not you.

Privacy? What privacy? EU's draft law on your data is useless, say digital rights orgs

EU data protection law is and always has been nonsense on stilts. Every protection of my public, non-confidential data is a limitation on your freedom to receive and publish information. Confidentiality is one thing, "privacy" (in the special EU non-private sense) is quite another.

Taylor Swift dumps Spotify: It’s not me, it’s you

Re: Sorry.....

Yes, the user pays, if only in opportunity cost. The question is simply how efficiently (if at all) the payment reaches the source of the good. Currently the payment is diverted into the pocket of YouTube, the ISP and the vendor of blank media (though there is often a private copy levy, so that actually the copier is paying a little). Set the cost (in the widest sense) of listening without payment high enough and the market will work, but probably at a much lower number on the supply axis of the demand curve.

OK, EU chiefs, 3 years of copyright wrangling - let's get it sorted. Now this white paper... DOH!

Spot on

The reason why a UGC exception is not needed (at least if the objective is economic growth) is implicit in ScottME's comment: "If getting rich had been my objective, I would not have uploaded it to YouTube."

Most UGC (Downfall subtitled clips etc), however amusing, is of so little value that it is not worth encouraging with an exception. It is on YouTube because it is not exploitable. But it should be up to the creator to decide whether to upload or not, and if you give that right to the creators of derivative works, you can hardly deny it to the creators of the works on which they rely.

The Content ID system has been worth its weight in lobbying gold to Google. Few commentators seem to realise that it is a protection racket.