UK court introduces judicial blocking

Matthew Toseland <toad-EI5O+8PHWbJeeLb3ft/[email protected]> Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:46:55 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.network.freenet.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14322957

What are the limits on this judicial process? Are there any limits? Can they only require measures which are implementible without any new infrastructure? Will there be so many copyright infringing sites as to require it, as some of the commentators say, and if so, will the courts be able to require more sophisticated blocking?

More importantly, at what level will this be applied? Will we see Wikileaks and sites critical of Scientology blocked in a low level court only to be reinstated by a higher court? Or Greenpeace's Star Wars themed videos criticising Volkswagen, which got taken down from Youtube recently (which they are now hosting themselves)? Will you be able to dispute a block yourself, or will you be completely reliant on your ISP - it was BT here? At the very least this could introduce long delays and sabotage legitimate campaigning processes, especially when combined with superinjunctions.

And isn't the UK judicial system basically adversarial? If you have no money, and you post controversial content which is borderline copyright infringing (e.g. the above examples), will your opponent be able to get you blocked cheaply?

And will this spread to extreme pornography, terrorist equipping, terrorist advocacy, libel law, etc? Is the doctrine exclusively concerned with copyright, in other words? Even if it is restricted to copyright, it could stretch to blocking filesharing tools, filesharing sites (rapidshare etc), privacy tools, VPNs ...

It is interesting that this occurs just as the government is dragging its feet on the secondary legislation needed for their own scheme...

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