Illegal ISPs?

24 Jan 2001 17:06

I look forward to the Secret Police's arrival at my house. Here, I own a Region One DVD of "Yellow Submarine" -- a cartoon movie designed for sale in America only; and I also own a DVD player capable of showing the movie.

This is material which breaches commercial agreements in the movie industry. I acquired it by buying it from Amazon.com in America.

According to John Hutton, Minister of Health -- BT Internet connived in this; it displayed the illegal material (provided by Amazon) on its servers. It's a fair cop, Guv; and we'll all come quietly.

Well, it sounds absurd, of course; I intended that it should. But how is it more absurd than Hutton's claim that UK ISPs should not carry details of sites which offer babies for adoption?

According to the BBC, Mr Hutton said the warning was intended to help the ISPs stay within the law. "Recent High Court litigation in this country has confirmed that when an internet service provider becomes aware of illegal material on their server, they do need to take action to deal with that," he told BBC Radio 4's The World at One programme.

Is it illegal to reveal that books are available for sale in the US which are not for sale in the UK? No, it isn't! Is it illegal to research how US people handle adoption? No it isn't! So what illegal material is Hutton on about?

And the answer: the examples I've given are no more absurd than Hutton's. It is a fact that people in other countries do things which are illegal in the UK; and it is also true that we do things openly, here, which would be grounds for imprisonment elsewhere. For example, we advertise beer on TV, and sell it in public.

In this country, adoption is carefully regulated. Some of those regulations don't apply to couples adopting children in the US. That information -- is it illegal, too?

The "high court" litigation he referred to, almost certainly, involved a libel case. The information concerned was a libellous statement which had been agreed to be libellous; but it was left on the Usenet servers because Demon, the ISP in the case, felt that it had a duty to carry all information, and had no right to censor it.

The reason that information was illegal was simple: it was libellous, and an order had been obtained preventing its publication.

Unless Hutton can show specifically that there is a law preventing the publication of information which MIGHT be put to illegal use, he's out of his tiny mind trying to enforce this sort of censorship.

It's worth noting that Singapore Internet companies are not allowed to carry direct links to the outside world. They get all their news feeds and Internet traffic from a Government proxy server. Only material that the Government thinks is good for its citizens to know, may be handled.

The only way for Hutton to enforce his mad desire to prevent ISPs from handling information he doesn't approve of, is to follow Singapore and set up even more repressive media controls.

I guess we should be grateful to know that the Labour Party has someone mad enough to counter Ann Widdecombe in the run-up to the Election; but this latest insanity tells me something about the current Ministerial mind set which I really didn't want to believe.

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