Banning of non-illegal (in Ireland) technical knowledge

Red Alert

I notice that a number of things are now banned in the computing forum, mainly proxies for watching iPlayer content as well as asking for technical details to circumvent internet filtering in the workplace.

The rationale for banning these is not explained in the charter. Why is this so? I do not see how there is a legal impact on boards.ie, in particular, in relation to the ban on circumventing workplace filters. If it is not a legally-imposed restriction, then why is boards.ie doing this?

(I have no problem with boards.ie deciding not to allow things, for example where it encourages bad on-thread behaviour or bullying. For instance, the ban in Edu on naming specific teachers and lecturers makes sense, and is justified and explained in the charters.)

Spear

Complaints can be sent to Sean Sherlock.

http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/reader-irelands-sopa-a-faq/

More specifically:

clueless politician wrote:

(5A)(a) without prejudice to subsections (3) and (4), the owner of the copyright in the work concerned may apply to the High Court for an injunction against a person who provides facilities referred to in subsection (3) where those facilities are being used by one or more third parties to infringe the copyright in that work.

If we act as a third party to facilitate copyright violations, we risk boards.ie being blocked without any notice.

So in the case of Net&Comms, while VPNs are perfectly legal and can be freely discussed, once it becomes about using VPNs to bypass someones copyright controls/rights, it has to be shutdown.

An update to the Net&Comms charter to reflect this, plus DRP etc is already in the works.

P_1

That SI has really left things utterly confused hasn't it?

If I get you right Spear, it should be ok to discuss the theory of VPNs etc but it's not ok to discuss their practical application? Is that the state of play at the moment?

Spear

P_1 wrote: »

That SI has really left things utterly confused hasn't it?

If I get you right Spear, it should be ok to discuss the theory of VPNs etc but it's not ok to discuss their practical application? Is that the state of play at the moment?

It's in the context of one specific application that's not an option. Much like discussing torrents and torrents clients is fine, until it becomes torrents for the purpose of violating copyrights.

Logical_Bear

You raised good points Spear about boards being possibly held responsible for copyright violation due to that clown sherlock but asking to get around work filters in place isnt a breach of any possible law at the moment.

I'm pretty sure it would be a breach of persons terms of employment but surely that would be the posters look out?

having said that would it not be good policy when somebody asks about illegal torrenting or getting around geo-ip blocked content to tell them to use google:pac: it has all the answers!

P_1

That makes sense actually. So somebody can ask about finding and installing a VPN but when asked how to use it to breach copyright its away to Google with ye, making it Google's problem and not Boards'

Logical_Bear

actually that might be a good question for the legal discussion forum to see if search engines would be legally liable for copyright infringement.

I use a torrent search engine and that is getting hassle in the USA,wonder would the same legal argruments carry over for the more generic engines like google and bing...

EDIT:here's an interesting post on that search engine in reference to google

On the news that Google announcing they will downrank sites "with too many valid DMCA takedown notices". Since isoHunt is currently listed as #3 of most noticed sites, that is likely to happen to to us.

But let's get it out of the way that we are crying foul just because we are scared of losing traffic. About 75% of all our traffic are direct traffic, with 21% coming from Google searches (and much of that being searches on "isohunt" and "isohunt.com"). So even if Google takes isoHunt entirely out of their index, we'll survive. Unless Google start censoring isoHunt at the Chrome browser level, but let's not give them any ideas.

What I want to bring to attention about this search algorithm change is Google is no longer the search engine upstart they used to be (for a while now). As Search Engine Land says, Google is now a content distribution company. What's missing on Google's DMCA notices report? Youtube. The by far largest video content website in the world ought to have very high volume of DMCA notices, if not the most, and it's inconspicuously missing from the list. To downrank and censor any website that's not Google's that receives a high number of DMCA notices? Sounds exactly like antitrust to me.

Now, on what is "valid" DMCA notices to warrant Google labeling a site as pirate? Google Legal has already labelled us a "pirate" service before, to prop themselves up as "legit". That is their opinion. What is really wrong with downranking/censoring websites based on "valid" DMCA notices however is that what's valid is simply notices that has not been countered. With millions of links subject to notices, we never bothered countering any DMCA notices on Google (not to mention Google only recently put up their transparency report so there hasn't even been an easy way to review what's been noticed per domain). That does not mean all links under isohunt.com which Google has filtered by notices are valid, just because we haven't countered them. Not any more valid than how Youtube took down NASA's Mars video just because a broadcaster said so. Is what Google/Youtube routinely call valid takedowns valid, like many others before? You tell me. (although to Google's credit, a video of a Canadian urinating on his passport is too good to takedown, unlike a video from Mars)

To complicate matters, we are also a search engine, like Google, not just a regular website. We have our DMCA policy and takedown process, like Google. (ours was electronic by email years ago I might add, when Google was still requiring snail mail) And contrary to popular beliefs, we have plenty of torrent links to non-copyright infringing content, and we'll be adding 1.4M more from the Internet Archive soon. Is it right for Google to downrank or outright censor torrent links to legit, non-infringing content on isoHunt.com (or any other site), just because copyright holders have spammed a million "valid" DMCA notices on our other pages to Google that hasn't been countered? Censorship will never be easier, by DMCA spam.

The media conglomerates failed to pass SOPA, now they are getting in bed with Youtube at the public's expense. I'd point you to Google alternatives like DuckDuckGo (which respects your privacy a lot more to boot), or heck, bing but since everyone google, that's unlikely to go far in practice. While Google already started down this path of censorship with autocorrect before, search ranking based on mere DMCA notices is a line that should not be crossed.

We need a protest against Google censorship and antitrust.

P_1

In a practical sense I can't see the government chasing Google legally seeing as they employ so many in the country

Red Alert

Thanks - I didn't actually realise that the legislation was that far reaching.