Geeklawyer confesses to a degree of uncertainty when reading of the report (Thanks Martin) of the House of Lords’ Science and Technology Committee. As is usually the case it is a bit of a curates egg: the usual crap about the Internet being the plaything of Satan and how wonderful it could be.
Some ideas were good. A Californian style disclosure law for when online companies get themselves rooted by crackers. When this happened they’d be obliged to email you and say;
“Hey dude!! We got pwned. Better change you passwords and keep an eye on your bank account.”
A little public humiliation would, one suspects, motivate some of the companies who are otherwise concentrating mainly on getting venture capital to look at security.
There are dubious suggestions that ISPs should be liable if they continue to host phishing and cracker sites. Not a bad idea at all, or at least exactly, but more likely to be ineffective. The majority of these sites are hosted in China Russia and to a lesser extent the US and who are unlikely to accept UK jurisdiction. Which is not necessarily a reason not to do it (at least when it’s something Geeklawyer approves of 
) but a caveat on the likely effectiveness.
Making it an offence to create rent out or use botnets is a terrific idea and would make convictions potentially much easier. Ditto providing more police computer resources and l33t computer skills. Most filth are barely computer literate and the specialist groups are tiny; they have to hire in expertise often and this is not good use of public money.
No. Geeklawyer is really more worried about two things: how would lobbyists pervert these new proposals for criminal power? Geeklawyer is paranoid, true; but would crime be so defined as to include copyright infringement? Nothing in the report suggest so but the MPAA/RIAA’s UK lackeys rarely miss an opportunity to promote their own interests on such occasions. Ah well, maybe Geeklawyer is just being paranoid.
The most interesting thing is making software vendors liable for their defective software. Geeklawyer cannot see this surviving intact into legislation. It would be terrific for Microsoft to be civilly liable for losses caused by bugs in their utterly crappy operating systems. And just the thought that at least one legislature is beginning to broach this policy question will cause a degree of fear. Good.
But how will it affect Free and Opensource software? Would Linux hackers be liable for defects? That would be a hideous result; at least it would be for free-as-in-beer software. Of course if you produce GPL code for money you should be, mostly, in the same position as Microsoft on this head of liability. Bad.
As long as liability was predicated on commercial value Geeklawyer would be happy: but not otherwise.
Geeklawyer reinstalled his blogging software specifically to cure this issue. It did: everything went fine and
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