Why do I always feel like somebody's watching me?

So big brother not only sees you on his CCTV cameras secretly picking your nose, fixing your hair, or attempting suicide he now also wants to know what content you are illegally accessing online! Without your consent or knowledge by the way, not that it's surprising at all, the industry is losing far too much money (in their view) from piracy and you know someone has always got to be paid!

You will remember that a while back the government proposed introducing new legislation that would see illegal P2P file sharers identified and potentially thrown off their networks. For this scheme to work they would need the cooperation of the ISPs to identify the human at the end of the IP address.

Turns out that Virgin Media wants to use a new piece of software called Cview which would allow the ISP to identify illegal traffic by some overly complicated technical means the business end of which means information about the content is embedded deep in the file which they can trace, collect and make sense of.

So what is the big deal? I won't pretend to know much about anything to do with software and privacy but according to Privacy International (PI) it is an illegal intrusion on personal privacy because "under the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations (PECR) and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) as well as the European ePrivacy Directive, interception and processing of communications requires either explicit informed consent from all parties or a warrant."

At the moment PI is threatening criminal action proceedings if Virgin forges ahead with the trial because well, technically they are breaking the law. (read the BBC article here)

I can't help but wonder though if it is at all worth it in the "fight" against illegal file sharing. But then again what will work? Virgin claims that all that this software will do is help them identify what kind of content is being traded so that the lawmakers can better legislate which is fine, you have to know the nature of the beast before you can kill it but lets face it, the outcome will remain the same every time. For every barrier there is a work around, we have seen it with the hacking of PSPs, iTunes and the iPod, region coding on DVD players and so on and so forth and its only a matter of time before some kid in his dorm room figures out a way to share without being detected.

Or is there a deeper principle here? Could the use of this software coupled with the legislation be part of a shock and awe tactic to "catch" just enough people and in turn deter a wider group of people effectively creating a paradigm shift in the way we consume content? Wasn't this the thinking is the US when the RIAA brought cases against the John Doe's that they had identified as illegal file sharers? How successful was that again?

I'll just wait an see what the EC has to say about this, they may not even get to do the trial.

Really?!?!?!... Tiger?

I think I can safely say say I never saw this one coming..."Tiger the philanderer"...clean cut, all American, living the "American Dream" Woods. 9- 14 women came out of the woodwork all claiming he had affairs with them. While the details may be salacious, maybe even tantalizing I will leave you to trawl the celeb gossip sites to get more info but for the purposes of today's blog I want to talk about the injunction in the UK courts preventing the publication of "the information".

I'm still trying to work out how exactly Justice Eady can injunct information that is freely available in the US media- broadcast, print, internet from being communicated here. Surely anyone with an internet connection is going to access this information, and by virtue of its availability it is in the public domain and last time I checked that was an exception to granting privacy rights. Not to mention that it makes a complete mockery of the injunction. Or does Justice Eady mean to say that only legitimate news outlets are prohibited from making the information available to the public? Even then, I still don't see the point- anonymous bloggers will blog about it, unless we learnt absolutely nothing from the trafigura debacle.

Surely this is an illegitimate application of the balancing test between privacy and freedom of speech. I've observed the media feeding frenzy in the US around this story and the injunction has served its purpose here and prevented the same and perhaps mitigated additional damage to his reputation but did it have to be at the expense of the credibility of the law?

Welcome!

Nervous about starting my own blawg...how is that even a word? Oh well here it goes