Circumvent the Digital Economy Act by running a public wifi hotspot from your house?

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Details on this guys blog http://revk.www.me.uk/2010/04/dont-secure-your-wifi.html

In short he reckons that if you get your ISP to reclassify you as a communications provider rather than a regular subscriber you are immune from prosecution as laid out in the Digital Economy Bill as long as your providing free public wifi access to the Internet.

Think it would hold water or would most ISPs tell you your service wasn’t available to give away as a free public hotspot?
 
Rev K is the MD of AAISP and he is frequently on the AAISP IRC channel.

I'm had many a conversation with him and he's a top bloke. Chances are he's done his home work on this (as he does with all the other things he talks about) so he's probably bang on the money.
 
And the reason it never goes to court is because there's now way to prove anything from an ip, no bill can change that :)
 
While I respect Adrian a lot he does preface all this with 'I'm not a lawyer' and people need to keep that in mind, my personal feeling is many of the things he's saying about the DEA would, if you said them in court, result in the judge telling you to get a grip.

Given the law is *exceptionally* new, nobody really knows how a court might rule yet. Andrew Cormack from JANET gave a decent presentation recently on the subject and the outcome was very much 'we don't know just yet'.

Oh, and while you might not be able to prove anything with an IP, you might not need to as if the technical measures provision gets activated, under that as it stands a given number of complaints would result in technical measures (limiting or just being cut off) being applied to your connection.

EDIT:

Oh, your average ISP will laugh at you if you ask to be designated a communications provider for legal reasons, you'll need a very compliant and helpful ISP (which will not be cheap).
 
bigredshark said:
While I respect Adrian a lot he does preface all this with 'I'm not a lawyer' and people need to keep that in mind, my personal feeling is many of the things he's saying about the DEA would, if you said them in court, result in the judge telling you to get a grip.

Given the law is *exceptionally* new, nobody really knows how a court might rule yet. Andrew Cormack from JANET gave a decent presentation recently on the subject and the outcome was very much 'we don't know just yet'.

Oh, and while you might not be able to prove anything with an IP, you might not need to as if the technical measures provision gets activated, under that as it stands a given number of complaints would result in technical measures (limiting or just being cut off) being applied to your connection.

EDIT:

Oh, your average ISP will laugh at you if you ask to be designated a communications provider for legal reasons, you'll need a very compliant and helpful ISP (which will not be cheap).
Click to expand...

I believe you mentioned over in SC that your company had managed to tweak some legal things to make most of the things the DEA says not applicable. I recall you currently work for an ISP, although a non-consumer ISP - in your view, are the changes you're making in your company non-applicable to consumer ISPs?

Apologies if I've misrepresented you - I'm just working from memory... :)

Re: OP, I must say that AA are looking like an attractive ISP to plump for when I move house. I remember when their prices were crazy, but they seem a lot more reasonable now.
 
I would agree that AA look reasonable as an ISP given the level of options and their reports of great customers service.

My F&F o2 deal is just too good to leave right now.

I do think its a very interesting article, I'm not sure I'd like to be the first person to set the precedent in court though!
 
growse said:
I believe you mentioned over in SC that your company had managed to tweak some legal things to make most of the things the DEA says not applicable. I recall you currently work for an ISP, although a non-consumer ISP - in your view, are the changes you're making in your company non-applicable to consumer ISPs?

Apologies if I've misrepresented you - I'm just working from memory... :)
Click to expand...

Some of the changes are not applicable to consumer ISPs due to technical complexity but some legal avenues are - the most notable one being a rather interesting loophole in that a subscriber is somebody who you provide IP addresses to - if you don't provide the IP addresses then it appears (and my legal advice concurs) that they are basically immune.

This is maybe most relevant right now if you're with, say, an Enta reseller as the reseller provides you with the internet access service but the IP addresses (in some cases) are provided by Entanet. Therefore as the reseller doesn't provide the IP and Enta don't have any contractual relationship with you nobody is empowered to serve you with a copyright infringement notices under the terms of the DEA. Whether this will stand up or will be patched up later is open to question (it's a big hole, a change in legal structure to make the consumer devision a legally separate entity owned by the parent network and you're off the hook in theory).

However if you provide IP addresses and they're allocated to you in RIPE then you're almost certainly in the clear, which might not matter much to most for IPv4 - who apart from me has their own RIPE PI allocation? - but it may matter very much for IPv6.

For reference, I'm doing work with a variety of ISPs these days (mainly NGN design and IPv6 rollouts with some high end MPLS and BGP design thrown in) and it is mostly on the commercial side but I keep an eye on the consumer side. It's worth listening to guys like Adrian (and AAISP are great people, they've got a fantastic rep among tech staff in the ISP community) but take his views on the legal side with his caveat that he's not a lawyer - basically don't be the first trying it in court!

To summarise - I think there's certainly the potential as it stands for changes to ISPs legal structure to make the DEA unenforceable however whether they will stand up in court isn't clear and if they do whether such a large loophole will be tolerated is not clear either.
 
Sorry for being a bit OT here but how exactly do they plan on enforcing this? will the music companies hunt down file sharers? My reason for asking is that I play World of Warcraft along with 12 million others and the game uses bit torrent to transfer all its patches, how can ISP's or whoever is hunting the illicit file sharing tell the difference between legal torrenting and illegal torrenting?

thanks
 
ubersonic said:
Sorry for being a bit OT here but how exactly do they plan on enforcing this? will the music companies hunt down file sharers? My reason for asking is that I play World of Warcraft along with 12 million others and the game uses bit torrent to transfer all its patches, how can ISP's or whoever is hunting the illicit file sharing tell the difference between legal torrenting and illegal torrenting?

thanks
Click to expand...

Find an illegal download (same way you do), connect to tracker, grab list of IPs, connect to IP to verify it's sharing the file, give list of IPs to lawyers...there are plenty of companies who specialize in doing this and they're pretty good at it, they even buy home DSL connections and put the monitor boxes through those to obfuscate them as much as possible.
 
groen said:
**** ofcom and **** big media. Just another corrupt government institution selling out the freedoms of the public.
Click to expand...

Oh grow up, this bill might be misguided and flawed but the right to circumvent copyright and illegally download other peoples intellectual property isn't one you've ever had...
 
groen said:
It is not a matter of maturity you fool. Nothing good can come of these worthless institutions like ofcom.
Click to expand...

Apart from sane efficient management of the radio spectrum and oversight of communications providers for a starting point? You're also factually incorrect and making stuff up (unless you'd care to offer any proof ofcom is 'corrupt')
 
groen said:
The market would regulate the communications providers just fine, without a worthless institution like ofcom poking its nose into everything and creating monopolies. How can you defend such a despicable organization ?
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How exactly would market forces regulate an industry dominated by a formerly state owned monopoly?
 
groen said:
The market would regulate the communications providers just fine, without a worthless institution like ofcom poking its nose into everything and creating monopolies. How can you defend such a despicable organization ?
Click to expand...

Because every indication to date is the market can't regulate them at all, let alone just fine. And we can't pretend everything that's gone before can be undone, companies like BT exist and require regulation, otherwise they are a monopoly, like they'd allow network access to anyone if their only concerns were commercial. I can quite easily defend them and working in the industry I'm subject to their influence day in day out (which I doubt you can say), do they make my life more difficult - yes, would we be in a far worse place without them - yes.
 
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