Roland Perry - "is an ISP a 'Person'?"

[Peter Fairbrother]

Richard Clayton wrote:

> Peter Fairbrother writes:
> 
>> It doesn't stop virus scanning, it doesn't stop (most) spam scanning, it
>> just stops things like autoscanning for eg political content. ISP's can scan
>> or autoscan for "purposes connected with the provision or operation of the
>> (telecommunications) service". That they should be able to autoscan for
>> other purposes would make a mockery of the intent of RIPA.
> 
> I think you should consider the law of contract as well. The ISP may
> well be being paid for a particular type of scanning and everyone is
> relying on the Lawful Business Practice Regulations....

Criminal law overrides the law of contract. The LBPR's don't apply to
ISP's... 

Or, perhaps just the scanner is a private CSP, attached to the ISP (which is
a public CSP), and LBPR apply. That's actually quite a useful idea, though
there should probably be separate contracts with the ISP and the scanner.

The scanner can't offer or provide service to, or to a substantial section
of, the "public" though, or else it's a public CSP. Would Companies but not
individuals count as the "public", or a substantial section thereof?

> 
> .... and then (in true 4-horsemen mode of argument) consider an ISP that
> sells a service that purports to filter out "adult" material so as to
> provide a product that parents might consider purchasing for the use of
> unsupervised offspring.

I don't know of any such service, and I doubt Parliament thought of that,
but...

Children could address their webpage requests to the ISP, rather than to the
webservers, and the ISP could either block them or pass them on to the
webservers, according to a list. The ISP is then the intended recipient of
the webpage request communication, and no interception occurs.

Needs a bit of customer software, but doable, and much less expensive to run
than scanning the webserver's replies. A third-party web-forwarding service
could do the same, it doesn't have to be the ISP. I don't know about the
Rights of the Child issue though.

Scanning email to filter "adult" material wouldn't be legal under RIPA, but
if you stretch "broadcast" in 2(3) a lot, you might be able to scan web
content. Cookie/form problems though.

An alternative is to stretch the meaning of "service" in 3(3), which also
takes care of the problem of ISP's being paid to filter.


Just allowing autoscanning wouldn't really help that much, as in practice
ISP's have to view content on occasion, to maintain the autoscanning system.
Human access to content is still limited by the DPA.



But maybe Parliament was being idealisic, and meant to outlaw any censorship
or scanning by ISP's at all, except as needed to provide or operate the
service?  :)


> 
> Move on from there to consider the sort of range of filtering that we
> see in web-based systems (which go way beyond pictures of naked bodies
> to health information, some political views, non-mainstream views of
> religion... etc etc). Then reread your paragraph again and consider the
> political realities of your views.

I'm unsure what you mean by web-based systems. Could you give some examples?
Where is the filtering done?

-- Peter Fairbrother