one-to-many messaging

[James Firth]

Clive D. W. Feather wrote:
>
> No.
>
> R v Stanford was another case dealing with the meaning of authorisation.
>
> "1(6) The circumstances in which a person makes an interception of a
> communication in the course of its transmission by means of a private
> telecommunication system are such that his conduct is excluded from
> criminal liability under subsection (2) if
> (a) he is a person with a right to control the operation or the use of
> the system; or
> (b) he has the express or implied consent of such a person to make the
> interception."
>
> Stanford claimed that he arranged for X to carry out interceptions. X
> was an administrator of the system and, he argued, therefore "a person
> with the right to control the operation or the use of the system". The
> court decided that X's permission from the owner of the network to
> manipulate the system was only for the purpose of normal administration
> and *not* for these interceptions, which the owner would not have agreed
> to. Therefore, for the purposes of these interceptions X was not a
> person meeting the test of 1(6). Therefore the interception was
> criminal, therefore Cliff was guilty.
>
> If the owner had asked X to do things that included interception [1],
> then X's authority would have extended to intercepting and so he (and
> thus Cliff) would have been protected by 1(6).
>

But X could have been prosecuted? Seems obvious point, just checking.  I
skimmed the ruling and the Judge seemed to stress that the Act wasn't
intended to give anyone acting for a carrier rights of intercept.

At the back of my mind is content monitoring being tossed around by the
music industry to detect infringing files being shared in their networks. 
The worst example of this includes an ACE or similar kit scanning all
files transferred to check against fingerprints of well-known copyrighted
content.

There are so many problems with this, not least of which is the fact that
I can copy files that I own from my home to my remote music station.


James Firth