Sky blocks Newzbin, important legal and technical questions need answering

[Francis Davey]

2011/12/16 Igor Mozolevsky <mozolevsky at gmail.com>:
>
> I think we better take this offline, I was trying to put what was
> necessary for BT to do in terms that ECJ put it in Scarlet. You seem
> to be saying that because Cleanfeed doesn't look at what is sent and
> received as a whole, but only at a proportion of what is sent, is less
> invasive?

I think at least that a court would find it less invasive. In its
current incarnation its not going to be looking at the content of what
is being transmitted, nor to interfere with what is transmitted on the
basis of that content. Scarlet is different.

There the ISP would be looking at every image or sound file that you
sent and would make automatic decisions on the basis of content,
notwithstanding that it can't know whether you are using the material
lawfully or not.

Other factors came into play such as expense and interference. Audible
Magic is going to slow things down a lot more than IP re-routing +
occasional blocking.

>
> Indeed, for some reason I was under the impression that IWF was
> running Cleanfeed, it appears that they only provide `filtering
> pattern'. In a sense then, BT appears to be already prejudiced by the
> fact that they had _some_ content filtering and this order was nothing
> more than a feature creep into BT's internal system.

Yes. That was a big factor. TalkTalk don't run Cleanfeed (for
instance) and that may affect the nature of any order against them.

Already having a blocking system built-in makes a big difference.


>
> That's how I read it, just was wondering about customers of customers
> of BT, if you see what I mean (ISPs who piggy-back their service off
> BT wholesale, for example), and incidental traffic to which BT chooses
> to apply Cleanfeed. I have no idea about how Cleanfeed is applied by
> BT, btw. Can one freely (not as in beer) find out if their connection
> to the Internet is subject to Cleanfeed?
>