Naked Law

Smile, you're on TV

The Home Office along with the Association of Chief Police Officers recently published its awaited CCTV strategy document detailing how UK Government anticipates the development of CCTV use in the United Kingdom.

Currently, despite extravagant claims in some quarters, the UK is subject to patchy and extremely variable CCTV coverage, both in terms of number of cameras and the quality of CCTV footage (as the report confirms at page 13).  The report also states at page 8 that "the effectiveness of CCTV systems ... varies significantly across the country".  The strategy document proposes a unified network of cameras connected so that they can be used for law enforcement in a number of ways.

The report, as you can imagine from its source, focuses almost entirely on how CCTV can be developed for further use by law enforcement bodies (see for example the table at page 16 of recommendations). The report does spend some time on the Data Protection Act 1998 issues (as well as aspects of the Human Rights Act 1998), pointing out for example that the Information Commissioner produced a CCTV code of best practice in July 2000.  As the report acknowledges, the code is currently under review by the Information Commissioner.  The latest draft of the code is available here and the consulation period ends tomorrow.  The strategy document also proposes giving greater enforcement powers to the Information Commissioner.  However, current legislation is regarded by the Home Office as 'inadequate' for the role they anticipate CCTV having, and a legislative development is recommended as part of the report.

The report has done well, in my opinion, in that it does look to engage with the Information Commissioner, it does recognise that there are existing legislative protections of individiual rights in place which need to be reviewed and it does consider that legislative reform is likely to be required. However, the report does focus more on the law enforcement benefits of CCTV, which will no doubt have individual liberties campaigners concerned. The 12 month implementation phase now begins, so it is very much a case of watch this space.

Domain Name Buyers Beware!

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has announced that it is investigating claims of "domain name front running".  This term refers to the use of insider information, gathered from the monitoring of availiability searches, to buy up desired domain names. 

The preliminary report from the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) advised that "checking the availability of a domain name can be a sensitive act which may disclose an interest in or a value ascribed to a domain name" and suggested that such checks be carried out with care.  Once such domain names have been bought, they can be sold on to interested parties at a profit.

The SSAC has confirmed that although complaints have been filed by registrants with ICANN, registrars and intellectual property attorneys that suggest domain name front running is occurring, there is not yet any hard evidence.  The SSAC has compiled a list of ways in which domain name front running may be occuring and has called for the domain name community to consider this practice and ways in which to restrict it.

Why it's not good to share

Rejecting an out of court settlement can be a very bad decision if you are a file sharer.  Jammie Thomas has been ordered to pay $222,000 in damages after losing a US court case in which she denied unlawfully sharing over 1500 songs through the KaZaA service.

The award was decided by a jury in Minnesota, who heard evidence about the IP address and log on name which were associated with the copyright infringements. Over 20,000 cases have been brought in the US against file sharers using KaZaA and similar systems to share copyright music, but this is believed to be the first to go to a full jury trial.