Under the proposed legislation, it would be illegal for us (or you) to link to any website – any website at all, including community-driven behemoths like YouTube, Flickr, Blogspot or WordPress – without checking first that nothing on that site infringes copyright. And we’d have to review those sites continually after a link was made.
I think the above may be taking things too far.. If it is as above, then it would only serve to 'break the internet' and be practically unworkable.
My mind goes back to the proposed cookie law earlier last year.. something else which became unworkable. I spent a huge amount of time trying to ensure this site was compliant with the new rules that were due to come in on May 25th 2011. I think basically the idea was to protect users of the internet against so called 'bad cookies', but somehow this legislation was passed without there being any proper guidelines and it basically stated the use of all cookies.. without legislation realising that this would make the internet unlike anything we had known before and a total nightmare.
I did all I could, I did several work arounds, but some things were just not possible when it came to the likes of 3rd party cookies which I had no control over... and would I be breaking legislation because I use google ads and good analytics.
Certain parts of the site (such as the adsl checker) need the use of temporary cookies to be able to work otherwise it would forget your phone no as it passes from one page to the next even though this data is destroyed once you close your browser window. It would have also affected shopping carts etc.. forum logins.. any site which needed cookies to remember data.
The proposed solution was to place a pop-up on every single page on every single site telling the reader before they can read the page that you use cookies.
Can you imagine how annoying this would have made the internet to have to see this popup.. and then even funnier because to do this you'd also have to involve the use of cookies in itself to remember if the reader had seen the pop-up.
We were compliant as possible I even stopped using google analytics... but I decided to sit it out with google ads, because I thought - hey google is much bigger than me.. maybe they can come up with a workable solution. Then it became funny ridiculous.. May 25th arrived and some pretty big sites such as the BBC just couldnt be compliant.. even funnier the ICO, which held the new directives on the cookie law still wasnt compliant itself!
So... 25th May came and went... and suddenly because some one realised just how unworkable this new law was it was
deferred. So that was a couple of days wasted for me - for nothing.
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This sounds like another one of those stupid hyped up legislations.
The Open CongresS Summary of the bill can be seen
here.
The DoJ or the copyright owner would be able to commence a legal action against any site they deem to have "only limited purpose or use other than infringement," and the DoJ would be allowed to demand that search engines, social networking sites and domain name services block access to the targeted site. It would also make unauthorized web streaming of copyrighted content a felony with a possible penalty up to five years in prison.
So now we can see what they are actually targeting... and although the law if expanded could cover links to all sites.. (something which just isnt feasable if taken to the extremes as quoted by reddit).
I hardly think they are going to be targeting the likes of smaller sites linking to youtube.. they are after the type of sites which purely provide links to pirated material... I think we all know what that really means and it could have a big impact on certain sites which purely exist to link to illegal torrents.
Even Youtube (which may on occasions carry copyrighted material) doesnt come under the bit Ive emboldened, .. and its not there purely to post unauthorised copyrighted material.. because they have their own systems in place to try and stamp out use of such.
I think perhaps someone has taken the legislation to the extreme... and something that just wouldnt be workable at such an extreme level.
Im going to look at it similar to the laws on theft... and although I supposed technically it could be considered theft, because it theft is taking something that doesnt belong to you, but would anyone seriously bat an eyelid to a kid picking a daisy in the park?
So for the time being Im not going to waste any time on it, and I should hope that common sense will prevail.
