Some Legal Matters

I have decided that everytime I want to stop work and start browsing the internet, I have to remember three of the formulas on my list. If I get them wrong, I have to do an hours revision and come back to another random three questions. Sadly when I woke up this morning, my brain was in gear and I managed to answer all three with perfect recall and as a result spent about two hours surfing the web. As I did so, I came across an interesting article about the Digital Rights Bill that is being discussed in the houses of government at the moment. It was a university tweet that put me onto it because a law professor had written the article in the guardian.

If you are interested in digital law - and frankly, why wouldn't you be? - or even just want to stand up for common sense, then you can read the article for yourself here. I cannot believe that people can be so naïve as to let things like this pass, do these people not have parents or elderly relatives? The article is really well written from the perspective of the authors mother who I suppose is the equivalent age of my grandmother and so I wholeheartedly concur with what she is saying. Neither of my grandparents are silver surfers and neither of them even own a computer. On my dad's side, my gran can work the TV simply by memorising what buttons she needs to press and other than that there is nothing. If something different happened one day, she wouldn't have a clue where to start. At least she was better than my grandpa on that side because he couldn't even work the VCR. On my mum's side things get a little better and my gran will often be able to work the simple operations by following the instructions although the last TV she brought came without any printed instructions, only a CD which is pretty useless to someone without a computer. Anyway, once again I have veered off course. What I was trying to get across, like the author of the article, neither of them would know how to set up a secure wireless network and if legislation came in that made them responsible then that would be a shambles. Old people - and Im sure some young people as well - up and down the country would suddenly be committing a crime for not knowing how to set up wireless encryption.

Thinking about it, even if they did, they would end up choosing - like so many do - a password like '12345' or 'abcde' and I am guilty of hopping onto a neighbours Wi-Fi for a couple of minutes to check my email or something when they are silly enough to use a password like that. I didn't do anything illegal, it was simply a lucky guess as to what the password was when our internet was down.

Next item on the agenda is that of software patents. Bizarrely quite a law filled day today because the next article I happened upon was this one. Software patents in the USA have cause no end of lawsuits and whilst I can see that there can sometimes be a need to protect inventions, I don't think that ALL types of software should be covered. I haven't quite decided what might be the exceptions to the rule but I genuinely believe that if Europe and the UK start to go down this slippery slope, it will cause more damage than it solves. Already the EU patent offices have started issuing software patents despite there being no legal backing for them but in the end, it is only the big companies who will benefit. If you come up with some software that actually does something new, say a new algorithm for example, it is already covered by law in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) because it is a written work. There is no need to slap a patent on it - a costly process in itself but not only that, this act stipulates that there would be no infringement if it were for the public good. Apparently things like MP3s are patented and have become so ubiquitous that tracking down every such breach of the patent would be far too complicated and there are several companies all claiming to own the patent according to Wikipedia.

So yes, or should that be no? Erm... just sign the damned petition and lets get this stupid matter sorted out once and for all, click the massive banner!