Sunday 31 July 2011

Closing the 'Net'? (2)

Readers will no doubt have read the first post in what has turned into a  two-part series, in which I wrote about suggestions that the internet should be 'controlled'.

During the course of the debate in Parliament on aspects of sovereignty during the 'Referendum Bill' some MPs made the point that it is Parliament that should make the law, not judges. As not a lot of people listen to our Parliament anymore on the basis it is but a 'toy parliament' - the real one being in Brussels -that debate was probably wasted. It would appear that recognising this fact, some 'learned' judges have decided to make a ruling, one that has serious implications for we proles.

According to this website a recent ruling in the Court of Appeal means:
"The significance of this ruling is that if you live in UK, every time you click on an internet link you must have a license for every page you open. This is the case for every link you follow on the internet, any link people send to you by email, or any link you find on Twitter or Facebook."
As Professor Lionel Bently, Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property, Cambridge University, states:
"there is something fundamentally wrong with a legal regime which renders the innocent acts of many millions of citizens illegal."
 I have yet to read the ruling, so it may be the following comments are misplaced and therefore invalid, but it would seem that what the Newspapers Licencing Authority have introduced is a form of censorship and if we are to have a free press - free in the sense that journalists should be able to write that which is true; and free in that what they print, whether on paper on post it on the internet, is for public consumption and thereby it is the public's right to disseminate that information in any manner they wish. But hey, what the hell do I know?

And we are a free people? Spheroids - it seems we are no more free than those living under any other dictatorship, democratised or not!

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