New LSE Summer School Course in Cyberlaw

Exciting news:

You can now apply for the brand new LSE Summer School Course in Cyberlaw.

You get to spend three weeks in London (during the 2012 Olympic Games) being taught Cyberlaw by myself.

At the end of it (if you take the exam) you will get an LSE Summer School certificate in Cyberlaw.

The Prospectus entry is here.

General information about the 2012 Summer School is here.

You can apply to the 2012 Summer School here.

Some basic information about the Cyberlaw course:

It will run from 23 July -9 August 2012. All lectures will be given by myself. There will be 36 hours of lectures split into 12 lecture hours per week. You will have three hours of lectures per day for four days then a day off. You will also have 12 hours of tutorial classes taken by a first rate class teacher - one hour per day for four days per week. At the end will be two hour exam which will qualify you to receive the LSE Certificate in Cyberlaw. 

The course will look at issues such as IP protection in Cyberspace (copyright infringement, trade mark infringement, Peer-to-Peer, Google etc.); Speech issues (defamation, free expression, transparency, injunctions (including AMP)); e-commerce (payment, contracting domain names) and privacy (data security, data protection etc.).

I will also be arranging for guest speakers such as Matthew Richardson to come along and talk about their experiences of Cyberlaw.

A detailed outline of the programme is here.

The session two courses are likely to be very popular with the Olympics on. I would advise applying early. If you have any questions please get in touch with me, my contact details are available here.

A Short Update on AMP v Person's Unknown

Since the decision in AMP came out I have received many messages telling me the approach will never work. Some of these have come directly to me via email, some have been posted on this site while others were posted on news reports of the case. One such example was posted on the Daily Mail Report:

Never heard of the Streisand effect then? Attempts to remove or ban online content inevitably leads to further interest and publication.I expect those images will go viral by the end of the week now that everyone knows about them. 

Well that didn't happen and neither did any of the other things suggested by the naysayers. The only blip we seem to have had to date in enforcing the order is that some wag decided to post a link to identifying information on AMP via the Daily Telegraph comments section on the story (now removed obviously) where actually another wag wrote "You don't need to publish the lady's name, because we know already. It's Ms. Canute."

Well happily so far the naysayers have been proven wrong. The pictures have not gone viral - a quick search of all the key search engines and social network sites reveals this. There has been (as we predicted) no Streisand effect. This confirms predictions I made in my book The Regulation of Cyberspace, that the online community function as a network and that regulation is likely to be effective when the community perceives that regulation or control as fair and justified. As AMP is perceived mostly as a victim, most people want the order to succeed. This may be contrasted with celebrities such as Barbara Streisand who seek to control unreasonably through a misapplication of the law (see also CTB).

Have we succeeded in removing the images from BitTorrent though? Well I've received a text from Matthew Richardson which reads

You will be pleased to hear that I think as of Monday morning we will have purged all of AMP's pictures from readily available websites...A great result I think. 

So as we stand it seems we have been broadly successful. There is a problem with digital goods in that there are surely still many copies of the pictures available in the hard drives of people who made copies before the order. AMP will have to live with this knowledge. What she won't have to put up with is the continued dissemination of the pictures. At least that's how things stand now.

New Approach to Privacy: AMP v Persons Unknown

I mentioned on Twitter last week that I was involved in a potentially ground breaking court case but that I couldn't say any more. Well the judgement came out this morning. The case is AMP v Person's Unknown [2011] EWHC 3454 (TCC) and the impact it may have is far reaching in terms of an alternative to orders being sought against essentially unregulatable (for the UK courts) offline platforms such as Twitter or Facebook (see entries passim on CTB v Twitter such as this one or my evidence to the Select Committee on Privacy and Injunctions.  


The reporting of AMP has to be done carefully as there is a Contra Mundum order in effect (for very good reason) so I will restrict myself to only those things said in the judgement and those things which are clearly not subject to the order.  Firstly all credit for the innovative order passed down today rests with the excellent and always innovative Matthew Richardson who made headlines two years ago with his innovative approach to online impersonation via Twitter - the so called Blaney Blarney Order (see here and here). I suspect the AMP order may have the same impact and provides a new approach to the regulation of online content for individuals and companies by applying Chris Reed's "Internet Fallacy" argument to a practical situation. This is people are people wherever they are and people may be regulated and controlled by the courts of the jurisdiction they are in. 


What happened and how was the order won? Well as I said I have to remain within the judgement given the wider Contra Mundum order. Essentially AMP either lost or had her mobile phone stolen (it was reported as stolen with the police) and with it sexually explicit images of the claimant - although the judgement is not clear we can assume she was "sexting" her boyfriend. It is clear that (a) AMP owned the copyright in these images and (b) they were private images obtained illegally via the theft. Soon thereafter the images appeared on a Dutch file hosting site for a short period but were removed from there at the request of the claimant but not before the images had been downloaded by others. As the judgement makes clear a number of blackmail demands followed, possibly from the same person. 


The images then found their way onto a BitTorrent site and a three year legal battle was begun to essentially block the sharing of the BitTorrent content. This is where Matthew and then later I (in a very minor role) became involved. Everyone knows BitTorrent content is unregulatable, or at least that is the orthodoxy, Matthew though came up with a novel approach. You cannot ask Torrent Trackers or the providers of Torrent Clients to block as they essentially cannot do so due to the nature of BitTorrent. What you can do though is prevent people from seeding Torrents if they are within the jurisdiction of the Court. Matthew surmised (and I agreed) that as AMP is not a celebrity (or in any way famous) anyone sharing the images was likely to know her personally either from her circle of acquaintances at home (ex school colleagues etc) or from University. These people would be based in the UK (England & Wales) and would be the key to seeding the Torrent. Take out the key Seeders and the Torrent would pretty much wither on the vine. 


What Matthew needed to do was to convince the Court to award an order that he could serve on anyone seeding the Torrent. As most of them would be located within the jurisdiction of the Court it would be effective. He developed a number of claims including claims under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 but essentially it came down to two claims: (1) Privacy under Article 8 of the ECHR and (2) Protection from Harassment. The stronger claim was under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 as an infringement of a harassment order is a criminal offence. The full judgement is available below but to cut a long story short Ramsay J. agreed that the actions of the Seeders was harassment and made an order under s.3 of the 1997 Act.  A breach of this order is an offence under s.3(6)(b). 


Matthew will now no doubt go about serving this order on anyone who seeds the files in question. This may involve a Norwich Pharmacol application but assuming we are right in our earlier assumption that overwhelmingly seeders will know AMP and are therefore within the jurisdiction of the Court we expect seeders to quickly stop sharing once the nature of the order is made known to them. Hopefully AMPs lack of celebrity means this will not lead to any kind of Streisand Effect - in fact this is not a free speech issue in any way the images were private and were stolen.      


Thus content on BitTorrent may just be regulatable after all. Although we accept this is a very unusual case and its wider application may be limited. 


The judgement is available here.


UPDATE - Just spoke to Matthew and applications for third party identities will be done under CPR 31.17 not Norwich Pharmacol. This is quicker, easier and cheaper. Also Matthew pointed out that the seeders do not have to be based within England & Wales to be brought under the jurisdiction of the order - thanks to a European Arrest Warrant anyone within the EU is bound by the order.

Evidence to the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions

I spent a fun afternoon yesterday with a mixture of MPs and Lords and three other excellent expert witness on internet industries and regulation/governance discussing what should be done about individuals with accounts on social network sites such as Twitter breaching privacy and super injunctions. Our evidence session was about one hour and we were followed by executives from Northern and Shell (publishers of Express Newspapers and owners of Channel 5).

Update You can also access the video stream from the BBC Democracy Live site which is better quality than the Parliament Stream and may work better on Apple Devices

Giving Parliamentary Evidence Tomorrow

Tomorrow afternoon I am taking a jaunt to provide evidence to the Joint Select  Committee on Privacy and Injunctions. I'm on at circa 2.15pm with Dr. Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute, Ashley Van Haeften, Trustee of Wikimedia UK and Nicholas Lansman, Secretary General of the Internet Service Providers Association. The whole thing can be watched live (and then archived) from the UK Parliament Channel - http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Home.aspx I have a list of questions but can't share them with you, I also have my suit pressed and a new pair of shoes. 


It is a busy day tomorrow as I'm teaching 12 - 1, then at 6.00pm we have the excellent and entertaining Barefoot Technologist discussing the key themes of her book Barefoot into Cyberspace. If you are in the vicinity of the LSE's new Academic Building at 6.00pm - we're in the Moot Court Room on the seventh floor - join us.