LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Mark Newton <newton@atdot.dotat.org>
  To  : Glen Vallance <glen@webmedia.com.au>
  Date: Thu, 27 May 1999 17:07:24 +0930 (CST)

Re: Opinions on New Internet Bill (While I am still allowed to

Glen Vallance wrote:

 > Remember this bill is divided into two parts.  

It's worse than that:  There are more parts coming that we haven't
even seen yet.  Here's a message I sent to aussie-isp earlier today:

Craig Sanders wrote:

 > the question here is "is it enticing a crime"?
 > what, exactly, is going to be illegal?
 > is it the act of downloading or viewing a page? or is it going to be the
 > service of providing access to that page?
 
Just a quick point here to foreshadow the next legislative step:  If
you think it's bad now, it's about to get a whole lot worse:  If you 
refer to the introduction of the Bill, there is supposed to be a
dove-tailed set of state regulations to supplement the Government's
current bill.

The Federal Government is regulating the servers (ISPs and content serving
organizations).  The State governments will be in charge of regulating
the users.  http://www.ozemail.com/~mbaker/amended.html contains
"Schedule 5-Online Services", "Part 1-Introduction", section (3):

(3) The second component of the proposed scheme will be: 
            (a) State/Territory laws that impose obligations on: 
                  (i) producers of content; and 
                  (ii) persons who upload or access content; and 
            (b) section 85ZE of the Crimes Act 1914.

So while in the first instance providing information to users to tell
them how to bypass filtering won't be an "incitement to crime," by
the states get through with us it probably will be.  Remember what
Jeff Shaw wanted to do in NSW?  Well, this bill doesn't just give him
the opportunity to do it again, it gives him SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS to
get on with the job.

I think we've been too distracted to make a big noise about this with
our users.  THEY ARE NEXT.  What we have here is only the beginning,
the states will soon be in charge of laws to "... impose obligations
on ... persons who upload or access content".

Of course, this says nothing about whether the provision of information
about how to bypass filters means we're providing carriage services
which fail to block prohibited content.

Be afraid, be very afraid.


    - mark

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I tried an internal modem,                    newton@atdot.dotat.org
     but it hurt when I walked.                          Mark Newton
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