Posts in Legal
Web Accessibility - addressing digital inclusion with standards
It’s been estimated that 11m people in Britain are disabled, with around 7m of those being of working age. What’s more, there’s a significant (and rising) number of older people who may not think of themselves as disabled but who might have difficulty with their sight or hearing. So, at a time when an increasing number of contact points are being moved online, it’s clear that unless accessibility is embedded into communication strategies, organisations may be unwittingly creating a digital divide.
In December 2010, the British Standards Institution (BSI) launched a code of practice on web accessibility. More...
Laura Norder in Digital Britain
We're all in favour of law and order, I imagine, and I'm sure we all want to see new technology deployed in a responsible manner. But to some people, all new technology is bad and only to the benefit of ne'erdowells, therefore its use should be either constrained or curtailed in order to keep the world as close as possible to the way it used to be. I'm not talking about record companies here, but the media. Remember the recent story about the girl who was mudered by a man she met on the interweb? The newspapers naturally called the fiend "the Facebook killer", although they could just as easly have called him the "Ford Mondeo Killer", since that it was he used to transport the victim to her doom, and started callng for a variety of crackdowns on social networking, e-mail and the internet. More...
Action on Filesharing Should Have a Quid Pro Quo
Lord Mandelson is right to try to stop the illegal distribution of music and video. The scale on which it happens distorts incentives for participants in both the communications and the creative industries; and we should anyway give special care to our artists and creators whose existence is often uncertain enough without adding callous disregard for the protections copyright offers them.
He should however accompany his efforts with a requirement on the music and film companies to supply retail entertainment services on reasonable and non-discriminatory wholesale terms, instead of the highly questionable approach they currently take, demanding equity stakes, disproportionate advance payments, and coercive tools such as short term licences and put options, which benefit neither the artists and creators, nor entertainment retailers and ISPs, nor consumers. More...
Data privacy: still no man’s land!
The last issue of the prestigious Technology Review, the MIT publication on the future of technology, is largely dedicated to social networking. As usual, I am devouring it during my journeys on the Tube. This morning, a story captured my attention. A technology blogger wanted to move their 5000 Facebook friends into his Microsoft Outlook address book. He asked some techie friends for some help. In the end, he managed to fulfil his task using an ad-hoc program.
Unfortunately, the program triggered alerts to Facebook, which disabled his account. “My identity disappeared. If I was your friend, I turned grey – all my information went grey” (Technology Review, July/August 2008). More...
Numéricable blows a gasket
If you recall, I told you last week about how an amendment in the law of modernisation of the economy currently discussed in the parliament favoured Numéricable by allowing them not to sign agreements to fiber up buildings in which they were already present in coax (see The Cable Exception.)
So, first of all, my coverage was incomplete. The core reason why this favoured Numéricable was that the law specifies that the conventions that fiber operators will have to sign when entering a building guarantees open access to the vertical in the building. By not having to sign such a convention to upgrade from coax to fiber, Numéricable would not have been subject to that open access obligation, which is what the consumer association UFC Que Choisir was so pissed off about. More...
