The problem with the Internet and legislation goes much much deeper than copyright.

To put it bluntly amongst other things it destroys the distance metric that makes “local markets” and is fundemental but usually unstated assumption of economics, and compleatly de-rails the arguments of “freemarket economics”.

As you note “copyright” has different meanings in diferent places as kindle owners found out.

I know we don’t have a world government but we also do not have realistic international legislation.

And it is not helped by various people going to different juresdictions to get enforcment they cannot get in other places (Look at the use of UK liable laws by for instance Saudis citizens trying to stop publication in the US of truthfull but embarising information).

My view point is all legislation of any kind must have,

1, A cooling off period.
2, A provisional period.
3, A sunset clause.

That is legislation should after being initialy pushed through both houses should be “under examination” to see if it passes muster, initialy (cooling off period) for profesors of law, judges, and other interested parties to go through the proposed legislation (as a fixed target not an evolving monster as it moves from house to house).

Then there should be a period of test cases whereby the law is stress tested at the expense of the public not some poor individual selected because they cannot afford to defend themselves.

Finaly after a relativly short time period the law should be brought back before the houses for reconsideration to decide if it should remain in part or whole on the statute books.

Now the last part brings up an interesting point about UK legislation versus that in other domains. In the UK the laws are writen in a very very convoluted way and are very self referential in a way that guarenties in most cases the law of “unintended consiquences” applies.

It is a habit that one can only conclude has been deliberatly fostered in the UK by civil service etc advisors to alow hidden traps and penalties to exist and thus hoodwink those voting the laws into existance without due consideration.

As for SI’s and Henry the Eighth rules we realy should find better ways of doing things they are the tool of a Dictatorship not a Democracy.

yes (would I lie to you?)

I thought they were all doing it by injecting routes into their core

BT’s “cleanfeed” does this, and others have similar schemes, but this is not universal (it’s expensive!)

it’s possible to use the DNS service as an oracle

Yes indeed:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/talks/090528-uknof13.pdf

also, bizarrely, on Wikileaks!

Then again, perhaps the BPI are naive, and the LibDems who instantly recognised its utility as a wrecking amendment, jumped at the chance to table it?

William of Ockham says they’re ALL naive, and the DEBill is a perfect expression of how ignorant industry and parliament is of the fundamental incompatibility between copyright and The Internet.

Whilst I too hope that this was intended to be a wrecking amendment (or that it has that effect), you’re right to point out that it’s too dangerous to ignore.

That’s why I’m going to be doing a lightning talk on what this could mean for SaaS at this evening’s CloudCamp event in London (http://cloudcamplondon7.eventbrite.com/).

For those that can’t make it along I’ve posted my slides at http://www.slideshare.net/cpswan/debill-vs-saas.

Cory Doctorow made some good points last week about ‘web lockers’, and what would happen if users and businesses couldn’t access those. Clearly the unintended consequences go further than that. What would happen if an online storage service such as Amazon’s S3 (which is after all just a gigantic web locker) was blocked? All of the SaaS applications that store objects there would suddenly stop working – a potential catastrophe for the businesses that depend on such services.