Subject: Re: [Add] Voluntary agreements vs laws

From: "Dixon, Hugh" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2020 12:09:42 +0000

Two significant advantages of agreements in technical domains (that relate to widely-socially-endorsed points of view such as the badness of child sexual abuse image content at least) as opposed to laws is that they can be relatively rapidly modified via largely technical consensus as technology changes and secondly don't have to be subjected to the interpretation of a (often highly non-technical) judge in order to be established as precedent.  A case in point is the copyright blocking legislation where in order to be actually effective as an enforceable law, the wording of the act and especially the legal judgement handed down in test cases has a bunch of stuff that took a lot of effort to get even close to actually sane, and can't be changed or updated without another test case.

Or to quote; "Hard cases make bad law" - and these sorts of things are often hard cases.

Ideally the TRR policy would find a way to recognise this context in a way that users would consider desirable and appropriate.
H

On 06/01/2020, 15:08, "Add on behalf of Livingood, Jason" <[email-masked] on behalf of [email-masked]> wrote:

    > This is a voluntary agreement and as such is not covered by "required by law".

    [JL] In many legal venues, this is why contracts often have the clause "as required by or authorized under the law" rather than just "as required by law". But for ISPs, usually the concern is specific to a particular law (e.g. Statute XYZ, Section 1, Part 7) and so an alternative to the exclusive language (required by) is to add in specific laws with which an organization may need to comply. But its complicated...

Information in this email including any attachments may be privileged, confidential and is intended exclusively for the addressee. The views expressed may not be official policy, but the personal views of the originator. If you have received it in error, please notify the sender by return e-mail and delete it from your system. You should not reproduce, distribute, store, retransmit, use or disclose its contents to anyone. Please note we reserve the right to monitor all e-mail communication through our internal and external networks. SKY and the SKY marks are trademarks of Sky Limited and Sky International AG and are used under licence.

Sky UK Limited (Registration No. 2906991), Sky-In-Home Service Limited (Registration No. 2067075), Sky Subscribers Services Limited (Registration No. 2340150) and Sky CP Limited (Registration No. 9513259) are direct or indirect subsidiaries of Sky Limited (Registration No. 2247735). All of the companies mentioned in this paragraph are incorporated in England and Wales and share the same registered office at Grant Way, Isleworth, Middlesex TW7 5QD