And under European law, in its current form:

Injunctive relief (such as a blocking injunction) is specifically recognised as acceptable by the law which grants ISPs "mere conduit" status:

Of course, this is just law, and could be struck down by a court on, for example, human rights grounds, and the CJEU's Advocate General made some interesting comments on human rights considerations in the context of blocking of open, free Wi-Fi recently but, to date, the courts have been relatively comfortable granting blocking injunctions.

It is worth bearing in mind that the charges in question do not appear to be charges under copyright law. They are, apparently:

Converting criminal property falls under s327 Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, and has a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.

Possession of an article for use in fraud is covered by s6 Fraud Act 2006, which carries up to 5 years imprisonment.

In the EU, there is no requirement of data retention at all any more – there was, for some years, but this was struck down by the CJEU in the Digital Rights Ireland case.

However, the European directive would have covered providers of Wi-Fi services: it uses the term "publicly available electronic communications services". (Article 3(1) directive 2006/24/EC).

This definition comes from the telecommunications regulatory framework – Article 2 directive 2002/21/EC defines "electronic communications service" as "a service normally provided for remuneration which consists wholly or mainly in the conveyance of signals on electronic communications networks".

Whether the Wi-Fi service would generate or process in the course of its operation of the types of data to which a retention notice could relate (list here, Part 3 in particular) is perhaps a different matter, and likely depends on the service in question. A service requiring subscriber registration, for example, or entering an email address, may well have been in scope (for example, paragraph 11(3)).

The most interesting part of the opinion, in my view, was the clear statement that someone offering free public Wi-Fi to their customers did so as part of the "economic context" of their shop, even though they do not charge directly for it.

The reason why this is important is that the shielding law in question here — Art. 212, directive 2000/31/EC — can be invoked only by those providing an "information society service". This is defined as:

As you'll have noticed, to be protected, the service must be "provided for remuneration". In this opinion, the Advocate General argues that it need not be direct remuneration, and that a link to a broader economic context is sufficient. This is logical, in the sense that it follows previous decisions, but it is an important clarification. (There is a previous decision, for example, (Papasavvas) which held that a website funded by advertising was an "information society service", even though the remuneration to the sites comes not directly from the site's users, but from the advertising broker.)

The Advocate General expressly stated that he was not considering the situation where there was no other economic context.

There is no specific European case law relating to the liability of someone running a Tor exit node. However, following the principles of the opinion (not yet a court ruling) here, someone running a Tor exit node would probably be well-advised to try to bring their activities within the scope of an economic context. That could be running the exit node alongside some other business, or offering subscription plans (well, supporter plans, I suspect) for would-be users of Tor (even if not of that specific exit node) to contribute to the running of the system, or something else which made it part of an economic activity. Someone running a Tor exit node, or an open Wi-Fi connection, from their home network, without an economic context, looks unlikely to be shielded by this law, if the court chooses to follow the Advocate General's ruling.

(My general comments on the opinion are here.)

In the UK, there is no monopoly on giving legal advice — only six things in the legal sphere require particular entitlement ("reserved activities"):

• (a) the exercise of a right of audience;
• (b) the conduct of litigation;
• (c) reserved instrument activities;
• (d) probate activities;
• (e) notarial activities;
• (f) the administration of oaths.

Anyone can give legal advice, so prohibiting just software from doing so would seem a very odd move.

The professional body for solicitors in England and Wales — the Law Society — recently released a report on "The Future Of Legal Services" and, at section 4.2, it talks through (very briefly) a number of the technology changes which will either be useful to solicitors or else challenging them.

Popcorn Time ... no more or less legal than utorrent or any other bittorrent client

The court here came up with a slightly different perspective:

• - even though the claimants did not argue this, the court commented that the developers of Popcorn Time probably authorise copyright infringement (Paragraph 48)

• The Popcorn Time application is a means necessarily used for users to infringe the copyright in many senses. It is the means by which they find what content they want, it is the means by which they access and collect the pieces of the content files using the BitTorrent protocol and it is the media player on which the user actually watches the protected work. Infringement of copyright is inevitable when Popcorn Time is used. That is what it is for. Moreover it is not a tool like a twin tape recorder which could in principle be used by a user for any work (infringing or not). The Popcorn Time application accesses content using its index and that index is controlled by the suppliers. Each Popcorn Time application connects to SUI websites for updates of various sorts and by that means the suppliers of the Popcorn Time application retain control over its use. Whether the suppliers could turn off a user's Popcorn Time application is not clear but in any event they determine what appears in the index.

• - the suppliers of Popcorn Time (as opposed to the code itself, since code can't (yet) commit copyright infringement) had a "common design" with the operators of the websites in question, thereby infringing copyright (Paragraph 55)

• The issue I have to decide is whether the suppliers of the Popcorn Time applications are jointly liable with the operators of the host websites. In my judgment they are. The Popcorn Time application is the key means which procures and induces the user to access the host website and therefore causes the infringing communications to occur. The suppliers of Popcorn Time plainly know and intend that to be the case. They provide the software and provide the information to keep the indexes up to date. I find that the suppliers of Popcorn Time have a common design with the operators of the host websites to secure the communication to the public of the claimants' protected works, thereby infringing copyright.

does a service that is used to enhance privacy and block spying have enough non-copyright-infringing uses to make a block disproportionate.

Until such a case goes to court, it's anyone's guess, really. Where the service encourages infringement, or "authorises" it, I suspect that it would be easier to make a case for blocking than if it were entirely neutral, even if it was used for entirely lawful activities too.

The VPN provider is based in another European country, so presumably this legislation would be unable to force them to block any sites.

This can perhaps be unpacked a little:

• Does the UK legislation permit a court to injunct a VPN provider?
• If so, could an injunction be obtained in the UK against a provider based overseas?
• Does the UK legislation permit a court to injuct a UK-based ISP (Virgin Media) to block access to a VPN endpoint?

My gut feeling would be that, yes, a VPN provider would probably be a "service provider" for the purposes of s97A. Could an injunction be obtained in the UK against a provider overseas? Not my area of expertise, but I suspect that the copyright industry would attempt to claim that the infringement takes place in the UK, and you connect to the VPN from the UK, so the UK does have jurisdiction. I don't know whether that would succeed and, even an injunction were granted, whether it would be easy to actually enforce it before the courts of whatever country from which your VPN service is provided — although, noting that it's "another European country", that would probably be easier than if it were somewhere remote.

Could VM be ordered to block access to a particular VPN service? In principle, yes, as the use of a VPN or not would seem to be irrelevant to the test:

The High Court ... shall have power to grant an injunction against a service provider, where that service provider has actual knowledge of another person using their service to infringe copyright.

If the "actual knowledge" requirement can be made out in respect of one connection, routing the same data via a different path once it exits the ISP's service would not seem to make a difference. However, an injunction against a VPN provider where there is clear non-infringing use would seem disproportionate — which probably means that a mainstream VPN service, used by corporates, is more likely to survive than a service named "usethisvpntoinfringecopyright" or the like.

But I could be wrong, of course.

Facebook - Twitter - Tumblr... and see if the ISPs dare to block these

It would be interesting to see what would happen. Injunctions under s97A can be imposed on "service providers", which is defined very broadly, as " any person providing an information society service", so not just telcos.

My feeling is that the copyright industry would attempt to secure injunctions against Facebook, Twitter and so on, if they had entities in the jurisdiction. Both Twitter and Facebook do, as both have offices in London. However, they are not the entities providing the services, so it would be interesting to see how a court might rule — if the European Court's approach of Google Spain was followed, their proximity to the service provision might be sufficient to bring them within scope...

The judgment is Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation & Ors v Sky UK Ltd & Ors [2015] EWHC 1082 (Ch)

The legislation is here

From BlackBerry's BBM page:

In case it might be of interest, in the UK, on mobile networks at least, the existence of filters is not (and, as far as I know, has never been) secret, and the categories of content which are likely to render a site being blocked are published too. I appreciate that this is, of course, not the same as a "what's blocked and what's not list".)

The UK's infrastructure mobile operators published the "Code of practice for the self-regulation of new forms of content on mobiles" in January 2004, with the filters being implemented about a year later in early 2005. The code was updated in 2009, and is accessible here. The code still references the Independent Mobile Classification Body, but this is no longer the right place: the IMCB's role has been replaced by the British Board of Film Classification, which also administers the age ratings for films for the UK.

The BBFC documents its approach to mobile content classification on its website, here, including setting out the type of content which the BBFC considers suitable for "adults only", the details of mobile operator contact points in the event that a site operator considers that their site is incorrectly classified, and an appeals procedure against decisions taken by the BBFC.

Whilst there is no published "what's blocked and what's not" list, the mobile operators buy third party services for website classification; most, but not all, buy from Symantec. Symantec has a web interface for its "ratings tool" here, which (after a captcha) lets anyone see how Symantec has classified a particular URL. This is complemented by the Open Rights Group tool (here): the ORG tool does a real-time check of whether a site is blocked across mobile and fixed networks, and the Symantec tool indicates the classification given to the site by Symantec.

I suspect it depends on what "mature" means to you, but owncloud has been around for a little while now, and seems to be updated reasonably regularly. LDAP integration is beta, so it might not be suited to a corporate environment but, for home use, it has been fine for a while (2? 3? years now.)

There is a plug-in for it, which allows you to encrypt the files at rest within the server, but this did not work so well for me, as it never seemed to finish — I don't think I have a big archive, as it is only about 5GB, but they are mostly small documents (and so a lot of them), rather than images or video. Sync only via https can be forced as an option, which is great, and it works fine with self-generated certificates, after the usual "warning — do you want to trust this" dialogue on setup.

Since it uses a flat file structure on the server, no reason you could not rsync that to your chosen off-site storage as a cron job if you wanted, else there is a backup module which might do that for you anyway.

Not quite the same as BitTorrent Sync, but I have used owncloud for a while, as I prefer data to be on my infrastructure where possible. It was easy to set up, although was too slow on a Raspberry Pi to be useable, and I have not had much luck using the default sqlite. Now on a Debian VM with MySQL, and it's running just fine.

I would not make it publicly accessible, though, as it's just not worth the risk to me, so it only syncs when I am travelling after I have connected to the VPN. However, if you didn't have a static IP, a dynamic DNS service should do the job just fine of making it easily addressable externally.