BT RULING IS AN INVASION OF PRIVACY
Odyssey Systems, the Tees Valley based business to business communications provider, has labelled a landmark ruling against BT as a “waste of time, impossible to police and an invasion of privacy”.
Six US film studios won the High Court case against BT to force it to block file-sharing Usenet website Newzbin2.
However, Mike Odysseas, managing director and founder of Stockton-based Odyssey Systems, said: “This ruling will open the door for many more. It is insignificant whether it is BT and Newzbin2 or any other combination of internet service provider (ISP) or site. A precedent has been set that the courts can order an ISP to start blocking a certain type of content and it is not a question of whether this could happen again, it is ‘who?’ and ‘what?’
“There is no secrecy in the internet at all. The way most ISPs work is that they inspect the content travelling through its network as it is being used. As one of the very few ISPs that does not do this, Odyssey allows the content to flow without being inspected in any way whatsoever, while others are doing the equivalent of opening every letter that comes through a sorting office before deciding whether the content is acceptable or not, and they can do that quite legally.