There is a website about the UK OSA from Neil Brown, a UK lawyer with his own law firm that specialises in tech law. It should be noted however that nothing on that website officially constitutes as legal advice, regardless of the expertise or profession of its author.
Same as before, nothing on that website is officially considered as legal advice.
Discourse (read: Haikuās forum software) CEO on the OSA:
Barring Haiku, Inc. hiring an actual UK lawyer specialising in tech law or one of those providing pro bono services, realistically the only safe options left at the moment are:
Geoblock the UK
Shut down the Haiku forum (and other affected sites) entirely
Thank you @win8linux, I hadnāt seen those articles. Theyāre awesome (and iām revealed a lot of my IANAL interpretation of the OSA matches what other people see)
Good to know that they were of help! Had I known better, I wouldāve DMed you some of this info on the day that the news dropped about the enforcement of the law.
Sorry, but how UK jurisdiction can affect Haiku Inc. that is registered in USA? Can we just ignore UK government lawsuits, or there are some international contracts that makes lawsuit valid in USA too? Maybe avoiding people related to forum administration to live in UK is enough?
Iāll second that. Itās a website. As long as we donāt offer or advertise in the UK. Whatever their citizens do online is their business. Iām sure there will always be a multitude of websites that they can easily access that donāt follow their rules. Some of which may actually be unsafe. People with unsafe websites outside of the UK probably arenāt too concerned with following their rules. I for one see no reason to entertain the idea of the UK getting to decide what companies in the US have up on the web. Letās leave the geo-blocking to UK and China, and only geo-block regions where they might cause us harm, not visa-versa.
Or just do a best effort. One time question "Are you a citizen of the UK or Brazil? (I think Samsung magician software asks this). Anyone proceeding does so at their own risk.
I wouldnāt fork over serious legal money, unless itās a quick modest payment if someone has a simple answer to implement that wonāt cause grief to non-UK users of the website. If they absolutely must be geo-blocked then just do it and oh well for them, we should focus out efforts on our own goals to make Haiku great. Those in the UK who want to be a part of it Iām sure will find some workaround to what appears to be safety theatre.
Edit: I also wondered about how much influence the UK could have from a legal perspective on Haiku. As a company I donāt know how the first amendment applies, but as this is a public forum we have a freedom of speech, which our own government ostensibly canāt suppress let alone some other government.
This is your only real option if I or any other UK user circumvents the geoblick with a VPN. I think your only option is to delete or deactivate all UK accounts now and make all future users get vetted before accepting their membership - if you are going to try to avoid this. I donāt think ābut he was using Tor/VPNā is a defence. That person is still located in the UK. The law still applies.
What if add a rule that access to this forum is not allowed from UK territory (or by UK citizens?) to forum terms of use? In this case access from UK will be violation of terms of use and user will be the one who take responsibility.
My guess is that a lot of projects that are recognized by FSF have forums that will be affected and itās a question of time since their lawyers will come up with a generic template.
In the contrary - the world is going forward, but the leaderships are fearing of the upcoming directions.
That the peoples will see the king is nude and noone will silent about it ā¦ especially among each others.
Now they are interested to try to control again every aspect of human communications with iron grips - look at lately what happened in EU when Zukerberg talked about in a podcast in the US how FB and its colleagues were pushed in US and EU - to have some topics censored on FB - based on ideological difference. It was about to remain silent.
It has changed in the US lately, but not in Europe.
This way I agree it may be followed by other Europian countries to have similar laws. It would come there, where the leadership does not take care their citizens and want to grasp the power in any way and does not tolerate altering opinion or obvious for many ā¦ especially to shout loud that : - The king is nude ! - against that all are basically democracy.
I am very sceptical that this forum needs to take any action at all, at this stage. I am a member of a couple of UK based rail enthusiast forums and, AFAIK, they will not pull the plug in March.
I strongly feel that your hunch is correct. I would expect Haikuās forum to be considered āde-minumusā.
As @VoloDroid kindly inked to the legislation, the test apart from UK user numbers (a quantity neither specified or tested in law), is harm:
Our own forum is clearly run on good faith and nobody could accuse us of being cavalier with the welfare of those on the forum.
We can be confident that others will be prosecuted long before the authorities get down to us (which they wonāt). I know the Haiku board have to consider their own peace of mind, but I feel the geo blocking is an over-reaction. The chances of anyone in the UK actually choosing to take action against the forum would be negligible. There are much more egregious cases out there that will be prosecuted first. This will result in case law that Haiku can use to decide to continue with the forum.
I suggest āwait and seeā is the only approach that we can take. Unfortunately it seems the UK is becoming the sort of country where the rules are drafted in such a way that the authorities can weaponise them to harass over any person or business they take a dislike to. Our terrorism laws have been used this way for years. Keep a low profile, stick to discussing Haiku, and we will be fine.
Iām sorry but hundreds of countries are on the Earth - so in the world.
I spoke up against that the world is going backward.
If any leadership tries to going backward - they face with consequences :
at least at next elections :))
I understand that anyone who lives their country that means āthe worldā from a selfish aspect, but everyone should step back and look at it out of their boxes before speaks about world is like this or this or which direction to move.
I also understand it is hard to accept that in sorrowness and anger in an affected country if it happens, and this way spoke up in anger and sorrow manner ā¦ against that remaining with cold head in which board of Haiku Inc. has hoped when planned this action and asking for useful advices with honest and open explanation.
.But please recognise that Haiku Inc. asked such help here - in this topic - to have an advancing action not some questionable workarounds.
I think itās understandable their carefullness if you move out of the shelfish aspects - their goal and fund got into risk to be spending to another than what planned and what our common benefit : development of Haiku and related apps.
They expect that some would come up with useful advise not childish or selfish ones.
For people here claiming that Haiku, Inc. is either safe from the OSA or can ignore it, please provide sources from legal experts specialising in UK tech law saying so. Unless the organisation is absolutely certain that it is possible to comply or ignore the law safely, it is prolly not a good idea to risk incurring fines or worse for a single country. Yāall are proposing more legally dangerous approaches to a law, which merit more qualified insight than risk-averse alternatives.
It still places onus on the forum moderators and owners to do something, and manage things but outlines what measures can be taken to attempt to comply and also has completed the mandatory risk assessments.
With regards to the āUK users are a target market for your serviceā bit, that might need clarification on what target market is supposed to exactly mean here. Would it apply if the intended demographic is global or only if a service specifically caters to UK users, such as a UK-specific part of the service or some other way of localised curation?
It may be a good idea for the UK-based forum members to speak up here, as this could help gauge whether they make up a large enough contingent to be potentially significant legally.
No I donāt have a law degree but I do live in the God-Forsaken lands known as the British Isles, so have a better idea how the place ticks. As an example of differences even to the UK derived law of USA, over the Gaza genocide it was pointed out to me that the UK not a country with any formal protection of the concept of āfreedom of speechā. This law will simply be a tool used to shut down anyone the state disagrees with but if we keep a low profile Iām sure we are fine.
So, having told us we are just speculating, we might in turn ask if your analysis comes from a properly qualified lawyer?