In fighting against Phorm I feel (personal opinion) it is important to focus on a few issues of significance rather than spread the discontent over as many issues you can think of.
A case in point is the issue of copyright infringement, as Struan Robertson wrote about in out-law.com:
http://out-law.com/default.aspx?page=9090
"Arguably Google breaks copyright laws when it indexes the web; Arguably Microsoft breaks anti-spam laws when it attaches tiny ads to the foot of Hotmail emails. But nobody cares about such minor transgressions. After all, where's the harm?
Legal risks and new technology are inextricably linked. Typically, upon being identified, some risks will be avoided, some will be mitigated and some will be ignored. Phorm has to look at all the legal risks and decide which ones to address, which ones to mitigate and which ones it can afford to ignore."
No my visit to this thread, as a veteran of the anti-Phorm debate on Badphorm, was to impart the opinion, my personal opinion, that it would be better for the campaign to focus on the less contentious legal issues, such as RIPA is very likely to be breached if email is scanned, rather than digress into issues such as but not restricted to copyright infringement.
The key issues as I see them are:
1.) RIPA s2, but only focussing on private email, protected content etc.
2.) DPA s11, the right to opt-out of direct marketing, because it is very hard to comply to this with a cookie opt-out model, and once a real network opt-out is implemented it is very hard for the ISPs to get those who have opted out to reconsider, furthermore in the event that Phorm blockers are deployed, this could cause many more people to ask for the opt-out (so long as the blockers allowed truly opted-out people to access).
3.) Privacy in Electronic Communications Regulations, because this *could* force an opt-in model, although I'm reliably informed due to a technicality with the ICOs v1.3 statement the commissioner could have misunderstood what actually constitutes header information.
Many other avenues, whilst perfectly valid forumfodder, and in my opinion, are markedly weaker and the ISPs have reasonably strong defence.
For the record I didn't get out of bed the wrong side this morning, but I will rigorously defend my arguments on the few times I choose to post. It doesn't matter that I am not here all the time.
Good night all.