Categories
Censorship

Jordan’s New Web Laws

Until recently, Jordan had been a great example of how an Arab country can have a liberal approach for regulating the Internet in a manner that aims at promoting innovation and the development of web culture. This might soon change if Jordan decides to pass the new amendment to its publication law that will treat websites like traditional paper publications.
Jordan had taken a progressive approach in regulating the Internet as the Internet has remained unfiltered for a long period of time and individuals have been free to start any website they wish without the need to satisfy any formalities. This has enabled the web in Jordan to mature quicker than in other countries in the region and foreign tech companies such as Google and Yahoo established offices there.

This situation might change as some Jordanian activists started rallying the government to censor pornographic websites on the Internet as they believed that it is the government’s duty to do so. Surprisingly for a country in this region, the government of Jordan was hesitant to impose any technical censorship filters, and instead responded to the demands of the public by offering a free filtering software that families can install on their own personal computers to limit the access their children had to websites on the Internet. The Telecom Regulation Commission of Jordan eventually gave in to the demands made by the protesters and issued orders to local ISPs to figure out mechanisms to start censoring websites.

The Jordanian Cabinet has also recently approved a draft proposal for amending the Jordanian Publication Law that will subject news websites to the same rules that apply to regular paper publications in Jordan. This amendment will require any website that publishes news and articles about Jordanian foreign or internal affairs to register with the government and acquire a licence before it can legally operate, and the website must also employ an editor who is a member of the Jordanian Press Association.

The new amendment will also have additional provisions that address websites specifically such as a new provision that explicitly makes the website admin liable for all content on his website and that the website admin must maintain a record of all comments made on the website for a period not less than six months. The Cabinet approved amendment will still need to be approved by the Jordanian Parliament before it will officially be passed as law.

These new developments in Jordan surely cannot have a positive impact on the development of the Internet in Jordan. The Internet is censored in a majority of other Arab countries and this censorship surely does not work because you can still have access to pornography even without the need to use any circumvention method such as a VPN.

It is not logical to apply the same formalities that apply to the traditional press. It will be impossible to enforce these rules, especially as the difference in the impact made by a proper news website and that of a personal blog of an individual is getting extremely nominal.

The future is still not totally bleak for Jordan, as opposing activists are trying to raise awareness in Jordan about the benefits of keeping the Internet free from censorship and the fact that the new law proposal will still have to go through the Parliament before it gets officially passed.

It is unfortunate that the Internet in Jordan is facing all these challenges. Let’s hope that this does not set an example of other countries in the region to impose further restrictions on the Internet in their own jurisdictions.

Categories
Privacy

Spam Soon To Be Banned in Oman

The Telecommunication Regulatory Authority has finally decided to address the issue of spam in Oman and is now in the process of drafting new regulations that will make it illegal for anyone to send unsolicited advertisements by any electronic method in Oman without acquiring prior consent from the person to whom the advertisement is sent.
Spam has been slowly growing into a problem in Oman due to the realisation of many companies of the ease at which advertisements can be pushed to a large number of people at extremely low costs. Many companies see this as an opportunity to promote their products, but from the point of view of consumers, this constitutes a breach of their privacy and can affect the way they use e-mail and SMS. These messages can be extremely repetitive, irrelevant, sent at inappropriate times, impossible to block, and make it very difficult for users to reach messages that they need to read, when their inbox is filled with unsolicited spam advertisements.

The current law in Oman does not provide individuals the right to stop others from sending them unsolicited advertisements. The telecommunications law only prohibits offensive, untrue or harmful messages, and not genuine advertisements that were sent without consent. The Basic Law of the State is the closest document we have in Oman to a constitution. It guarantees many rights for individuals such as the right for the freedom of expression and right for religious freedom, but it does not guarantee privacy as a right for individuals in Oman.

A report by Symantec last year, claiming that Oman had the highest percentage of spam messages in the whole world coming into the country, led the TRA to make statements soon after that it will work on combating spam. TRA is now working on new regulations for combating spam that will make it illegal for any person in Oman to send advertisements by any electronic method to anyone without acquiring the explicit prior consent of that person, and anyone who violates these new regulations may be fined up to RO1,000.

TRA will consider a message to be spam message for which the sender will be penalised, even if only one message was sent to one person, as long as that message was an unsolicited advertisement. The only exception to this rule is when an existing relationship can be established between the sender and recipient, such as the relationship between a hospital and patient. Even in such circumstances, individuals will have the right to have such messages stopped and an offence would be committed if a message is sent after an individual has indicated his wish to not receive any more of these messages.

Even though it will be impossible to stop all spam messages coming into the country, it is a great development for Oman to have in place local regulations that ban the transmission of spam in the country and one which would help ensure that local companies do not participate in this unacceptable practice. It will also surely provide us consumers with great comfort knowing that we can use our e-mail accounts more efficiently and that we can finally stop these ridiculous SMS about the latest gym discounts.

The public consultation period for new spam regulations had just finished last week. It is unknown how long it would take TRA to issue these regulations, but when they do come, these regulations would surely fill a serious gap in the telecom regulatory framework in Oman.

Categories
Privacy

Public Consultation on Anti-Spam Regulations

The TRA has finally decided to take action about the spread of spam in Oman and is seeking public consultation about their upcoming anti-spam regulations [PDF].
The new proposed regulations will require businesses to have the explicit consent of any person to whom they send a commercial message using any medium. The regulations will provide an exception for institutions that have an existing relationship with a person and will enable individuals to have the right to stop receiving such messages.

The TRA is proposing a system where an offense would be established even if only one message has been sent without consent, will provide individuals with the right to complain to the TRA, and will provide the TRA with the right to impose sanctions that include imposing a financial penalty not less than RO 1000.

The regulations will also provide guidelines as to the content of the message, its size, and will require the header to include words such as “Commercial” or “ad”.

These regulations are still in the public consultation stage and there is no guarantee that they will be officially passed.

You can read the PDF document issued for public consultation at this link. The last date for submitting your opinion on these documents is the 25th of July.

Categories
Censorship

Indian Censorship in Oman

If you are a fan of Bollywood films and happen to be a user of Omantel’s home broadband service, you might be surprised to find that a number of websites that cover such films are blocked in Oman, not because the Omani government has anything against them, but because the Indian government has decided that such websites need to be blocked.
Censorship in Oman is not as big a problem as it is in some of the neighbouring countries. The most irritating aspect about censorship in Oman is the restriction on VoIP services such as Skype, but no other major website such as Blogger, Wikipedia, YouTube, or Flickr is blocked in the country.

Censorship in Oman is about to get unpredictably complex as a report by the OpenNet Initiative has found evidence of the inaccessibility of a number of websites in Oman due to the routing practices of Omantel.

According to the OpenNet Initiative, Omantel has signed a number of agreements with an Indian Internet service provider for traffic peering that allows Omantel and the Indian service provider to share their traffic with the intention of improving the performance and reliability of the service provided by both ISPs. This means that when a user in Oman attempts to open a website, his request might be routed from Omantel to the Indian ISP and then to the Worldwide Web.

An unintended consequence of this practice is that an Omani user will not be able to access a website if it is blocked in India and Omantel decided to route that request through the Indian ISP. For example, an attempt to visit absongs.com and desimusic.com from an Omantel connection would come up with a page that says, “This website/URL has been blocked until further notice either pursuant to court orders or on the directions issued by the Department of Telecommunications”.

So now not only websites that violate Omani law are blocked in Oman, but even websites that violate Indian law will also be blocked in Oman. This is surely unacceptable, because even though Oman does censor the Internet on its own, India also has had a history of unreasonable censorship of websites that exceeds that seen in Oman, in some instances. For example, the whole of Yahoo Groups was previously blocked, and more recently, the video website Vimeo has also been blocked.

Internet users should have the right to access all websites as long as these websites do not violate Omani law, and it really does not make sense that Omani Web users have to go through the lengthy and cumbersome process of getting each website blocked by the Indian government, unblocked.

The Telecommunication Regulation Authority in Oman should consider policies relating to peering agreements between Internet service providers in the country and those outside, and ensure that such agreements do not impose further content restrictions on the accessibility of the Internet in Oman.

Categories
Privacy Telecommunication

VPN For Security?

The legal status of VPN in Oman still remains a grey area. The telecommunications law prohibits the use of any method of encryption without acquiring an explicit permission from the government beforehand, but this law has no practical implication because encryption is a fundamental aspect of the Internet. Without it we cannot log into our e-mail accounts, pay our bills online or check our online banking services.
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a method by which a computer can securely connect using a public connection to a private network located elsewhere. Once a connection is established to the VPN, the administrator of the public connection cannot have any control over what content is delivered through the VPN to the remote computer and cannot monitor or intercept any of that traffic.

VPNs are regularly used by companies to connect their branches to their head office, thus ensuring that their communications remain secure. VPNs are also used by consumers all around the world to ensure that their connections are secure when using untrusted public connections such as those available in cafes, hotels and other public venues.

The authorities in Oman do not like VPNs because using a VPN circumvents all the censorship and regulations imposed over the Internet. If you connect to a VPN using a local ISP such as Omantel or Nawras, you can view any website, even if that website is blocked by the local ISP which you are using to connect to the VPN. Using VPNs also allows users in Oman to connect to blocked services such as Skype.

In 2010, the TRA sought public consultation over draft regulations that would have made VPN totally illegal for private use and would have required establishments to acquire a license from TRA to use VPN for commercial use. These draft regulations never materialised and the feedback the TRA received about them was never published.

While it is understandable that TRA would not be happy to have the public circumvent all the restrictions that it imposes on the Internet by using a VPN, it would be unreasonable for TRA to ban the use of VPN for private use. This is because using VPN in certain situations is fundamental towards ensuring that the user is protected from Web criminals and identity thieves.

It is extremely common for people to log into public networks in cafes and hotels, and using a VPN in these circumstances can be the only guarantee that your connection would not be compromised by the administrators of these networks or by anybody else who manages to take control over that network. Taking such precautions in certain countries where there is a high risk of Internet scams is a serious necessity, and it is not logical to stop consumers from taking such precautionary measures.

Instead of making more futile attempts at censoring the Internet, TRA should accept that this is an impossible task to accomplish. The position of the law in regard to encryption as it stands is pointless. TRA should focus on improving the Internet and providing us with rights that guarantee that our privacy will be protected instead of creating more barriers to connecting with the rest of the world.

Categories
Integrated Circuits

Protection of Layout-Designs of Integrated Circuits in Oman

(photo credits: oskay)

Oman has been under an obligation to provide protection for layout-design of integrated circuits as a result of its membership to the World Trade Organization. The first law to provide protection for layout-design of integrated circuits was issued in the year 2000 which was later replaced by the more comprehensive Industrial Property Law in 2008.

The objective of the protection of layout-design of integrated circuits is to provide the creators of registered original layout-design the right to stop others from using the same layout in any integrated circuit or product without seeking their prior consent.

What Are Layout-Designs of Integrated Circuits?

Integrated circuits (commonly referred to as ICs) are the small chips found in electronic devices that control the functionality of the device. Prior to the invention of ICs, electronic functionality was created by setting up a series of circuits with semi conductors and wires. ICs replicate the functionality of electronic circuits in small prepackaged wire-free chips. The functionality of the integrated circuit within a chip is defined by layers of mapped layouts which are stacked over each other to regulate the current and create the required the functionality. This layout that determines the functionality of the IC is called a layout-design or a topography.

Effective layout-design of integrated circuits can result in the development of smaller chips which are cheaper to manufacturer and occupy smaller physical space. The development of such layout-designs usually involves high intellectual skill and big financial investment, yet it can be easily replicated through a photographic analysis of a IC chip. In order to protect the investment made in the development of new layout-designs of integrated circuits, Oman, and many around the world, provide a legal mechanism for protecting these layout-designs.

Qualifications For Protection

The Omani Industrial Property Law allows the registration of original layout-designs only. For a layout-design to be considered original, that layout-design must be the result of the creator’s own intellectual effort and must not be commonly known among other creators of layout-designs at the moment of creation.

This is a very threshold for protection, as any layout-design would be considered original as long as it has not been copied from elsewhere and not commonly known by other people. This also means that a layout-design could be registered regardless of whether or not it brings any new advancement to the field or offers any special performance improvement. The requirement for the layout-design not to be commonly known among other creators of layout-designs consequently means that it can still qualify for protection if a few other creators have created it before as long as the creator in question created it independently without copying it from another source.

For layout-designs which are made up of commonly known element combinations, the layout-design in question can still be considered original if the collection of all these elements as a whole satisfies the originality requirement.

An additional condition for registration in Oman is that the layout-design can only be registered if it has not been used commercially anywhere in the world for more than two years.

Scope of Protection

The owner of the registered layout-design has the right to stop others from doing the following acts:

  1. Reproducing the protected layout design in whole or in part by integrating it into an IC or through any other method. This right does not extend to stop the creator of the registered right from stopping others from reproducing smaller parts of the layout that do not satisfy the originality requirement on their own.
  2. Importing, selling, or distributing for commercial purposes the protected layout-design or an IC or a product that integrates the layout-design.

It is important to note that the protection of the layout-design of ICs relates only the actual layout-design and not the functionality achieved by that layout-design. This means that, for example, successfully registering an original layout-design of an integrated circuit that is used in cameras to enhance their processing capability of low light photographs, will not grant the owner of the layout-design the right to stop others from creating a similar IC that executes the same exact function using a different layout-design. Protection for the industrial application of a novel non-obviously idea is done through the registration of patents and not layout-design of integrated circuits.

Allowed Uses of Registered Layout-Designs

The law provides that any person may reproduce a protected layout-design without the need to seek the permission of layout-design owner if the reproduction is made for a private purpose or for the sole purpose of evaluation, analysis, or teaching.

The law does not object to the practice of reverse engineering for the purpose of developing new original layout-designs as it states that an original layout-design would be considered in violation of the rights of the registered layout-design owner, if the second original-layout design was built as a result of the evaluation of the protected registered layout-design.

An exemption is also made for a person who imports, sells, or distributes for commercial purposes a product or an IC incorporating a protected layout-design if that person did not know and had no reasonable ground to know that the product or the IC incorporated an unlawfully reproduced layout-design. In this situation, that person would be entitled to continue to import, sell, or distribute the stock he already has or already ordered before his knowledge of the unlawful incorporation of the layout-design on the condition that he pays the right holder a fair compensation.

The law in Oman also explicitly specifies that independent creation of an identical layout-design by a third party does not constitution an infringement.

Duration of Protection

In Oman, order for a creator of a layout-design to acquire protection for his work, the creator must register his layout-design with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

A registered layout-design is protected for a period of ten years. This period of protection can start from two different points:

  1. It may start from the date of deposit of the registration application if the layout-design was not commercially used anywhere in the world prior to that deposit.
  2. It may start from the date the layout-design was commercially used anywhere in the world if the layout-design was commercially used prior to the deposit of the registration application.
Categories
Censorship

Censorship and Enemies of the Internet

Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are listed as Enemies of the Internet in a recent report published by Reporters Without Borders. UAE on the other hand is listed as a country worthy of being under surveillance due to the deteriorating conditions of freedom on the Internet in the country. Oman is not mentioned at all in this report, but does this mean that our Internet is truly free and open?
The Enemies of the Internet report provides a scary overview of how censorship on the Internet was a major issue over the past year. It talks about how Egypt decided to shut off the whole Internet in an attempt to control the riots, Iran’s grand plan for its national ‘Halal’ Internet, China’s use of 50 cents bloggers to spread propaganda on the web, and the US attempt to censor the Internet on grounds of copyright infringement.

International summits now talk about the ‘right to be connected’ as a fundamental right for survival in today’s world, especially as communication blackouts are now commonly used by oppressive regimes to cripple dissenting movements.

Learning about the extreme incidents taking place around the world, especially in countries as close as UAE and Bahrain, makes Oman seem as a relatively more lenient and open environment.
The keyword here is of course ‘relatively’, because the Internet still remains very much censored here as well. Fortunately though, censorship on the Omani Internet is primarily done to block pornographic and similar websites with the aim of protecting society values and preventing minors from being exposed to such offensive content. The process by which websites are filtered is carried out by an automation software that blocks content categorically. Websites can also be blocked on the basis of individual decisions made by authorities. An example of this is the decision to block the blog of Ammar al Maamari, a Omani blogger living abroad who regularly leaks highly confidential information in violation of the law and criticises His Majesty the Sultan and the government in an offensive manner.

Using the method of censorship to ‘protect’ society values might have worked in the early days of the Internet when there was a limited and manageable number of websites online, but there is no practical way of selectively censoring the Internet today when an unquantifiable amount of content is uploaded to the web by the minute.

With all the censorship made by Omantel and Nawras, any person in Oman can still easily do a quick Google image search to be entertained with unlimited amounts of pornographic content. As long as you can connect to the World Wide Web, there will always be a method to access blocked content. Subscribers to RSS feeds of Ammar’s blog did not even realise that the website got blocked because the content of the blog is routed to them through their RSS readers which are not affected by the local censorship. Ammar also created a private mirror of his blog for anyone in Oman to access upon sending him an access request. It is clear that censorship has totally failed from stopping the Omani public from reading Ammar’s blog.

Censorship of the Internet is not a major problem in Oman at the moment, but Oman should be careful not to take the approach taken by some of our neighbours, because it is really necessary for the public to have uncensored access to the Internet for their right to freedom of expression to have any value in today’s world.

Categories
Uncategorized

The Losing Battle of DRM

The core protection of copyright law is the right for a copyright owner to stop others from copying his work. Enforcing the rights of copyright owners in the digital era has proved to be difficult due to the ease at which content can be copied.
The market solution to this problem has been the creation of certain technological measures, such as digital rights management (DRM), that copyright owners use to make it technically difficult to copy a copyright work. DRM such as the protection methods used on DVD and Blu-ray disks make it extremely difficult for the average user to copy the video from the disk and save it on a computer. DRM, like all technologies, is not perfect as people have succeeded in circumventing the majority of DRM and consequently managed to copy the underlying work.

The response by the authorities to the failure of DRM in stopping the public from illegally copying copyright works was to pass additional provisions to the copyright law that grant separate protection against the circumvention of the technological protection measures applied to the copyright work.

This DRM protection is complimentary to the copyright protection of the original work and at the same time completely independent. This means that a person who breaks a DRM technology will be held liable for the infringement of the DRM provisions of the copyright law even if he does not consequently copy any protected copyright work.

While the protection of DRM sounds like a reasonable thing to do, the reality is that DRM protection trumps a number of legally permitted uses of copyright works, such as the creation of backup copy, the translation of the work into a format readable by a blind person, or the extraction of certain segments of the work for purposes of criticism or review. Circumventing DRM protection will technically constitute an offence regardless of the purpose for the circumvention.

The issue of DRM is complicated further by the fact that more and more manufacturers use DRM to restrict the users of their devices from installing unauthorised programs on the device regardless of whether or not these third party programs that the users wish to install infringe any copyright. That is why users of Apple’s iPhone must circumvent the protection measures, or ‘jailbreak the device’, in order to install third party apps that Apple does not approve of.

This action is not exclusively done by Apple, Amazon’s new Kindle Fire also has a closed app environment even though it is built on top of the more open Android OS.
These manufacturers use DRM for this purpose to ensure that all applications that run on the device are of a certain quality and that they conform to design guidelines that ensure a consistent user experience. Other obvious reasons for having such control are to ensure that the device manufacturer gets a share of the profits of any application sold on the application instead of allowing the sale through other independent application stores.

There is a great debate on whether or not manufacturers should have the right to control what the users choose to install on a device they legitimately bought and own, but it is extremely clear to me that this whole discussion should not be part of the copyright debate as the point of copyright law is to provide an incentive for authors to create more original works, and it is not meant to deal with issues such as manufacturer control and consumer rights.

The fact that DRM provisions under copyright law allow manufacturers to impose such control is clearly an unintended consequence of copyright law, and it should not be used to further restrict the legitimate users from carrying out acts they are entitled to by law.

Categories
domain names trademarks

Non-English Domain Names Not A Smart Move

The legal status of VPN in Oman still remains a grey area. The telecommunications law prohibits the use of any method of encryption without acquiring an explicit permission from the government beforehand, but this law has no practical implication because encryption is a fundamental aspect of the Internet. Without it we cannot log into our e-mail accounts, pay our bills online or check our online banking services.
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a method by which a computer can securely connect using a public connection to a private network located elsewhere. Once a connection is established to the VPN, the administrator of the public connection cannot have any control over what content is delivered through the VPN to the remote computer and cannot monitor or intercept any of that traffic.

VPNs are regularly used by companies to connect their branches to their head office, thus ensuring that their communications remain secure. VPNs are also used by consumers all around the world to ensure that their connections are secure when using untrusted public connections such as those available in cafes, hotels and other public venues.

The authorities in Oman do not like VPNs because using a VPN circumvents all the censorship and regulations imposed over the Internet. If you connect to a VPN using a local ISP such as Omantel or Nawras, you can view any website, even if that website is blocked by the local ISP which you are using to connect to the VPN. Using VPNs also allows users in Oman to connect to blocked services such as Skype.

In 2010, the TRA sought public consultation over draft regulations that would have made VPN totally illegal for private use and would have required establishments to acquire a license from TRA to use VPN for commercial use. These draft regulations never materialised and the feedback the TRA received about them was never published.

While it is understandable that TRA would not be happy to have the public circumvent all the restrictions that it imposes on the Internet by using a VPN, it would be unreasonable for TRA to ban the use of VPN for private use. This is because using VPN in certain situations is fundamental towards ensuring that the user is protected from Web criminals and identity thieves.

It is extremely common for people to log into public networks in cafes and hotels, and using a VPN in these circumstances can be the only guarantee that your connection would not be compromised by the administrators of these networks or by anybody else who manages to take control over that network. Taking such precautions in certain countries where there is a high risk of Internet scams is a serious necessity, and it is not logical to stop consumers from taking such precautionary measures.

Instead of making more futile attempts at censoring the Internet, TRA should accept that this is an impossible task to accomplish. The position of the law in regard to encryption as it stands is pointless. TRA should focus on improving the Internet and providing us with rights that guarantee that our privacy will be protected instead of creating more barriers to connecting with the rest of the world.

Categories
Censorship defamation

Omani Website Blocked As Public Prosecution Investigates Defamation Case

Popular Arabic Omani discussion board Al Al Harahhas been blocked for the past week or so upon the order of the Public Prosecution in response to Al Hara’s failure to provide the Public Prosecution with the IP details of a member who has posted defamatory material of a number of individuals in the past.
I am not aware of the specifics of the content that was posted on Al Harah, but Omani newspaper Al Zaman has claimed that this content is of a political nature and that is why Al Harah has been blocked, the Public Prosecution came out with a Press Release today claiming that the matter is exclusively based on a criminal incident that with no political aspect.

It seems that the Public Prosecution has directly communicated with the administrators of Al Harah asking them to disclose the IP details of the person who posted the offensive material. Al Harah claims that it does not have the IP details of that person due to the fact that the software they use retains IP details for a certain period of time only after which they get deleted. Al Haram claims that it tried helping the Public Prosecution in reaching this person by sending a private message to him through their forum, but he has not responded.

According to the Public Prosecution the webmaster is under an obligation to provide them with all the details they want as Article 27 of the Criminal Procedure Law provides that anyone asked by the officers of a judicial capacity as part of their duties to help in capturing suspects to preventing their escape must provide that help.

The Public Prosecution claims that it could not identify the actual person who runs Al Harah website and the administrators of the website have refused to provide these details to the Public Prosecution and apparently that is why a judicial order was made to temporarily block the website until all the necessary information are provided.

The Public Prosecution is stating that any person who has suffered damage from this decision may complain to the competent court.

It is worth noting that the WHOIS records of Al Harah are protected, so the details of the domain name registrant are not public.

I am not sure to what extent Al Harah has cooperated with the Public Prosecution before the decision was made to ban the website, but I am not sure how banning the website can help in the disclosure of the real owner of the website or the IP details of those who posted the defamatory content. I am not an expert on criminal procedures, but this cannot be said to protect the evidence as the website can still be accessed or deleted completely from the central control panel of the hosting service provider – let alone using proxies, vpns, or even just going as close the UAE to access the website.

I think that it is important for web masters to watch this case closely to see to what extent they have to cooperate with the Public Prosecution before they are held liable for the content published by someone else.