It is done: President Aquino signed a version of the Cybercrime Prevention Act into law Wednesday, 12 September 2012. And guess what? It has provisions regarding online libel (Chapter 2, Section 4(c), Content-Related Offenses, item 4).
The plagiarist Senator Mr. Tito Sotto comes to mind.
On a lighter note, my previous gripes about data privacy were misplaced: I should have sought out the text for the Senate Bill No. 2965 and House Bill No. 4115. A first glance tells me I’ll need to read the texts; we’ll find out more in the next few days. You can download SBN 2965 from the [still domain-name-free] Senate Legislative Servers, here.*
Load these pages up, and read with me. I’ll be putting up comments here over the next few days:
- Data Privacy Act: Republic Act No. 10173 (15 August 2012)
- Cybercrime Prevention Act: Republic Act No. 10175 (12 September 2012)
I have a feeling I’ll want some coffee or beer with friends to talk about this.
* What the fuck, amateurs? What’s with the use of an IP address instead of a name ( http://202.57.33.10/plis/data/1218710275!.pdf) like the rest of the decent Internet does? Why don’t you have a subdomain for this content server? Sure, you’re on the fucking web, but if you don’t have a domain name: (1) you don’t intend to be found by search engines (2) You intend for people to jump through fucking hoops, your own damned lousy search engine, to find the texts detailing ours laws. Fix that! Or hire me to fix it for you, dammit.
Interestingly, the annual budget allocation has been pegged by the law at 50 million pesos annually – quite a big jump from the 10 million defined in the Senate version. I can just _imagine_ the discussion there.
And the lawyers who advised members of the committee that discussed this ought to be sued for the hamfisted way in which the libel clause was inserted. Them, and the shadier characters in the Senate committee – yes, I’m referring to Bongbong Marcos – for the cost of of having to rectify a bad law. Those costs include the fines citizens like myself will be donating to the cause of any journalist who gets sued under this asinine law (Asinine, as in, “like an ass”, which is what these people have made of our Laws by introducing that dumbass insertion, Section 4.(c).4. ).