NO2ID

I have a few questions regarding the legal position of 'ownership' of an individual citizens biometric ID ? Can anyone answer them ?

Once a citizen has had their biometric data recorded and archived in the Government database, who actually owns ownership of this data ? The Government or the Citizen ?

Does the new ID Bill give the British Government supremacy over all existing laws (UK and EU) and assume ownership of an individuals ‘profile’ or does the citizen effectively own his / hers own ID ? Could it be that this position is unclear as yet ?

If the Government does have the rights, what are the safeguards to stop them using your personal biometric data (iris / fingerprint/ face) for their own ‘promotional’ purposes ?

It has become quite common for celebrities and actors to patent their own image/voice in order to stop violation of their commercial rights. Likewise, will the British public have to resort to the expensive process of having to patent themselves in order to stop misappropriation of their image ?

As far as I know the card and therefore your rights become the property of the Home Secretary. Therefore they have the right to do what they want with your information, the card and your entitlements. You'd better be a good subject! Don't ask questions!

Funny you thinking of this, I was thinking on the same lines.....theory is....When we are born we are unique individuals....hence Originals....with Originals there is the patent one can aquire .....and obvioulsy copyright.....now if we our selves were to take all the data on our own selves, gather together and copyright and patent it....then surely the laws stand firm in these area's.....
This could protect the next generation of children, simply take a photo of them , date the contence and put letter of particulars in it , address to your self..put in envelope .post it, when it arrives back do not open it as it is proof of date you need.....this is the simplist way to copyright! lol...after all we created them!....
Then obviously the gov. would seek to buy these of us...with no joy at all....

I wonder if it would be possible to argue that you own the copyright to your
own finger prints and irises?

Peter

Im going to research this avenue, as when one puts their signature to their paintings as i do, it is then considered "Your mark to your work" so to speak...The law is complex in this area, but as long as the painting is dated it is a valid reason for taking steps if anyone copies your original....so the same in theory should go for us humans, as we are all originals!.....

The Guest above sorry is me, shirley, I forgot to log in!

any further info on this subject ???
It seems to good to be true, and I would expect the government to add a clause, to block this concept.

The Legal position is unclear and advice is a bit thin on the ground. I have asked the UK Copyright Service if they would accept an application from me. I proposed sending them a CDR with dated digital images of my face, eyes and fingerprints. Iam waiting to hear back.



https://secure-d.copyrightservice.co.uk/

After sitting up half the night researching this matter, books and internet.. I found a realistic view of it in a book to do with copyright....
Maybe after what you said, it may be too dodgy to post my findings, even though they are in favour of those, who could take the trouble to protect their Biometric images, with a bit of genius amd amataur directions this matter is POSSIBLE.....

Well done! You are a step ahead of me

Hi Mike,
I notice you not a member of this website...If you send me a mail of line, Then i can too send you a particular detail...

In the increasingly small amount of time I have that isn't used for NO2ID, I work in intellectual property licensing, so I can attempt an answer to that.

To be copyright something has to be an original creation of a person perceptible to the senses. Natural phenomena aren't capable of copyright. You did not make the physical attributes of your body.

Further copyright is a legal privilege; its existence and categories are created and conditioned by law. If it is implicit in the legislation that the Home Office may reproduce something, then it may do so. The later legislation creates an exception to copyright.

Finally, a fingerprint or iris scan is not the same thing as the finger or iris it is taken from. If there is a copyright in it at all, then that copyright would belong to the maker of the representation, which is to say, the Home Office.

Consider a building. Generally speaking someone who photographs the building owns copyright in the photograph. The ownership of the building of the building is not affected by the photograph, but nor can the owner of the building lay claim to any rights over the photograph (except in very restricted circumstances).

(It is far from clear in law, BTW that we do own our own bodies, that they are in any legal sense property even while we are alive.)

As far as I know I am an original creation by my parents (with the help of God perhaps) and therefore wouldn't they own the copyright of my body, if I do not hold it?

Also, if registering for the system means I am excluding myself from copyright law, does that mean as long as I don't register or sign anything, they do not have permission to take biometric identifiers from me by force? Where have I agreed to accept this legislation? What if I was to record my own biometric measurements (iris scans, DNA code, fingerprint scans and facial contours) and copyright them?

The DNA side is especially worrying. Am I right that under intellectual property law (e.g. TRIPS?) as I understand it, a person who creates a GM or cloned organism, or invents techniques, then has copyright of the organism itself. Therefore if our DNA is recorded or stored and we give others permission to use it (e.g. artificial insemination) the inventor then owns the offspring?

You have to look at the totality of the slide towards a totalitarian police state - the Identity Cards Bill is not the only potentially evil legislation.

The combination of the Human Tissue Act 2004 and the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 means that "intimate samples" can be taken from you by force, if necessary, if you are arrested for anything (and the number of offences that you can be arrested for has been vastly increased), whereupon your DNA sample and "DNA fingerprint" can be retained forever, even if you are never charged with an offence, or if the case is dropped or even if you are found not guilty.

Defending your Copyright is extremely expensive in High Court legal fees, and the Government has unlimited funds.

No. "Creation" in this sense means a work of art, of one of a number of specified types. There is no copyright in a human body. Please, this is a technical area of law, and is not susceptible to simple-minded "common sense" arguments.



No. Whether they have permission or not is not relevant if they have the power conferred by the law to do so. The Bill does not appear to provide such a power, strangely. It relies on people complying in the face of penalty notices--and perhaps on life becoming impossible for those who fail to comply.



What other legislation have you come across that only applies to you if you agree to it? The law is not optional.



There's no such thing as "copyrighting" in Britain. Either copyright subsists in a work from the moment of creation or it does not. As I explained before, an image of something is not the same as that thing. Even if copyright subsists in the image, that does not affect whether it does so in the object imaged. Measurements in particular are not original works (anyone could take them) and are not copyright.



What "DNA side"?



No. You really do not understand it at all. You might as well worry about the diseases transmitted to schoolchildren by Edward Lear's Jumblies (whose head were green and whose hands were blue and who went to sea in a seive).

What you are misunderstanding here is that some patent regimes allow certain genetic techniques to be patented in such a way as to control access to things that we might normally characterise as discoveries. This has nothing to do with copyright, or ownership (in any of a range of senses) of organisms, though it does in some cases facilitate commercial control of the breeding of organisms incorporating uses of those techniques.

There are at least a dozen distinct forms of "intellectual property" and they vary widely in their application in different jurisdictions throughout the world. TRIPS is an international agreement concerning mutual recognition of forms of intellectual property. It is not of any particular importance in the UK since we already had well-developed IP protections.



No. That does not follow from the misunderstanding before.

None of this has anything to do with the Identity Cards Bill, which creates all sorts of subtle new legal, conceptual and institutional traps, which, unlike intellectual property, have not been thoroughly explored by the best legal and scientific minds in the world.

The combination of the Human Tissue Act 2004 and the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 means that "intimate samples" can be taken from you by force, if necessary, if you are arrested for anything (and the number of offences that you can be arrested for has been vastly increased), whereupon your DNA sample and "DNA fingerprint" can be retained forever, even if you are never charged with an offence, or if the case is dropped or even if you are found not guilty.


Surely this then would breach human rights. poor souls would see this as assault! This will lead to more abuse of power on individuals!....
especially if the id cards come in and they make it compulsary, the gov. will in effect be starting up a massive concentration camp within the boundaries of our own country........

In one sense yes it already does.

However it does not breach the Human Rights Act 1998 which incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights, simply because these Acts of Parliament are Primary Legislation, all prefaced by a statement from a Minister saying that in their opinion, the legislation is compatible with the Human Rights Act, and therfore all the "in accordance with law" and "for the purposes of detecting or preventing crime" or "national security" or " public health" etc. loopholes in the HRA or ECHR come into play.

The same applies to the Data Protection Act as well, and will also apply to the Identity Cards Bill if and when it becomes law.

Then we could argue, "Opinon" is not fact.....to be fact it would then be a subjection from a quotation of law.......and to be in accordance with the law should provide the said paragraph they are referring too...thus demonstating they have not wrangled it in their own favour, but are bound to keep the rules of the human rights act to protect their citazins.
In a court of law, evidence has to be based on fact not opinion so this should go with the government wording of a legal document as such that effects us all.......

You are confusing fact and law. And missing the point that parliament ( largely controlled by the Government) is the supreme source of law.

The law is whatever parliament says it is. The courts interpret it. In any particular case there may be argument as to the exact meaning of the law--how it applies to the facts of the case--or about what the facts are--what has happened in the real world leading to the case. In practice evidence is a matter of competing opinion as to fact or law--or there would be nothing to try. It is the court's job to decide between opinions.

Parliament is not bound to make legislation according to any particular principles or any rules other than its own procedures. The Identity Cards Bill may be in conflict with the Human Rights Act (though the latest version is less explicitly so than the previous one), but parliament passed the Human Rights Act and parliament can override it, even if the exceptions built into that legislation do not be apply.

[There are lots of objections to the Human Rights Act, BTW, but the biggest trouble with it is its name. "Human Rights" is a 'rah phrase that many people both support without thinking, and assume means whatever they want it to. Something you don't like or don't approve of you will say is a "breach of human rights" entirely without justification in law. "It stands to reason," in the Alf Garnett sense, that the Human Rights Act therefore supports some slack disgruntlement against all law, all liberty of other parties, all official power.

But in fact "human rights" is just another technical legal term. The HRA is in practice mainly a tool of interpretation for the courts, though it does have some strange constitutional implications.]

The statement at the beginning of all new Bills or Acts of Parliament is a mere formality to comply with the letter of the Human Rights Act. e.g.



I can only recall one instance of a Minister stating that in her opinion there was part of a Bill (the Corruption Bill) being presented which was not fully compliant with the Human Rights Act.

Of course Minsisters are "deemed to always act reasonably" and to never "mislead Parliament", but I doubt if any of them are honourable enough to resign, if any bit of legislation that they have rubber stamped, is ruled to not actually be compliant with the Human Rights Act.

I obviously am mistaken as I was under the impression, like so many others, that the Human Rights Act was a protection for everyone and that Governments were also bound to follow them too, so no injustice can be inflicted on their fellow citizins. Also following this that the human rights court of law in the hague was the supreme court over them all.........oh dear, I jolly well have been miss informed!
In this case, it is a more worrying situation with Britain in the hands of parliamentry squabbles!
With no higher Authority then their selves then can I ask, What action is taken for their misconduct if it was to happen? as this makes it sound like they are except from the Law of the Land!....

Not always. The presumption is they should. The principal invention of the administrative law of judicial review is the capacity of the courts to find that ministerial power has been execercised unreasonably, and therefore the minister must re-take an unreasonable decision.

This is not quite as powerful a control as it seems. When you or I are required to be reasonable in law, it is either depending on context to behave as the ordinary reasonable man would expect us to do, or to give valid reasons. The "Wednesbury reasonableness" required of ministerial decisions is that a decision is reasonable unless no rational minister could have made it, i.e. it is mad in every respect.

I am aware of the ambiguities in law and their divergence from logic and sense. I also appreciate that it is the interpretation of the law not its letter that is significant. Taking that into account and taking into consideration that the laws are subject to acceptance by parliament (i.e. the home secretary being the significant minister in the case of ID cards), i am still left wondering if DNA is patentable and posibly copyrightable.
I can understand the arguments about copyrights, design rights, other IP, etc, but there are ambiguities as to what constitutes original or prior art, etc. from my inderstanding all the 'identifiable' data (and hence useful data with respect of ID cards and the NIR) constitutes an original work and can be shown to be 'code' as defined by the IP laws, thus could be protected. the IP would only be vunerable if someone else could prove or cause significant doubt on the originality of the data, that is not to say that other rulings may or may not superceed it. However, the regulations regarding international IP would be the dominant factor when examined by an international court. I suspect the government would throw out a case in the uk on grounds of... well anything they wanted really, but if the case were heard by an overseas court although they have no juristiction in the UK they can impose fines, etc on UK bodies.
With regards to who 'owns' your body, this is irrelavent for the argument on ID as it is only significant as to who has the right to use the ID property. If you either waive the right to any protection under the law with regards to IP and another party exherts a claim you have no case against them. If you exert your claim to your ID, both as owner of your ID and holder of your ID you are the only legal entiry that can lay claim to that ID, unless someone knows otherwise.
With respect to 'identifiable' objects such as buildings, art, sculptures, etc, when someone takes photos of them there are some interesting things that happen. the photo remains property of the photographer, however if that photo is to be used for any purpose other than 'personal' use (and possibly even then) a release has to be obtained otherwise the photographer is likely to be sued. royalties and licences are also likely to be exherted over the use of such images.
As such i think there is still a case for IP protection on ones ID, but i suspect it would take an international court (of some description) to rule on it and would still not deter the government.

On the other hand, unless i register for the ID and NIR how would they get my data. I have openly said that i would willfully not register for either, and any issue of ID card will be returned to the idduing authorties. I would willingly ensure i cost the government more money than it is worth to issue me with such ID and use my data. I would imagine that the government cannot afford such a PR disaster, the only way which they could avoid such coverage would be to exhert a blanket ban to the media, which would be equally detrimental to them. I would urge anyone voting at the elections (local and national) to make their opposition heared, such is the damage this legislation will cause.

I am not in any doubt at all about this. Neither.

This discussion about ownership of ID and copyright claims to photos, fingerpribnts is very interesting. I could have the potential to derail the whole project.

As a author of technical works for several clients on a freelance consultant, the IP rights to material I produce is of importance to me.

The are two aspects of copyright - the physical form, such as printed books, CDs etc, and the creative material therein. Record companies have gone to some lengths to protect the creative element of their works from downloaders, and it has been accepted that copyright infringement takes place even though no physical object is copied.

This aspect of IP has more to do with the Berne Convention on moral rights to authored/creative works - a right which can be treated separately from the rights to the distribution the material in physical form. As I understand it the author/creator of a work can retain a moral right to how his work is used even though having assigned reproduction rights to his record company/employer etc.

The key issue is whether we could class passport photos as "artistic works". Given the lengthy instructions on what constiutes an acceptable photo (see in the guide to passport renewal), I think there are strong grounds for asserting moral rights on how that photo, as an artistic creation, is used subsequently. As with record downloads, I think we could assert rights over subsequent digitised renditions of our nice artitistc photos.

I think we would be on stronger grounds with this type of argument as any attempt to circumvent moral rights over "artistic works will have huge implications to the economony in the digital age - that is all about Digital Rights Management now. Also such rights are defined through international conventions.

Good luck to all.

John Shaw