While I don’t believe that the new Hadopi “three strikes” law in France has started being enforced yet (due to data privacy questions), it technically went into effect at the beginning of the year, and was widely promoted around France. Of course, our big question was why anyone thought that such laws would actually make anyone buy. The general reasoning that supporters of such laws gave is that it would decrease unauthorized file trading, and those people would magically want to start buying again. But, of course, as mentioned at the time, we already have empirical data that this wouldn’t work. After all, here in the US, thousands of people were threatened with millions of dollars in fines for file sharing — a punishment significantly more stringent than losing your internet connection. And, rather than decrease the amount of unauthorized file trading, it only increased (quite a bit), often moving to more underground resources.
So it should come as little (i.e., no) surprise that in the few months since the Hadopi law has technically been in effect in France, reports have found an increase in unauthorized file trading, along with a notable shift from BitTorrent to other, less trackable, solutions.
So what’s next? Suing doesn’t work. Kicking people off the internet doesn’t work. Can we hope that maybe next on the list is actually putting in place a good business model?
And this is the biggest stupidity of Dark Lord Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill. He seriously thinks that by setting draconian punishments for ‘illegal’ downloading he can change people’s behaviour. The evidence worldwide suggests otherwise, and the people who are instead most likely to be disadvantaged are legitimate businesses, libraries, universities, websites and ISPs who don’t feel they can afford to get sued for the behaviour of individuals entirely unconnected with them. And that’s without the bill’s provision for secret and arbitrary web censorship by the Secretary of State. It’s stupid legislation which shouldn’t be allowed to pass.
Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.
The survey – of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries – found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide.
Countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens.
International bodies such as the UN are also pushing for universal net access.
“The right to communicate cannot be ignored,” Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), told BBC News.
“The internet is the most powerful potential source of enlightenment ever created.”
He said that governments must “regard the internet as basic infrastructure – just like roads, waste and water”.
“We have entered the knowledge society and everyone must have access to participate.”
Interestingly though in Britain 55% of those surveyed believed there was also a case for some governmental regulation of the Internet. The gap between attitudes is what Mandelson is counting on in order to get the Bill through before the general election. Due process and the rule of law would continue their decline under this draconian piece of legislation, and this and successive governments would not just be allowed to censor the Internet as they saw fit (and in secret), but they would also severely damage the most important new communication resource since the telephone. For what? Appeasement of the Labour Party’s corporate friends? What’s getting lost in this argument are the facts about filesharing:
It’s time to get worried. By way of the digital economy bill, Lord Mandelson means to punish innocent people and limit their right to a fair trial. He means to grant his successors the power to block web content by order, without restriction. His proposals are aimed at restricting copyright infringers, but in reality will damage many people who have never done anything wrong.
The reason for this is as simple as it is unjust. Mandelson and the music companies monitoring copyright infringement can perhaps identify the household, business or cafe where someone is uploading a file, but they cannot identify which person or computer did it. Their answer is to make the internet account holder – the person paying the bill – liable for everyone’s actions. And then, to disconnect the entire household.
Disconnection of whole families is not an acceptable punishment. It is the modern day equivalent of banishment: it will disrupt social lives, education and people’s livelihoods. It is designed to threaten and intimidate, and cow people into behaving, with no regard to the consequences of using the law in such a manner.
Restricting the right to a fair trial, state censorship, disproportionate state punishment against households (and businesses of all kinds) for the actions of individuals – these are the tools used by tin pot dictatorships. The Executive Director of the Open Rights Group is right – this isn’t the way our government should be behaving over anything, and we shouldn’t be fooled – the people most at risk of the bill are younger people, who have amongst the least power in society, and who are currently possibly the most ignored minority group in the run-up to the general election. The bill will affect everyone, because it’ll give the government the right to arbitrarily censor the internet as it sees fit. Abuses by such laws are already kicking off in Australia, and it would be crazy to think the same wouldn’t happen here – when laws exist which can be abused, they are invariably abused; it’s the nature of power. Killock continues:
Hardly anybody thinks this bill is a good idea – outside of the music and film lobbies; not even most musicians I have spoken to. But politicians need to hear us much more loudly if they are going to react. You can help by contacting your MP, and explaining what this bill really means, to you and to others. You can take action with Open Rights Group: do it now!
Outside parliament, hotels and educators have complained that the bill also endangers their businesses and provision of the internet to the public because of its insistence that organisations providing net access should be liable for the actions of their customers.
The bill proposes a “three strikes” rule which would mean that persistent copyright breaches would be lead to disconnection from the internet. The aim is to reduce illlicit filesharing by 70%. But in a letter (PDF) to Lord Puttnam, representatives from institutions such as the University of London, British Library and the Imperial War Museum, said: “Because public institutions often provide internet access to hundreds or thousands of individual users, the complexity of our position in relation to copyright infringements must be taken into consideration.”
It says that the bill is unclear about the role of “intermediaries” such as libraries in the bill.
The letter added: “If this is not done, a public institution such as a library, school or university’s internet connection as a whole could be jeopardised, resulting in loss of internet access to large sections of the public, particularly the 15 million citizens without an internet connection at home.”
Meanwhile, the British Hospitality Association (BHA), which represents thousands of hotel, catering and leisure establishments, worries that the requirement in the bill for hotels to provide guest details to an internet service provider (ISP) where copyright infringement is alleged could be impossible in some cases – and that hotels might be disconnected if guests are persistently infringing copyright.
Disconnection would endanger a hotel’s business which the BHA said would be a “grossly unfair consequence” of a guest’s action.
It strikes me as bizarre the level to which the government is determined to control the population, to punish protest, to clamping down on freedom of speech, to the sharing of ideas, you name it. Throwing people off the internet without a trial? Banning websites because Secretaries of State don’t like them? No accountability for these decisions worth a damn? What would this do to schools’ internet access? Hotels’? Libraries? Is New Labour so inextricably wedded to monolithic corporate interests that it’s prepared to take British culture down in the name of ‘protecting copyright’?
The business case for the Digital Economy Bill hasn’t been proven: music profits are up, as are takings at the cinema. Certainly in the latter case it’s had something to do with better product being released, but a greater lesson was shown this last year as well in the case of copyright infringement and film. X-Men Origins: Wolverine was released early in 2009 to critical derision – it was a lousy film, which deserved to crash and burn at the box office. A near-complete print was even leaked to the Internet and circulated virally worldwide, yet the film did extraordinarily well. And there is no evidence whatsoever that the pre-release leak damaged the film’s takings at all – on the contrary it’s more than likely that it increased the excitement for the final print’s release. As with music, all the evidence shows that people are willing to pay for product they like, and ‘pirated’ material is in fact of benefit to the market, allowing people to decide in advance what it is they like. Why then should the rule of law be suddenly abandoned?
For that matter should schools, universities, hotels, libraries, all sorts of public buildings and organisations, suddenly become in effect state informers? Has the government learned nothing from the ISA debacle? It’s crazy to legislate with a wrecking ball to crack a nut. Noone’s suggested the problem of illegal downloading (or paedophilia in the case of the ISA) isn’t there, but this will hurt far more than the few who really are out to breach copyright on an industrial level. It’s not just stupid, it’s insidious and will damage us all.
The Dark Lord Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill, through allowing households to be disconnected from the Internet without any judicial say, would severely undermine the rule of law in this country. Other elements of the Bill would allow Mandelson and his successors to give police-level enforcement powers to any individual or organisation they choose, and to block any websites they choose at any time, in secret, and without having to give a reason – censorship the likes of which would make a Chinese Communist Party official squirm with delight. The Don’t Disconnect Us campaign has run a contest to produce a viral protest against this authoritarian nonsense. The winning entry is below:
A lot of hyperbole is given over in this country to the idea that we’re somehow drifting into a police state. Some of it is valid, much of it isn’t – Jacqui Smith may have justified the Metropolitan Police’s arrest of shadow cabinet member Damian Green earlier in the year, but where is she now? The police may have been used a number of times this year to attack violently protest groups which the state decided were behaving contrary to its interests, but the furore was so great they’re certainly not operating overtly in such a way at present. Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill however in its current form would give him powers the likes of which the Chinese would envy:
What is the problem with clause 11 that I am getting so alarmed about it? It amends the Communications Act 2003 to insert a new section 124H which would, if passed, give sweeping powers to the Secretary of State. It begins:
(1) The Secretary of State may at any time by order impose a technical obligation on internet service providers if the Secretary of State considers it appropriate in view of—Pausing there. Note that this says nothing at all about copyright infringement. For example the power could be used to:
order ISP’s to block any web page found on the Internet Watch Foundation’s list
block specific undesireable sites (such as wikileaks)
block specific kinds of traffic or protocols, such as any form of peer-to-peer
throttle the bandwidth for particular kinds of serivce or to or from particular websites.
In short, pretty much anything.
I do not exagerrate. The definition of a “technical obligation” and “technical measure” are inserted by clause 10:
A “technical obligation”, in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against particular subscribers to its service.A “technical measure” is a measure that— (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.As you can see blocking wikileaks is simply a matter of applying a technical measure against all subscribers of any ISP.
Surely something must limit this power you ask? It seems not. The Secretary of State may make an order if “he considers it appropriate” in view of:
(a) an assessment carried out or steps taken by OFCOM under section 124G; or (b) any other consideration.Where “any other consideration” could be anything.
Francis Davey’s superb analysis of the bill is truly terrifying. The Digital Economy Bill would not just give Mandelson (or his successors) the power to ban say child porn sites immediately, but Wikileaks or any other site the state had issues with as well – on a whim. The power would not be limited by judicial or parliamentary scrutiny – it would be absolute. You’d have no idea he’d blocked the site, you’d have no comeback against him, and in short this would give government the ability to censor the internet as and when it saw fit in the most draconian manner imaginable. Davey’s right when he says this isn’t even about censorship – it’s a continuation of the regular New Labour attack on the rule of law and evidence based policy making. He (and they) must be stopped in this mad quest, because freedom of speech really is under threat, and if passed for example all the twitter campaigning the likes of which have shown some effectiveness against particular villains in the last year would be made futile by this bill.
No doubt the government will trot out it’s common spiel that there are no current plans to use this element of the bill, but if such powers aren’t needed then why develop them? History has always shown that powers when available are always used – RIPA, SOCPA, Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, you name it. Government agencies will line up to say the abuses of such powers weren’t what they intended, yet their very existence has led to local government and the Home Office to stamp all over civil liberties, be it against photography of public buildings in public areas or the right to protest itself. If Mandelson is allowed to bring about what’s contained in this bill we will move one step further towards a genuine police state, and that’s something we should all fear.
Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson — or his successor in the next government) the power to make “secondary legislation” (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).
What that means is that an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright.
Of course it’s not unusual for New Labour to sidestep the rule of law. They did it with the Extradition Act, for which Gary McKinnon is paying a price, they’re doing it with the Independent Safeguarding Authority, for which we’re all paying a slow price, and they did it with Iraq, for which the whole world has paid a price. Unelected Peter Mandelson plans to give himself unlimited power to make laws and not have them subjected to scrutiny or approval by a single elected representative. It’s not just unfair, it’s a crime against democracy. To expand:
1. The Secretary of State would get the power to create new remedies for online infringements (for example, he could create jail terms for file-sharing, or create a “three-strikes” plan that costs entire families their internet access if any member stands accused of infringement)
2. The Secretary of State would get the power to create procedures to “confer rights” for the purposes of protecting rightsholders from online infringement. (for example, record labels and movie studios can be given investigative and enforcement powers that allow them to compel ISPs, libraries, companies and schools to turn over personal information about Internet users, and to order those companies to disconnect users, remove websites, block URLs, etc)
3. The Secretary of State would get the power to “impose such duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified in connection with facilitating online infringement” (for example, ISPs could be forced to spy on their users, or to have copyright lawyers examine every piece of user-generated content before it goes live; also, copyright “militias” can be formed with the power to police copyright on the web)
These are all basic constitutional infringements – and for what threat? With the ISA it was to combat paedophilia which is apparently so widespread it threatens every vulnerable person in or around a workplace. Except it doesn’t. With Iraq it was to protect us all from weapons of mass destruction. Except there weren’t any. Now Mandelson is gunning for absolute power because piracy threatens what? Our culture? No. Our creative industries? Have you seen just how well the film industry is doing? He’s been told file sharing threatens the excess profits of New Labour’s corporate friends, and he’s making an unprecedented power grab to stop it. Andy Robinson of the Pirate Party UK asks:
What exactly is the ‘first tier tribunal’ referred to in the Digital Economy Bill? If that phrase does not mean ‘a court of law with a judge, jury and a presumption of innocence until proven guilty’, what is the justification for throwing out one of the major pillars of the British legal system?
Why should consumers not open their internet connection over wifi as a service to the community, and why shoul they not be treated as common carriers when they do so?
Why are libraries being given the right to ‘lend’ audio books digitally, but not the right to lend music and films digitally?
Why is file sharing good when libraries do it and bad when the public does it?
How will disconnecting people from the internet possibly help the bill’s stated goal of ’securing the UK’s position as one of the world’s leading digital knowledge economies’?
Why did the text of the bill appear on a record industry owned website before it appeared on any government site?
The bill includes a provision for unappointed, unelected, monopoly collecting societies to “assume a mandate to collect fees on behalf of rights holders who have not specifically signed up to that society.” Why should doing this be considered anything less than criminally defrauding the people these fees will be collected from and stealing copyright (in the true sense of claiming ownership, not the way it is misused as a synonym for infringement)?
Why does the government see file sharing as both to trivial that it can be dealt with by just sending a letter and simultaneously so serious that it warrants the imposition of a new £50,000 fine?
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, why does the bill not even mention the concept of ‘fair use’?
These are vital questions which should concern us all. In addition to constitutional norms, Mandelson is attacking basic cultural norms. My question is this – why should the concerns of Big Media trump a) the rule of law and b) the concerns of internet file sharers, whom it has been shown spend more on films and music? Rupert Goodwins quite rightly says:
industry bodies, such as the BPI, FAST and so on, [will be given] powers of investigation tantamount to those of the police force. The risk of copyright infringment would be enough to force any company to patrol its actions and offerings, closing down anything that might land them in the dock. The freedom of the Internet would be gone. It is placing the future of the Net, with the force of law, in the hands of those who depend on artificial scarcity. It is antithetical to everything that matters in the digital world.
Freedom in the real world has been under concerted attack by these people, and they’re now extending their control to the digital world. They must be stopped at all costs.
Sorry it has been such a while since the last time I forced my opinions upon you – I have had a week of gigs, followed by a week of I’m-sure-it-wasn’t-but-it-could-have-been Swine Flu, followed by a couple of days lethergy. Who would have thought that the person to kick me out of my slightly sorry for myself stupor would Peter Mandelson?!
This post is essentially a quick overview of what I have been wanting to write in more detail over the last few weeks, and hopefully will act as a more structured base to start thinking about the actual things Mr Mandelson is trying to bring in, and whether it is a good or a bad thing.
Essentially my view of filesharing is the following: For – Against – For. Let me explain slightly, hopefully this somehow will connect back to the inital conversation. As a member of an unsigned band looking for a break into the music industry I want EVERYBODY to have copies of my songs. The more the better! We ask that if possible you have a listen to the tunes, stick them on your ipod, tell some of your mates then (and most importantly) all come down and see a gig. Everyone wins – you get some nice music, we get people to gigs, thus creating a buzz.
Once you have your buzz and get signed your then releasing an album or two. This is where I am against. The guys in this position (and this is where the Lily Allen / Musicians Alliance stuff comes in) are the ones who have managed to get their job to be music. But all is not as it seems- as we have already discussed these guys essentially get a ‘loan’ from their record label, to be paid back in full, and with interest, before they can make money themselves, and in the end record another album. These guys are against filesharing and I absolutely agree with them.
The idea of a ‘rockstar’ being someone who drives Rolls-Royces into swimming pools and is constantly in hotel rooms with groupies is out dated and just plain wrong. These guys will be earning very simliar amounts to you or me right now (and I earn a pittance…) they are also the future of music. How many times recently have we heard people lamenting the fact that the naughties has had no classic music formed in it? Well in my opinion its not suprising – even Radiohead had to make 3 albums before they really started working on something different and clever, which, if they were starting now, is a luxury they would never have been afforded (not least because their first album didn’t sell – they would have been dropped). These guys need your support and your money to help them to continue down the path they want to make – and surely the goal for everyone on both sides of the argument is to be able to listen to quality, enjoyable, sometimes groundbreaking, always original (to an extent) music?
Then I get a little controversial- when a band hits a certain level of success I think it is in everyones best interest to go back to not being bothered about filesharing. This is because at this level they are (if doing their job properly) making a fortune from endorsements, being on soundtracks to films and games, playing live and merchandise from playing live. Labels get their money through other revenue streams and they are able to start experimenting with their sounds, seeing where they can lead their audience and generally becoming the ‘artists’ that they have always had the potential to have.
So whats this got to do with Mandelson? Well next time I will explore his plans of controlling what we do on the internet, and whether it really will make any difference to anyone at all.
The storming reception accorded to Mandelson on Monday was widely hailed as the moment when New Labour’s fortunes could start to turn. To me it signalled the opposite. The sight of Labour activists cheering their Blairite bête noir showed how bad things have got, and how desperate they have become. After all, Lord Mandelson is the unelected, widely reviled symbol of all that the old Labour left is supposed to despise about the Tony Blair years: a backroom fixer and backstabber for whom politics is about positioning and image more than principles and ideas. That he has been brought back into the centre of government owes less to his own self-styled status as a giant of politics than to the standing of the political pygmies around him.
It is not Mandelson who has changed. He remains the embodiment of the fact that New Labour believes in nothing beyond its own re-election. Yet there were the rank and file Labour Party delegates, cheering him to the rafters. It sounded like a death rattle, a case not so much of whistling past the graveyard as singing from the grave.
And this is why they are going to lose next summer. It’s also entirely avoidable. They could wipe ID cards out today, but they’d rather pretend otherwise. They could end the ISA today, but they’d rather ‘review’ it instead. They could improve their environmental standing, but would rather stick with the neoliberal idea of growth and pretend there’s a reason for a new runway at Heathrow. They could deal with the issues such as a terminal lack of new social housing, which the BNP are feeding off, but even the Home Secretary would rather just stick his head in the sand. Electoral reform? Try a solution which will boost their fortunes rather than the Greens or Lib Dems. Reform the House of Lords? In a generation or so. House of Commons? Not any more…
The party which introduced the Human Rights Act is going to sacrifice itself needlessly to one which has insisted it’s going to repeal it, and is best friends in the European Parliament with the far right. Proportional representation couldn’t be more needed to help get a better deal for us.
In a letter to the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, he said: “I am of the view that the unchecked proliferation of illegal downloading (even on a “non-commercial” basis) will have a seriously detrimental effect on musicians, and particularly young musicians and those composers who are not performing artists.”
The letter comes as talks to heal a growing rift in the music industry over piracy broke down today , with a group of artists including Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, Billy Bragg and Tom Jones accusing labels of stubbornness.
The artists are part of the Featured Artists Coalition, whose members also include Annie Lennox and Blur’s Dave Rowntree. The FAC took the rest of the music industry by surprise by publicly announcing that it has “agreed to disagree” with labels over government proposals to suspend the internet connections of persistent filesharers.
“I could have been dropped from my record deal because so much was spent and so much of my album was leaked and not paid for. But luckily my label had great belief in me. File-sharing has had a very, very negative effect on my career, as it has on many others.”
He added: “I think it’s very positive to see that other artists, along with the government, are coming together to defend the right to protect our art.”
This is all hyperbole and no fact. The Wolverine movie was widely leaked before its cinema release, but the leak to p2p services made no impact to its takings. In fact considering how awful a movie it turned out to be, it was shocking that its leak had no financial impact. How on earth has Cruz’s album being leaked had a negative effect on his career? How can Elton say sharing music has a ‘detrimental effect’? Lily Allen says:
The music industry is now facing destruction because people have stopped buying music. For every car sold in the UK , a small piece of that profit will go to the designers of the cars, there are thousands ands thousands of other people working in the motor industry that need to be paid too. If we stop paying for a product, the industry supporting that product falls apart, as we have seen over the past few years. i hope that made sense….
Well sorta, but I don’t think the comparison is a valid one. Unless she can prove that the downturn in music sales is uniquely down to filesharing, there’s no reason why the downturn in the music industry hasn’t been down to a period of terribly bad product being made. And she can’t. And neither she nor Elton has attempted to come up with a credible justification as to why the government should be able to terminate households’ internet connections for what is overwhelmingly a civil offence. Maybe they should take their blinkers off and start encouraging their colleagues to make better music, just to see what happens!
In a letter to The Times, Charles Dunstone of TalkTalk, Ian Livingston of BT and Tom Alexander of Orange UK criticised the proposals on how to reduce illegal filesharing announced last month, which include the possibility of disconnecting accounts.
The letter, also signed by Deborah Prince of Which?, Ed Mayo of Consumer Focus and Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group, said innocent consumers would suffer.
Consumers must be presumed to be innocent unless proven guilty. We must avoid an extrajudicial “kangaroo court” process where evidence is not tested properly and accused broadband users are denied the right to defend themselves against false accusations. Without these protections innocent customers will suffer. Any penalty must be proportionate. Disconnecting users from the internet would place serious limits on their freedom of expression. Usually, constraints to freedom of expression are imposed only as the result of custodial sentences, or incitement to racial hatred, or libel.
A point very nicely put. Mandelson’s plans represent the same problem posed by the Independent Safeguarding Authority – they are the equivalent of a sledgehammer to crack a nut, benefit entirely the wrong people, and would have side effects – most notably (in both cases) of undermining the rule of law. It’s heartening to see these people bringing the issue back to that, because ahead of any other transgression, it’s the undermining of the rule of law which remains this government’s most appalling achievement. Join us in fighting to stop it, and join me at the Pirate Party UK’s first public meeting this Saturday at 5.30pm in London.
In the backstory to all this lurk arguments that will not go away: artists, writers and inventors should be paid; the traditional creative industries have their uses; and the great chaotic utopia envisaged by some online evangelists would be culturally impoverished – a world that would create millions of buskers, but no Beatles.
This kind of libertarianism gives off the same whiff as the pro-freedom politics once espoused by acid house party organisers – not just politically empty, but off-puttingly spivvy.
The party does not want to abolish copyright but it needs to be balanced and fair, Robinson claims.
“At the moment, big businesses is saying that we steal handbags, and we say let’s talk about what copyright is about,” he says. The original purpose of copyright, created by the Statute of Anne of 1709, was to encourage the creation of artistic works by granting a right to copy for 14 years. Copyright for written works now stands at life plus 70 years, and copyright for sound recordings is 50 years after the recording is made, or 50 years after publication. The EU has extended copyright to 95 years for performers and sound recordings.
The term of copyright has been marching forward but along the way, the purpose of it has been lost, according to Robinson. Instead of encouraging artistic creation, modern copyright has made certain companies cultural gatekeepers, he argues, adding, “copyright is serving the needs of music labels, not the needs of the public, the public domain or even the artists“.
In other words the argument isn’t about whether or not to pay, but who benefits from it. And look at those statistics. Harris is being disingenuous when he uses the term ‘pirates’ pejoratively – the European Pirate parties’ popularity isn’t politically empty and ’spivvy’. The large number of young people joining them in enormous numbers understand the arguments, and have the technology to do something about it. Politicians like Mandelson should be wary of patronising young voters – they don’t have enough of their own as it is!
Under the tougher proposals, internet service providers would be obliged to block access to download sites, throttle broadband connections or even temporarily cut off access for repeat offenders.
Communications regulator Ofcom would report regularly to the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, providing evidence of whether such action is required against illegal filesharers.
The consultation document from Mandelson’s Department for Business Innovation and Skills proposes that the secretary of state could then direct Ofcom to implement a raft of new technical measures.
This is a massive announcement that threatens far more people than before, yet it has been hidden away in an update to a consultation document. We are only to be given 5 weeks to respond to this major announcement and defend our right to justice, a fair trial, and to defend the principle that collective punishments are wrong, despite the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills having a commitment to 12 week minimum consultation periods.
The other new announcement is that ISPs will be expected to share the cost of enforcement 50:50 with ‘rights holders’, a move which may well price independent artists and film-makers out of the process, and places an unjustifiable burden on ISPs who are a third party in disputes between file sharers and rights holders.
Yet again the Government have done exactly what the big media cartel have told them.
It does seem awfully convenient that the government is more interested in listening to David Geffen than coming up with a workable solution to the problem of filesharing. The government should be forced to answer the question of whose rights they’re most interested in protecting: the rights of powerful rights holders? The rights of the artists themselves? The rights of users? Again however we are in the situation where the government has bought into an international, corporate agenda at the expense of those whose interests it’s really supposed to be protecting.
A much more fruitful path – economically, politically and socially – would be to ask why current economic and regulatory conditions are not bringing about enough legal alternatives to draw UK consumers away from illicit p2p. Working on the fairly safe assumptions that (a) people like downloading music from the internet, and (b) most people, given a choice, would prefer not to break the law, we should aim to map a way forward for businesses old and new to take advantage of the digital market in a way that allows them sufficient profits to invest in the creative talent of the future.
I couldn’t agree more – it seems like such common sense. Why criminalise 6-7 million people when they’re responding to technological change, and to a widely-shared perception that the artists whose product is being shared aren’t losing out through filesharing? If the potential losers in the p2p future are corporate, what’s government doing siding arbitrarily (and disproportionately) with them, and entirely against users (which is quite possibly illegal)?
If you’re against Mandelson’s kowtowing to Big Media join the Pirate Party UK here. You’ve seen how successful they were in Sweden. Join them here and send a message to New Labour.
These are all basic constitutional infringements – and for what threat? With the ISA it was to combat paedophilia which is apparently so widespread it threatens every vulnerable person in or around a workplace. Except it doesn’t. With Iraq it was to protect us all from weapons of mass destruction. Except there weren’t any. Now Mandelson is gunning for absolute power because piracy threatens what? Our culture? No. Our creative industries? Have you seen just how well the film industry is doing? He’s been told file sharing threatens the excess profits of New Labour’s corporate friends, and he’s making an unprecedented power grab to stop it. 
This is where I am against. The guys in this position (and this is where the Lily Allen / Musicians Alliance stuff comes in) are the ones who have managed to get their job to be music. But all is not as it seems- as we have already discussed these guys essentially get a ‘loan’ from their record label, to be paid back in full, and with interest, before they can make money themselves, and in the end record another album. These guys are against filesharing and I absolutely agree with them.
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