“Digital Economy Bill: the final instalment

Political losers

• The main political losers in this Bill seem to be the Liberal Democrats following Lord Davies’s amendments aimed at non-P2P file sharing. Despite the leading role of Lord Mandelson and strong Labour support for the bill – with the notable exception of former minister for digital engagement Tom Watson and Derek Wyatt – Clement Davies’s support and obvious connections to the media industry seem to have served as a political lightning rod.

Lord Davies went against the views of the Lib Dem party faithful in his support of the bill and is likely to have cost them valuable votes in the forthcoming election.”my emphasis

We really need to make sure that our MPs kick up a fuss about this and do their best to not let the Bill pass without proper debate and/or in its present form. Conference passed a resolution with all the right words in it and we need to act on that as best we can.

I would urge readers to send a letter to their MP using the 38 Degrees page.

What were the Libs thinking with suggesting this stupid clause?

you might of just lost my vote

Turns out they didn’t Tony – they proposed to delete the even worse clause 17 entirely but the Tories would not vote for that without a replacement. But if you read around here – there must be half a dozen different posts on this, you might learn what’s happened since. If they have still “lost your vote” after reading all that, then you’re welcome to it.

you might of just lost my vote

Conference reps going to Birmingham, please support this motion being prioritised for debate; and then please support it in the debate!

Now, to “Benjamin”, thanks but no thanks. In terms of changes to intellectual property laws in that list, they are just as arbitrary as any others’ proposals whilst they retain the basic principles of the state granted monopoly and artificial scarcity and there is no evidence that the IP actually does produce the “utilitarian” benefit implied. Arbitrary = unjust and a the whim of politics. There are sound, and just, arguments for abolishing this interference and protectionism entirely.

Also, whilst I am wholly supportive of a Citizens’ Income, the Green policy document at least does not appear to talk about where it would be funded from, espcially if it’s average effect would be to produce an income more than current benefits for everyone.

I have no problem with that in principle, but you are missing the other side of it – that it should be funded by reducing everyone’s other costs of living through a land value tax. Since the party’s economic paper can only muster five lines if a two inch column I can only conclude (as well as from reading “Gaian Economics”) that the party still really fails to understand the full importance and possibility of LVT.

Until the Green party really appears to “grok” this (and they may well yet do so before the Lib Dems!) then the CitInc policy remains fundamentally *re-*distribution – i.e. allowing privilege to go relatively scot free and then trying to fix it, whereas a CI *funded* by a full land tax is an entitlement, an entitlement of people to share equally in the value that is created by our cumulative interactions that make land valuable. It is *pre-*distribution that does away with the privilege.

(a) read the related posts on this site
(b) realise that partly as a result of our pressure the Lords Tim are now actually listening and prepared to negotiate on the amendment by meeting with ORG, the PPCs etc
(c) realise that this opportunity to affect a parliamentary outcome is exactly what we make it
(d) continue to lobby by outlining our particular concerns (because we had many different and good points between us) to some of the PPCs who signed the letter – Bridget Fox, Martin Tod, Julian Huppert would be the obvious ones.
AND
(e) above all concentrate on the actual opportunity in front of us to influence party policy on the DEBill *before* we start rethinking our loyalties.

Anyone can do the above, whether they’re a member of the Lib Dems or not. And if they care in the slightest about the DEBill as distinct from making a party political point, they should. I am seriously quite shocked by the party shilling that the Greens and the Pirates are doing when we have an opportunity to actually DO something. The Bill is nearly through report stage, we’ve got a window of a few days to make our point before the momentum boils off, and that time should be spent influencing and communicating. So let’s have some fucking focus, please.

1. introduce a Citizen’s Income (see EC730), which will allow many more people to participate in cultural creation;
2. introduce generally shorter copyright terms, with a usual maximum of 14 years;
3. legalise peer to peer copying where it is not done as a business;
4. liberalise ‘fair use’ policies to operate outside the academic environment, and allow greater development from existing copyright material; and
5. make it impossible to patent broad software and cultural ideas.

It is without question that such a Bill will limit the freedom of the majority. What needs to be implemented is a realistic bill that allows societal innovation to remain and individual and collective liberty to prevail. I believe it is fallible to apply the same property rights to intellectual material as that as physical….it just cannot be done. A intelligible approach needs to be taken which is utilitarian and fair to all classes and all members of commerce and both present and future civilisations.

The way we should be going, is not to further privilege copyright rent collectors and further criminalise the population, and not creating or tacitly permitting surveillance regimes to enforce these rules. Not liberal, not at all!

I have come by this opinion gradually, being truly appalled at the measures being contemplated to stamp out and control expression and fair use.

I came across this – the original argument on Copyright : read MacCaulay, will take five minutes and open your eyes : http://yarchive.net/macaulay/copyright.html

Child pornography is illegal in almost all jurisdictions. Why couldn’t our government just contact the government where the child abuse hosting server were located, and have them take it down?

We’re getting a little off-topic here, but the main reason why this doesn’t work is varying opinions of what constitutes ‘child pornography’, particularly in regards to the magic number of hours since birth when a child transmutes into an adult.

The vast majority of the “child pornography” that the UK and US governments like to rant about is produced in Russia. It mostly features individuals aged 15 to 17, unclothed and suggestively posed, but not engaged in actual sex acts. It’s completely legal (under their own laws), and it’s often poor, homeless orphans or families who face a very real prospect of starving or freezing to death if they can’t bring in some money. Our government’s position is that they’re better dead than caught on camera; the Russian government disagrees, and takes the position that our government has set the age too high. Obviously, this is not a simple matter to resolve, morally. The point here: regardless of which way you think this should be resolved, there is no international agreement, so you cannot simply ask the hosting country to take it down and expect that to get you anywhere.

Russia’s more cooperative when it comes to under-14s, which is their “age of consent”, but that accounts for a relatively small amount of the material. They are actually willing and capable of taking down the groups who do things like that.

I’m not certain, but I think the behaviour of a firewall is at the discretion of the system administrator; some work automatically (e.g. by blocking suspicious looking packets), some by set access rules (e.g. user A cannot access superhotporn.com). Maybe I’m wrong. I only said “Great Firewall” as an overly emotive and slippery-slope fallacious reference to the Great Firewall of China, which is obviously far more extreme than anything we’ll see in Britain until they start burning books again. That said, I still stand by my attacks on the IWF – they may not ask ISPs to block political content, but they are as undemocratic and opaque an organisation as one will ever come across.

Individuals (or more likely, corporations) would have to go to court, yes. However, I’m still worried about the lack of provision for the accused to defend themselves from accusations of copyright infringement, especially while our libel laws and super-injunctions remain on the books. And should the courts have the power to take sites (or pages) down? Shouldn’t the amendment detail the legal framework for sites to be put back up?

With regards to international law enforcement: Russia are a member state of Interpol. They have already shown an interest in cross-border co-operation of police forces. And I doubt the Russian government want to be associated with protecting child abusers. I at least think our first instinct should be to pressure them to prosecute the paedophiles in their own country.

Hypothetically, supposing the material was hosted in a country that did not have the resources or inclination to remove the CP, then I suppose there is a debate to be had on whether the material should just be outright blocked. I think that if we do censor, we should make damn sure that we do the blocking right, though. The web page should redirect to a sign that says “The UK government has blocked this website on the grounds that the content is deemed unacceptable and features the exploitation of children. If you feel there has been a mistake, please contact the independent reviews panel at …”. The government’s criteria for blocking should be publicly laid out, and ministers should not be able to instruct for specific sites to be blocked.

I realise that I’m blabbering a bit, and have swayed slightly off-topic, so I’ll summarise my comment with a punchline. It is just about conceivable that there should be some instances in which the government may have to block access to some websites, perhaps. However, I doubt copyright infringement justifies such extreme measures, and even if it does I think this amendment is not the way to do it.