Sadly, he just doesn’t get it.

Tony:

These young people and their skiffle bands, eh?

As Krz’s friend, I can confirm what he says. Although he’s been very generous in how long I’ve worked on it for… he likes to make me appear much speedier than I am. I haven’t had a day off in months.

I think of myself very much as a traditional craftsman, because the people who trained me in my field were, and I build tools for professionals to use. During the course of my career, as has happened for many people in this age, the tools used by the industry moved from the physical world to the virtual world, simply because this is more efficient for them. As a toolsmith I have to strongly endorse anything that makes the user’s life better; that’s what I do.

Whilst I am intimately familiar with the importance of personal liberty, I’m also intimately familiar with the practice of refining things until they work. Scrapping the bill is childish. Those of you who patronise and claim that people aren’t living in the modern world are seemingly blind to the actual nature of modern industry. To claim that the work of a craftsman has no value simply because the work can be duplicated is ignorant and disrespectful to those of us who form the mainstay of the British economy. If I was a carpenter, there’d be no confusion. Those of you who patronise should appreciate that industries and demands HAVE changed. Not everything is, or should be, a service. Is a chair a service? Not every business is primarily a means to generate advertising revenue. Should a chair advertise?

To give you a nice insight into what you’ll actually achieve by banning the bill, let me tell you about the dominant player in my industry. Since piracy is rife for any kind of distributed software, and since they do have a fair amount of money, they literally hired private investigators to go out and find people using their software illegally, and then sue.
Personally, I find this somewhat abhorrent, but the point I’d like you to take from this is this:

Those with money will find ways to defend themselves.
Those of us starting out can never get anywhere, since our focus is (and rightly should be!) on our industry, and not on self-defense.

Scrapping this bill will keep the rich companies (who you assume it will protect) rich, and leave the rest of us with no freedom for innovation or entrepreneurship. It’s the little guy who needs help, and with the right work this bill can help the little guy. The big guys will take care of themselves. They always do.

Regards,

Dave.

Before the ad-hominem begins, I’m 28, and an avid reader of Spolsky, Gladwell, Godin and Rappaille.

Cheers,

Dave.

i think to a certain extent many of you are ‘crackers’ for being so naive. Copyright is being abused every day by the “small and innocent” and the the isp’s; who have made millions out of illegal copyright, which they say they cannot control. shutting the pipes of limewire, bitcomet, etc is the only way forward and for digital watermarks to be fully utilised. if the public cannot be trusted to not adhere to copyright law….then tough measures are needed. This age old argument of the ‘human rights’ tack is an incredibly stupid path to take. We have allowed the likes of itunes to ruin the music industry and we need to act quick to save or creative society who purely want paid a fair market rate for all of their hard work.

And lastly slagging off our judiciary is not clever. The systems in this country are far from the backward and barbaric autonomies of China and Iran

Hi Mark, can you correct me just to make sure I understand correctly:
– debill enforced traditional British copyright law on the internet, but needed work to ensure no abuse.
– party believes that copyright holders should be forced to develop “innovative new ways for customers to access content legally”
– party has moved to scrap debill

= Lib Dems have decided that all business must be conducted following innovative (currently nonexistent) new models
= No protection for current businesses.

So let’s see the outcome of that:
1) We’re going to reduce internet crime by making everything on the internet legal
2) We’re going to sit and wait for a big company with sufficient marketing resources to show us all the way
3) I (personally), and other developers of software which BY ITS NATURE must be distributed using the existing models of business, have no support from your party.

Yes, I did listen to the podcast.
Your chap speaking about how he’s been ripped off is a dreadful example. Let’s be clear of that. If his primary income was from the works he hadn’t been paid for, one wonders how he afforded to get to the conference.
He’s not the little guy. I am. You’ve made it patently clear that you lack the empathy to comprehend my position.

I have to be clear that I HATE the fact that you are forcing me to vote conservative, but you appear to have left me with no choice.

Would it really have been impossible to just put in more work to amend the bill?

Incidentally, Mark, didn’t you find it at all disconcerting that everyone said the same things? Surely in proper policymaking there would be some disagreement, but listening to the SPEECHES you’ve posted (because I heard NO DEBATE – where was this debate of which you speak?), there is an eerie consensus, a complete lack of any other perspective. Let’s face it, nothing was said, it was all very superficial and poorly articulated anecdotes about how crazy the internet is, how we should all love it and keep it free. I heard nothing regarding the state of individual sectors of the UK digital economy and their development. I don’t think I even heard any discussion of the substance of your policy proposal, you not think that pertinent? I noticed you all chose not to mention us, the people you’re disempowering. That was your idea of a debate on the UK’s digital economy? Really?

I urge everyone to listen to the audio, so you understand what level of” debate” is being proffered; all I heard was one side of the coin, reconstituted ad infinitum to varing degrees of quality. Very bizarre, it’s as if you got a bunch of people together and just boshed this one through. If there was a debate, can we have the audio from it?

Hey Mark,

Your silence speaks volumes. No debate? Footage?

That really was it. Please people, listen to his audio and tell me that was enough detail for a debate on the future of our economy.

You keep telling us why third parties think you’re right, but you never engage with how you see it working yourself. You can’t explain how current UK digital businesses could survive without DMCA, how we should conduct our day to day business with no protections. You have no answers or justifications, which makes it all the more shocking that you’ve proceeded as you have. You know as well as I do that a photographer and the soundtrack guy are shoddy examples, as neither rely on digital content as primiary revenue – you should of asked, because we know a lot of serious digital content creators, in many different fields and of varying size. That might of given you the start of a debate.

Had you of got someone that actually owns a digital content business, you might of had a speaker that spoke with some knowledge of the subject; for example Anna Arrowsmith, plus I expect she knows a few people – you could of had an actual debate instead of just getting your uncle to tell us how wild the internet is, but why it should be free all the same. When will you start to address this issue in a liberal and pragmatic way? Why have you offered nothing at all to rights holders?

Trouble rides a fast horse.

Hey Mark

How do you make out your reply in any way addressed Hywels point? You don’t have an answer, you’ve made it abundantly clear that you don’t have a working economic model in your head. If you want I’ll transcribe what that OST guy said, because it’s actually pretty funny and completely undermines your argument.

So there’s a photographer and the TV OST guy – I really meant someone whose primary product is digital. Your examples are people just saying “I get ripped off, and it’s OK” – I’m glad they don’t mind, I have a wife and kid – bills to pay, I’d be sweeping the road if I took that attitude and our economy would crumble. What point are you trying to make with these illustrations? They seem to further weaken your already tepid case as to why we don’t need a Digital Economy Bill.

You really don’t see the distinction do you? Let me explain again, Daves product is 100% digital – I make CD’s and vinyl too, but he is completely digital. It’s not photography and it’s not TV soundtracks, it’s DSP coding, and if you look around you’ll find that he’s one of the most respected dev’s in his field; yet you offer him absolutely nothing. No reason to stay in the UK, no reason to vote Lib Dem, plenty of reasons to vote Tory.

How is Dave going to make cash without a DMCA campaign on a digital only product? Practically, how could the digital businesses of the UK survive with what you’ve proposed? Should they keep relying on DMCA because their own government offers them no protection?

How is the UK going to survive without Dave’s?

You’re waving your fists at small UK digital business and protecting Google, eBay, Yahoo! and the ISPs from any responsibility. What you’ve proposed is a death warrant for our countries economy, made up by people that seemingly have little economic/industry experience in what they’re talking about and pushed forward by a lobby of people that don’t really believe in IP at all.

Hey Tom

I do recognise most of the things you say (apart from the “internet access denied” bit – which has never been part of the DEB, it’s just a rumour perpetuated by the illiterate), my argument was completely practical – it was about how digital businesses currently survive day to day in the UK. When you send people takedown notices that cites UK law, they’re generally ignored; a properly formatted DMCA request is roughly 95% effective within a 24 hour period (some Russians don’t care what you send them) – it’s simply a matter of practicalities and time. Small businesses can’t afford large legal fights, we just grab the best tools to hand and DMCA is the only tool that seems to work. Its shortcomings, or technicalities rarely occur to us, because we can’t actually use it – it’s an empty threat, but the only one that works consistently. I understand the bill seeks to change some of the CDPA, but they’re mainly practical changes that have been brought forward as the result of case law, or to reflect new technology (like the inclusion of “e-books” and “audio books”).

I completely agree that there are faults in the bill – I’m arguing because the motion says LibDems don’t agree in the bill at all, without providing any alternatives.

I think I’m pretty liberal on this issue, I don’t mind people stealing my copyrighted works as long as I have a right to ask hosts to take them down, I think that blocking sites should only happen in extreme cases, where the site owners repeatedly refuse to act (50 consecutive times seemed more than reasonable to me) or the content abuses the human rights of others, such as child porn, snuff videos, etc, which I see the motion now conceptually protects. I’m not talking about “China” or some “slippery slope”, what I’m saying is there are Russian mob sites we have no controls over that sell hideous abusive content in our country and we should stop them…I don’t see that as illiberal regardless of what the motion says.

What else can I concede without making it impossible to trade? The whole point of the bill was to try to avoid that, and give people warnings and then slow their connection down, or in worst offender cases, temporarily suspend the connection, rather than big, costly legal cases. People can appeal to tribunals, and that is built into the bill (section 14). I don’t see how full legal force is more liberal than sending someone a letter asking them to stop, plus it’s clearly unworkable to prosecute everyone, which is surely what you’re suggesting by appealing to the CDPA. I’m looking for a more socially friendly way, and the DEB would give us that if it was worked on further and not just discarded, as the motion suggests. Also, we’re talking about a facet of the bill, it addresses a lot of other issues about the UK’s digital economy other than filesharing and copyright, such as digital radio, TV switchover, EMS licensing, classification of video games, etc, etc. The Lib Dems now don’t have a position on any of these issues, or implementation.

The real irony is that this will never get through in time. As such, all that’s been achieved here is discord and apathy before the general election – when Parliament reconvenes the reduced Lib Dem representation will be powerless to stop it rolling through in whatever form, so these people have served the agenda of Labour/Tories, lost their chance to have a real say and split the party in the process. I figured if we all just concentrated on getting our candidates elected things would work out fine, clearly that isn’t the case.

Either way, I’m sorry if you’ve taken offence at my ranting, I’m all about working together to get it right…sadly they just want to axe it.