Digital Economy Bill

[WebDude]

A group is trying to stop the "on a nod" passage of the Digital Economy Bill into law in the dying days of this Government.

If you feel that a Bill should receive proper scrutiny, please Phone your MP TODAY.

The debate is due to start this afternoon - there's to be a 'live blog' on the ITPro website.

Here are a few links to check:

BBC news

NewsNow links to many web articles online today and in last 2 weeks.

---

Obviously one should get a balanced view but with the example of how laws can be wrongly used (eg anti-terrorism legislation against Icelandic banks) then the possibility of blocking sites like Wikileaks becomes much easier. Last year Wikileaks was covering online censorship and listed sites blocked in Denmark. In Australia, the Wikileaks site was put on the blocked list and anyone linking to it could be fined $11,000 a day.

So much for "freedom of speech". Anyway, the LibDems have voiced concern about the Digital Economy Bill (I am not a member, nor do I vote for anyone, but saw that on a different website) but without other MPs also voting against the Bill until it can have proper examination, we may go down a route of censorship like some other countries.

From a live blog on the web here

"9.18pm: Paul Farrelly (I think), Labour, sating that it should have had pre-legislative scrutiny. In a committee. Line by line. Lots of people agree. But not ministers."

I don't generally use Twitter, but see from various people that a lot of negative comments are being made, and I found some quite funny (and thought provoking - might be of interest to prospective MPs just how much greater the scrutiny will be on them):

edent
"Hard to change your IP address"? Really @stephenctimms? My ADSL provider changes mine several times a day. #DEBill

ChrisWHoy
If I copy a CD I buy on Amazon (e.g. to my MP3 player), will I get my postal service cut off? #debill

p4pictures
RT @Danandglados: 4 months ago the internet picked the Xmas no1. Now the government has pissed it off just before an election. This will be fun. #Debill

aenimiac
Thanks @LabourParty for forcing through the #debill without proper debate. At least your legacy won't just be an illegal war and massive deficit.

scourou
I suppose the only small consolation with the #debill being pushed through by MPs is that like any IT issue, the Gov will fuck it up.

FFS how comes that in the wake of the expenses scandal, in the middle of a General Election campaign, they are not effing ashamed to pass this bill? It just shows what a complete waste of time this general election is. They know that most people are too stupid to pay attention to this sort of thing, so it doesn't matter - they'll get re-elected anyway, whatever they do.

Some other links, worth a look:

DEB: a nightmare of unintended consequences - Blog entry on the Telegraph web site... Someone somewhere commented about the BBC having copyright on the Gene Hunt poster, now being used by both Labour and Conservatives (with some photoshop work, I guess). Makes a mockery of them denouncing copyright infringement, and the BBC letting them get away with it, while being in favour of copyright, quite understandably! Speech on 06.04.2010 by Fiona MacTaggart, MP [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLsBD30jKis on YouTube

handy graphic and list of MPs who voted against the Bill.

sorry - should have previewed that!

I'd rather like to know who voted that is expecting to be "out" of politics after the election...

I think some 300 MPs are expected to be 'new' so that still leaves another 100+ who could have a seat but weren't voting.

I don't know how high the numbers are for votes in general, though I guess somewhere there is a website which has all the numbers 'crunched' for those who need to know.

Certainly TheyWorkForYou.com and some of the other websites are a useful resource to at least find out if your own MP has attended or voted. The one for my area went along with party line and voted yes, of course.

"I applaude the rebels for having the brains to see exactly how bad for the people of this country this bill really is ( and not just the 'downloading' piracy issue) and the backbone to vote against the deal that was done."

Me too. They show that the system could work. I know from following twitter last night that most of the ones who have voted no have spoken to their constituents, whereas those who voted yes have either ignored or lied to their constituents.

"whereas those who voted yes have either ignored or lied to their constituents."

Treated like mushrooms again (kept in the dark and fed on sh*t).

Part of the problem is that I doubt that many MPs actually understand the problem.

Despite protestations stealing from creative types is quite clearly morally wrong and MPs as a whole realise this.

And along comes this bill which seems to do something about it.

"Hurrah" say many MPs.

Protesters against the bill are easily painted as thieves and so can tend to be ignored.

But the MPs don't really understand the technical ins and outs of how the net works. Technical details that make the bill nigh on impossible to work as is intended and opens it to all sorts of nasty abuse.

So I think they're trying to do a good thing (well most of them are, I'm not convinced about Mandy) and really don't realise what they've spawned.

Again for the record I am the most determined hater of "Freetard" culture and illegal file sharing but I just don't support this bill.

Exactly BadgersPaw.

THe clauses in there scare me. They are awarding themselves the right to cut off website access. And alleged file sharers are treated as guilty (and have to pay to appeal) based on a flawed system.

Google and YouTube are under threat now.

DP hasa friend in a band, who chooses to release his music through P2P, despite his record company not being too happy. He would be penalised for releasing his own music!

How nuts is that.

There's nothing to stop anyone releasing their own product that they own the rights to over a P2P network. File Sharing itself isn't going to become illegal.

However if the rights to the file have been sold to someone else, such a record company, then the creator will no longer have the right to release it onto a P2P network. So it becomes illegal file sharing.

And in all honesty that's understandable. It's quite possibly breach of contract, and certainly immoral, to accept money from someone in exchange for them having the rights to release it and then to break that contact and release it yourself.

A few more items I found funny (if not tragic!) :-

brouhaha RT @doctorow: RT @jobsworth:

Is this true? The Minister driving #DEBill thinks the IP in IP address stands for Intellectual Property. tr.im/UXSd

Someone even started #TimmsguidetoIT

ISP: Internet Surveillance Providers

#RSS = Retarded Surveillance Society

MSDOS = Mandelson's Steaming Dump On Society

DHCP - Destroy Homes with Copyright Protection

LAMP = List of Absent MPs

DDoS: Don't Download or Share

VoIP = Volition of Imbeciles Prevails

IETF: Industry Executive Tribute Fund

MPEG = Miserly Parliament Exhausts Goodwill

BP will love this one:
TCP/IP = Take Control of Pirates Intellectual Property

SKYPE = Successfully Killed Young Persons' Entertainment

https: hate those teenage people sharing

HawkeVIPER
@stephenctimms 20k opposing views resulted in you railroading the #debill through. Why the hell should any of us believe a thing you say?

I'm loving #Timmsguidetoit

It's so ridiculous that we need to draw some humour out of it

Also saw this today

I suppose it might be worth subscribing to something like Napster and just running streaming music all the time.

No doubt someone could feed that into another PC, then record to MP3 any tracks they like, without any suspicious downloads or peer-to-peer and not using encryption unless logging into their bank.

"BP will love this one:
TCP/IP = Take Control of Pirates Intellectual Property"

It was delightfully ironic when the authors of one of the early file sharing systems (Kazaa?) found out that someone had stolen their intellectual property and took them to court.

However that said they were right to fight for what they had created, you can't blame the software for what people do with it.

"No doubt someone could feed that into another PC, then record to MP3 any tracks they like, without any suspicious downloads or peer-to-peer and not using encryption unless logging into their bank."

Technically proficient people will always find a way around how this will be monitored. We could just hope that they grow up and stop stealing from people but "free" is addictive especially when they convince themselves that their theft is really some moralistic crusade to liberate creative people (let their bosses "liberate" them from their salary before they take it upon themselves to "liberate" me from mine).

That's one of the arguments against the bill, that it's so obviously set up to fail and is just a step to the Government being well placed to demand an end to encryption on net traffic.

"I suppose it might be worth subscribing to something like Napster and just running streaming music all the time."

You don't need to subscribe to anyone there are plenty of sites out there that stream music for free ( and systems that you can download free (without adware/ spyware that will capture it to you mp3 ) and a lot of the movie and tv show sites are either already offering streaming or are moving towards this process, so truthfully nobody actually needs to get 'caught' nowadays.

That's why this is so stupid, the only people who are going to be caught are the kids who can't be bothered to stay ahead or who don't know how too.

The modern equivalent of recording from the radio onto a cassette, is to lay your mobile phone on the loudspeakers of your parents car as the car radio plays the latest hit, and record it as a video, I have noticed. So much cooler and more retro than clicking copy and paste.

Runs into the familiar problem of having to cut the recording before the dj starts speaking.

Open Rights Group

And some more information on what this bill can stop you doing.

here

atlantis - thanks for the reminder about bits of software... if I had a 6+ Mbps connection again, I'd be able to use some free software called RadioGrabber...

That is an application which allows multiple radio services to be streamed simultaneously, and it notes the names of artists coming from the radio station player stream too, so it saves each piece of audio into separate MP3s with the artist names as filenames.

Bit of good news in amongst the bad

Also, well done Talk Talk

O2 have also had a say

I got a response from Virgin on Twitter saying
"At present our corporate and public affairs teams are reviewing the bill, as soon as we know more we will let you know."

So will let you know if I get a response.

If people don't want to watch the #debill or #deact tags on Twitter, then I'm retweeting the most interesting/informative/funny tweets. (kalokimallow)

Another person to watch on twitter is glynwintle who kept those of us who couldn't watch the streams up to date on what was said in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

Be Internet are joining in too. Hopefully more ISP's will be saying the same as Talk Talk and Be.

Data protection acts says hands off our details!

Sorry for the multiple posts.

38 Degrees on what to do next

Perhaps the "noise factor" shortly before the election will hit a high enough level that whichever party / parties form a government, a rethink will be considered essential because with the use of Twitter, FaceBook and so on, even without the Number 10 Petitions website being in limbo, the politicians will understand that thousands of people are unhappy.

I don't know what porion of university students will have given it any thought but they are probably a large enough group of potential participants who (a) could vote and (b) are more in tune with Twitter etc.

As I'm twice your age, I don't claim to be "in tune" with what's best in terms of getting the message across, and know that in election terms it isn't (or ought not be) a vote winner.

However, in terms of democracy (or lack thereof) it should serve as an example to young and old about how policy making is in need of change, and MPs should not consider themselves suitably hidden away in ivory towers, but are now under the spotlight.

As a cruel child with a magnifying glass can focus some (sun)light onto an ant and shorten it's lifetime, internet users can put their 'magnifying glass' on any MPs and hasten their demise (at least in credibility - I mean no physical harm to them!)...

So it is perhaps time that the new intake of MPs note what the public think, even more than the Whips, and take heed (as the whips alone cannot get them re-elected).

We need to let as many people as possible know about the way this was handle, not just the geek network! lol

That's why I'm hoping to get more people on MumsNet to listen, this is meant to be the MN election after all!

I think this is probably the first time so many people have watched the process of passing a bill, hopefully that will have some effect too.

There's a petition here to make lobbying more transparent, hopefully that will help give the power back to the voters. Was over 5,000 when I last looked

I can think of a few things where the numbers on MN could 'do good' if they spotted items.

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to get any idea of how many people just 'lurk' and never post. Hopefully some of those who don't post would (if feeling enthusiastic /cross enough) get into gear and sign some of the petitions or e-mail MPs.

I suppose some of these threads would be better in the Politics area, where they won't be completely buried by dozens of other threads!

Tjere is a petition here to repeal the Digital Economy Act