The government is as clueless as the music industry about the Internet
Posted on 10th Apr 2010 at 10:48 by Antony Leather with 43 comments
So the Digital Economy bill has largely been passed here in the UK (except for a few loose ends). It's been a topic of conversation in countless online forums and indeed here in the office.
However, while there's something positive to be said for wanting to reduce piracy, and for the government at least taking an interest in the Internet, I'm not the only one to think the process by which this bill has been created, debated and passed into law is extremely worrying.
In one case, a list of 42 clauses were discussed and agreed upon in less than five minutes (that's one every 7.1 seconds). Even if the people involved in the debate were web experts (and let's face it, they have been known to think the IP in IP address stands for 'intellectual property'), five minutes is no where near enough time to properly debate that kind of information.
Watching any of the extremely sparsely attended debates on the TV and you could see politicians with simply woeful technical knowledge passing law that really depends on technical issues - for instance, as you probably know, if you use your net connection for pirating copyrighted material, that connection can ultimately be suspended - so what about shared connections? Some MPs did raise this (well done Fiona MacTaggart, for this speech in particular) but others thought it was impossible to crack your average wireless router's security, and weren't at all concerned about the fact that not everyone is tech-savvy enough to even make sure their wireless internet connection is protected.
The severe lack of knowledgeable on behalf of most MPs and the way the Digital Economy Bill has been passed - rammed through on the orders of the whips, right at the end of this Parliamentary session - is damaging, offensive and in some cases disturbing. It proves one thing: our politicians have very little understanding or even a regard for how the Internet works, how important it is and what its needs are.
The issues the UK faces are as wide ranging as they are important. Take speed for example; in January, it was reported that the UK ranks 26th in the world for broadband speed and even more optimistic data don't put us in the top 10.
A majority of ISPs have speed or download caps even if you're lucky enough to live near an exchange. In a time of public spending cuts, it seems unlikely this situation will be improved any time soon.
The list is pretty long, but the lack of interest and understanding is, amazingly enough, mirrored elsewhere. The music industry. It all kicked off big time with a little program created by a student at Northeastern University in Boston in 1999. Shawn Fanning's file sharing program, Napster, took the Internet by storm but the music industry completely and utterly failed to recognise the enormity of the problem. When it did eventually go on the defensive, it was far too late and far too aggressive.
Critically though, it totally failed to take advantage of the fact that people were actually quite partial to getting music online in favour of the high street and 11 years after Napster was doing the rounds, we still don't have a legal music download service that's proved as popular. Spotify might change that, but it's not available in the US, and while iTunes is good for some it's tricky to use with many MP3 players in addition to being rather bloated. Still at least Apple saw the light and on 24 February 2010, the iTunes store delivered its 10 billionth song download.
Instead of grabbing the bull by the horns and taking interest in something other than money and its existing business model, the music industry decided to ignore the problem. Instead of getting creative and leaving its outdated ways behind it, it was and still is content to let other people such as Apple, Spotify and The Pirate Bay sort it out.
I salute those MPs who didn't turn up in protest but in my view Parliament, by not properly debating the Digital Economy bill, is showing similar disregard and lack of knowledge of our online world. What makes this so infuriating is that it's a difficult subject and a solution has evaded everyone for over a decade, yet when it comes down to actually make decisions on the really important stuff, the government's attitude stinks. As it's the body with both hands on the reigns of progress, this is very worrying indeed.
However, while there's something positive to be said for wanting to reduce piracy, and for the government at least taking an interest in the Internet, I'm not the only one to think the process by which this bill has been created, debated and passed into law is extremely worrying.
In one case, a list of 42 clauses were discussed and agreed upon in less than five minutes (that's one every 7.1 seconds). Even if the people involved in the debate were web experts (and let's face it, they have been known to think the IP in IP address stands for 'intellectual property'), five minutes is no where near enough time to properly debate that kind of information.
The House of Commons during a debate on the Digital Economy Bill - not exactly a full house
Watching any of the extremely sparsely attended debates on the TV and you could see politicians with simply woeful technical knowledge passing law that really depends on technical issues - for instance, as you probably know, if you use your net connection for pirating copyrighted material, that connection can ultimately be suspended - so what about shared connections? Some MPs did raise this (well done Fiona MacTaggart, for this speech in particular) but others thought it was impossible to crack your average wireless router's security, and weren't at all concerned about the fact that not everyone is tech-savvy enough to even make sure their wireless internet connection is protected.
The severe lack of knowledgeable on behalf of most MPs and the way the Digital Economy Bill has been passed - rammed through on the orders of the whips, right at the end of this Parliamentary session - is damaging, offensive and in some cases disturbing. It proves one thing: our politicians have very little understanding or even a regard for how the Internet works, how important it is and what its needs are.
The issues the UK faces are as wide ranging as they are important. Take speed for example; in January, it was reported that the UK ranks 26th in the world for broadband speed and even more optimistic data don't put us in the top 10.
A majority of ISPs have speed or download caps even if you're lucky enough to live near an exchange. In a time of public spending cuts, it seems unlikely this situation will be improved any time soon.
The list is pretty long, but the lack of interest and understanding is, amazingly enough, mirrored elsewhere. The music industry. It all kicked off big time with a little program created by a student at Northeastern University in Boston in 1999. Shawn Fanning's file sharing program, Napster, took the Internet by storm but the music industry completely and utterly failed to recognise the enormity of the problem. When it did eventually go on the defensive, it was far too late and far too aggressive.
Critically though, it totally failed to take advantage of the fact that people were actually quite partial to getting music online in favour of the high street and 11 years after Napster was doing the rounds, we still don't have a legal music download service that's proved as popular. Spotify might change that, but it's not available in the US, and while iTunes is good for some it's tricky to use with many MP3 players in addition to being rather bloated. Still at least Apple saw the light and on 24 February 2010, the iTunes store delivered its 10 billionth song download.
Instead of grabbing the bull by the horns and taking interest in something other than money and its existing business model, the music industry decided to ignore the problem. Instead of getting creative and leaving its outdated ways behind it, it was and still is content to let other people such as Apple, Spotify and The Pirate Bay sort it out.
I salute those MPs who didn't turn up in protest but in my view Parliament, by not properly debating the Digital Economy bill, is showing similar disregard and lack of knowledge of our online world. What makes this so infuriating is that it's a difficult subject and a solution has evaded everyone for over a decade, yet when it comes down to actually make decisions on the really important stuff, the government's attitude stinks. As it's the body with both hands on the reigns of progress, this is very worrying indeed.
43 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyThe fact that they went against the recommendations of expert reports in places as well makes a mockery of even having those reports done in the first place! Oh well, nothing new there...
the treasury has advised against many thing GB has pushed through regardless. And that is ignoring accountants pointing out flaws in many of the taxes he introduced as chancellor. This is meant as an explanation of my comment above, and I do not mean it to spark off a tangential debate.
there should be a law against such a low number of MP's passing ANY bill as all it shows is the majority of them are not interested.
if they where interested. there would have been more than 25% in attendance.
its a farce.
I mean we can do it. We've had evil games teaching us how to kill people all our lives.
If you pirate music beware as everything will attempt to aquire you
Beginning of 5th paragraph
Considering that google can be loosely classed as a torrent search engine if you use it the right way then YouTube probably is considered piracy by the copyright rats
I don't. It sounds noble on paper, but turning up and voting against the bill would have sent a much stronger message. Saying they aren't turning up as a protest is really just a cop out because they are too apathetic to the issue and just want to garner favor.
I dunno if you guys watch the apprentice over there.. but the corrupt governor of chicago (guy who tried to sell obamas senate seat after he was elected president) was on there for charity.. the guy is a total imbecile- he couldn't type or even turn on a laptop, he couldn't answer a freaking telephone! I mean how the hell do you become governor and be so technically illiterate
he could just spin words when he talked which made him look like a psychopath basically.. but that's the kinds of people we have in government running things.. they can run their hands under the bathroom stall for sex and talk a good game (well bush couldn't even do that)
but ask them what 9 divided by 3 is and you'll get a deer caught in the headlights
The problem was, as an economist astutely observed, that they forgot what business they were actually in. The railroad industry was not in the business of trains and track; it was in the business of transport. The movie industry was not in the business of film but in the business of entertainment. But they forgot that: they focused too much on how they did it than what it was they did, and got complacent. When their business came under threat by competitors they clung onto doing what they knew rather than learning to do what the customer wants.
The music and video industry is now facing the same problem. Instead of regarding piracy as a crime (or really, a competitor), they should see it as an expression of consumer demand; a market to get into and make money out of. But they have been successful in the past, and as Andy Grove from Intel says: success breeds pride; pride breeds arrogance; then complacency, then downfall. Only the paranoid survive.
The UK government is incompetent and corrupt. It rallies to the anxious bleating of big industry and it does so in the most stupid way possible. Moreover they are old. They don't grok the internet or technology; they are reminiscent of the old male misogynist dinosaur Tories of the 70's resisting removing VAT on feminine hygiene products because (in the words of one idiot) "soap and water suffice".
6th May, people. Vote wisely.
**** them!!
Is it just me that sees the contradiction here? iTunes has clearly proved incredibly popular.
It has, but a hell of a lot more music has been downloaded using file sharing and that's before you take into account other legal sources too. iTunes is still far from all-encompassing.
Has anyone seen the number of MP's in the house when they were debating the arguably more important finance bill? Its pathetic. Especially when they go on and on and on and on and on and on - not-really-getting-to-any-point....... and on etc.
One positive is that the parliament channel acts as a very good way to lull yourself to sleep - especially if you suffer from insomnia.
+1
Hmmm, thought not.
I can't see any problem with this at all. It seems the geeks are just annoyed because they might actually have to pay for something!
And it appears the Labour government is clueless about networking - or at least they don't know the difference between a bit and a byte.
On the privacy issue; there are ~18.5 million households in the UK, most of which will have an internet connection. This is in addtion to the thousands of businesses/services/education facilites etc. which have huge numbers of workstations connected to the internet and you are worried that somebody is watching you? Get real.
Obviously I'm not suggesting that all the Labour MPs who turned up to push it through (I suspect mainly at the behest of the whips) had actually read and understood more than a small portion of it!
lacuna: for what it's worth, I did lobby my MPs (both my MP at home, and Roberta Blackman-Woods in Durham), but only heard anything from Vince Cable. I got a very interesting reply from Dr. Cable, saying that the Lib Dems wouldn't support it unless it was heavily amended, and to their credit, all the Lib Dem MPs who turned up voted against it, but I was disappointed that he didn't bother to vote at all.
actually yes i did write to my local (labour) MP but heard no reply from him
this and a few other things have me as a genuinely undecided leaning towards conservatives atm
Owning or renting, there's no difference (the government don't own it either) as I'm paying for a private connection. You lease your phone line too, does that mean you'd be happy for your neighbour to listen in to all your calls too, because you don't own the line?
For all intents and purposes, if you pay for something, while you're paying, you own it.
When the two are compared in terms of punishment for misuse the 'unfairness' of the 3 strike policy for the internet seems trivial. You could, by process of accumulation, lose your driving licence by speeding or suffer an immediate ban for a serious offence. The additional fines and costs make this far more severe than just losing your connection.
This law was brought about because we, as a populous, apparently do not have the ability to control ourselves when it comes to downloading copyrighted material.
After a while, obviously it's going to be noticable.
Similar enough to constantly downloading music/films/games/cars illegally?
Oh, and what stops you from getting "banned" from the internet if your computer gets infected with a virus, and downloads the material to distribute to themselves?
The problem is first of all enforcement and classification of said crime, not all P2P sharing is a crime firstly and the thing is we can't really classify it anyhow.
At any rate, the out of proportion for theft of INTELLECTUAL property is insane as it is.
Because that analogy isn't set in reality, nor does it have sufficient similarities to the case in hand.
I chose to compare the internet and the public highway because they are both forms of national infrastructure that the public can lease the right to use.
Okay, how about if you had 3 zombies then?
It'd have to be a fair sized lockup that you leased though. I mean, if one was a boomer that hadn't boomed, that's going to cost an arm and a leg to store. Mind, it wouldn't be there for long as I guess it wouldn't be long before it did boom and the bile would surely seep under the door. Hmm..
It isn't? Since when? The 3,594 people who have read the "The weapons you would use at your last stand against a legion of zombies" thread and the 1,634 people who have been reading and listening to the " The songs you would play at your last stand against a legion of zombies" thread as well as the 8,733 people who have been reading the "What's your Zombie Plan?" thread are not going to be impressed if you have scientific proof that zombies don't exist.
Oh, also theres a guy looking for you, he says he's a lawyer from something called Umbrella Corp?
Edit : I just realised this forum is seriously into Zombies!
Road tax didn't even exist when German tank rolled into Poland. VED covers your car not the road you drive on. The roads are paid for either from general taxation or local council tax depending on the road. The Zombie analogy was more grounded than this fantasy that car tax is used entirely for the upkeep of the moonscape that is the average British road.
Please make sure your analogies are correct, the road network is paid for from general taxation there for it is completely different from the leasing of a private phone line or broadband connection from a private company.
/pedantry.
For your general ignorance Road Tax was stopped in 1937, before WWII broke out.
The only car analogy I can see work is when you lease a car (like you lease a phone line): the car isn't your property, but you'd be pretty pissed if the leasing company went through your wallet whenever it's in the car; or if you'd have to have a body search every time you wanted to enter the car (just to make sure you're not going to blow it up).
I pay for my internet connection (and DRM-free media). I don't want my taxes (as they do now in France) to be used to spy on what I do online.
If the internet was 99% pedophiles exchanging pictures, I would agree to surveillance - now it's 99% normal guys jacking it to adult pictures, so there's no need to treat us all like criminals (serial masturbators, though...). As a decent, law-abiding, tax-overpaying citizen, I find this really ****ign insulting, and I'd rather have a daily kick in the balls from Ass of the Republic Sarkozy himself.
1. internet is invented by the people for the people! and i dont mean what was created for in the beginning connecting 2 computers blah blah! i mean this is one huge network created by people! therefore i fail to see how the government has any rights on it... but that's completely different story!
2. I do not understand why people continue to believe is for their own good? its not! i would very much would love for these people to share their address online so someone demonstrates how easy it is to frame you for downloading! this is done for the benefit of the companies... companies that obviously bribe lords and mp's and what not!
3. fences are meant to keep people in since they have never done a good job to keep people out! this ban is stupid and i hate to see taxes i pay go to such a waste! if i want to download something i will.... get a VPN encrypt and download as much as i want... HA-HA-HA! just made all their debate pointless!
4. car tax and internet is unbelievably far fetched analogy... this just goes to prove how short-sighted people can be! internet is the internet and nothing else! there are different ways there and these ways have to regulate laws! you cant simply copy and paste laws to accommodate this and that! if it was that easy we might as well copy and paste from the beginning! murder = murder-------- 500 years later----- pirated song = death sentence!
this is a classic problem! there is NO WAY stooping the internet and preventing people from downloading one way or another people that do not want to pay... simply WONT PAY! its irrelevant if you just opened a kick ass factory for horse shoes! WE DRIVE CARS! these businesses need to grow up and move on!
for the rest of you guys:
http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/index
Bindi Edit: Corrected all your spelling mistakes for you.
the loophole could be as simple as saying- I'm innocent.. enough good people get banned from their isps there will be a backlash on the law itself
this law could also be used to damage a business.. trojan into the business computers and get them to infringe on a copyright.. I've always laughed at how the music and movie industry do things.. there's no way for them to truely know if the offender is just a poor sod on the botnet
I was wondering when it would get down to the isp level as they see everything..
it's the only way to stop piracy really.. but they also have to make a living, it's not in their best interest to lose their customers.. and you can see the problem with innocents- it's one of those laws that looks great on paper and would only work in utopia
Are you sugesting that someone biulds a cs sorce map of the houses of parlement
not me
someone nealy got arested for
making a map of there school
just a Side note to stop me double posting:
anything that is put on the Internet will be made public
if the govoment trys to block a site I will take less than a week to have the site acsessable again.
This has already happened when one country blocked fackbook and within a week a total incription progam had been made to get round it
Being pedantic about how people colloquially refer to 'VED' does not impair or invalidate the analogy. It is irrelevant where the money comes from for the maintenance of the highway, only that you have to pay to use your car on the highway. I pay a fixed amount for line rental, is this amount directly proportional to cost of line maintenance etc?
The source of the funds is exactly the point! The roads are paid by every one who pays any tax at all, yes even the local junky who only buys fags is paying for the road. Your least line is a contract between a corp and an individual not using a publicly owned resource, you may remember a government privatised the telephone network some time ago. You DO NOT pay to use the highway in any way (well except the M6 Toll).
Next, who pays for the policing of this public network? Ah yes that's right the public to ensure the roads are safe for the use of said public. The government uses tax to ensure the laws they enact are enforced. In the case of the ISP's the government are passing expensive laws and then passing the cost on to the company hardly unprecedented but completely unrelated to the road network. Equally neither the roads or the postal service are routinely for the benefit of some other corporation or special interest group.
some time ago a bill called "rippa" or something like this was pushed forwards banning any type of encryption.... you could get arested if you didnt tell the passwords to a policeman that requested it! so what naturaly happened the guy that was pushing for the bill got a mail with encryption on it someone called the police and accused him... later that day he called again and told them the truth!
the problem though is this idiots in westminister do not use computers this also why they vote on such stupid laws!