Stories

Web-blocking returns

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The government has been circulating revised web-blocking powers for the Digital Economy Bill with industry and activist groups, and The Register has seen a draft. This version is believed to have won the backing of the Tories, and could end up in a Second Reading. The revised Clause 18 we’ve seen is a hybrid of … Read more

Lords: Analogue radio must die

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Digital radio isn’t great and the public doesn’t want it, but you’re going to get it anyway. So recommends the House of Lords Communications Committee today. 90 per cent of the UK listens to radio, and 94 per cent of listeners are happy with what they’ve got. The Lords accept most of the points made … Read more

Pirates and the politics of spite

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If “digital rights” becomes reduced to gesture politics, only one group can win: the one with the biggest, boldest, daftest gesture

A clear winner is emerging from the Digital Economy Bill – and it’s the UK Pirate Party. The penny only really dropped for me yesterday, after the Open Rights Group’s big demonstration at Westminster.

“What was all that about, Andrew?” someone asked me in the pub afterwards. He’d been at the Commons for a meeting, and walked past the demo too. The confusion was understandable: the ORG’s clever wheeze of blank placards and a silent protest meant anyone walking past had no idea what it was about. The glorious exceptions were a beautiful banner and a large flag from the Pirate Party. The logo is very cool, as you know.

As an exercise in communicating, the Pirates were the only success of the event. At least the logo will have got on TV, and made an impression with passers-by.

Nobody particularly likes the Bill, but as long as the sheer joy of filesharing remains an illicit one, and not part of the legitimate music market place, then Piracy will have a lustre, and the Party will be in with a chance. You may find them childish, ignorant and selfish – as I do – but they have a simple message that eludes other digital campaigners. But I think the Pirates may flourish for a few other reasons. I’ll try and explain what they are.

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Greatest Living Briton gets £30m for ‘web science’

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As an alliance of the desperate, this one takes some beating. The Greatest Living Briton (Sir Timothy Berners Lee) has been thrown £30m of taxpayers’ money for a new institute to research “web science”.

Meanwhile the Prime Minister waxed lyrical today about the semantic web – how “data” would replace files, with machine speaking unto machine in a cybernetic paradise.

It’s really a confluence of two groups of people with a shared interest in bureaucracy.

Computer Science is no longer about creating graduates who can solve engineering challenges, but about generating work for the academics themselves. The core expertise of a CompSci department today is writing funding applications. And the Holy Grail for these paper chasers is a blank cheque for work which can be conducted without scrutiny for years to come. With its endless committees defining standards (eg, “ontologies”, “folksonomies”) that no one will ever use, the “Semantic Web” fits the bill perfectly.

Of course, most web data is personal communication that happens to have been recorded. Most of the rest is spam, generated by robots, or cut-and-paste material ‘curated’ by the unemployed or poor graduates – another form of spam, really. The enterprise is doomed. But nobody’s told the political class.

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The problem with ‘substitution’ studies…

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A study for the international chamber of commerce reckons 2.7 million jobs have been lost since 2004 in Europe because of unlicensed internet downloads, and warns economic losses could treble to €32bn by 2015. The report is backed by trade unions, including the TUC.

The work was led by Patrice Geffon, an economist at Paris Dauphine University, for consultants Tera. It uses the WIPO definition of creative industries, including software, databases and printing as core jobs, and support and consultancy for example as non core jobs. It’s likely to strengthen calls for legal measures to deter downloaders, since picking up unlicensed music, movies and software is currently largely pain and risk free.

“Stemming the rising tide of digital piracy should be at the top of the agenda of policy makers,” the authors conclude.

But it’s not going to be without controversy. Debate over such studies focuses on the net substitution effect – the degree to which a digital download substitutes for a genuine purchase, minus any positive effect of spending on a legitimate good which might not otherwise have taken place. This ratio varies significantly across various types of goods.

For digital music, most academic studies put the figure at 1:10: for every ten CD downloads, the consumer typically forgoes one legitimate purchase. This is significantly lower than the 1:1 ratio some music industry figures insist upon. But still it’s a net negative effect.

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Panorama on the Digital Economy Bill

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BBC1’s flagship current affairs program was devoted to file sharing last night, and contained something to piss off a range of lobbyists.

Usually when this happens, BBC producers often conclude “they’re doing something right”, and pour themselves a large, congratulatory drink. They shouldn’t, because while the program succeeded in trying to be “fair”, it failed in its larger mission to present the issue properly – something we already understand.

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BBC: Grasp the high-speed runaway cloud nettle

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Hats off to BBC Online’s Silicon Valley correspondent Maggie Shiels, who on her dot.maggie blog offers some defining purple prose for the new era in computing.

Attending the RSA conference, Maggie reports on the race to offer ‘cloud computing’ services:

ensuring security is not a “Johnny come lately” idea and that the clock was ticking for the industry to grasp the nettle before it was too late.

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LibDems drop net blocking, blame activists

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LibDem peers agreed to drop their controversial net-blocking clause from the Digital Economy Bill after the government advised that the proposal would be legally unenforceable. It means the Bill now heads for the Commons with one of the key copyright infringement countermeasures up in the air, although it’s likely to be a return to Plan A (ministerial superpowers) rather than judicial oversight by the Courts, as the LibDems’ Plan B proposed.

The original Section 17 was written to deal with music and movie business concerns that a third of infringing material was being downloaded via cyberlockers, such as RapidShare. It gave the Minister considerable powers to order new countermeasures – extending copyright law on the hoof.

A clearly exasperated Lord Clement Jones, who had tabled the replacement Clause 17, said he’d done so in response to the concerns of internet activists, such as the ORG, who had objected to the ‘Ministerial Superpowers’.

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