People closely following the Amendment 120A debate at the Lib Dem Spring Conference will already know that the Emergency Motion was carried unanimously (apart from one vote I understand).
I am reporting it here for the record and following on from yesterday’s short post announcing it. You can read a bit more on the Lib Dem website here.
The Digital Economy Bill is going right to the wire I feel.
An Emergency Motion against the Digital Economy Bill amendment 120A has been tabled at the Liberal Democrats Spring Conference in Manchester this weekend.
Obviously I’ll keep us all updated but it may make next week quite interesting on the Parliamentary front if the motion is carried.
The music industry thinks its prospects within the Digital Economy Bill are still good to middling with concerns over website blocking voiced by MI5 seen as a potential scupper.
A weekly newsletter sent by Music Industry representatives BPI to stakeholders such as Sony Music, Warner Brothers and EMI Music also discusses the results of a TalkTalk sponsored survey that finds that “71% of 18 – 34 year olds would continue to infringe copyright, in spite of the Bill provisions, and would use “undetectable methods” to do so”.
There is also the suggestion that MI5 might have helped pay for the survey!
Virgin Media Business threw a terrific launch party at the RIBA premises in Portland Place, London last night. Most of the ISP industry was there in one shape or form.
The hour’s worth of presentation (no such thing as a free launch party) wasn’t too onerous and the speech by rugby world cup-winning coach Sir Clive Woodward was entertaining – ask me how many F words he used when you see me next.
It might be my naivety but I was surprised nay shocked at the ISPA Council meeting today. You must read all this post.
The informed betting is that the General Election is going to be on May 6th. The betting for the dissolution of Parliament is either the 1st or 8th April. Normally notice given is 6 weeks but I’m told that because the Labour Party is (allegedly) short of funds they only want a 4 week election campaign – eat yer heart out US of A. My bet is the 8th because they will all want a nice Easter break before the pitched battle to come.
The Government has confirmed that the Budget will be on 24th March (at 12.30pm for the detail minded – warm the TV up soon). Normally we might expect a week to be given for the media to digest and comment about what will presumably be a budget pitched to give us all as much of a feelgood factor as possible after the last year or two of financial hell/instability/crisis/disaster/nightmare/worry/prosperity (delete as appropriate).
News is distributed so quickly these days (thanks to us ISPs) that by the time us ISPs finish doing the day job and get around to writing up the blog it almost seems like old news already. However in the interest of completeness (ish) of content on trefor.net on the subject of the Digital Economy Bill I’m going to post it anyway.
Following on from my comments last week regarding the outrage amongst ISPs over clause 120A the industry has united and written a letter published in the FT this morning. The signatories are a roll call of the heaviest hitters in the internet in the UK and include ISPA – drafts were circulated to us for comment on Monday.
It will be simply scandalous if 120A proceeds after this. Coincidentally and as a bit of an aside one of the consequences of 120A would be potentially to slow down the aforementioned lightening distribution of said news. Half the websites concerned could be blocked!
To the letter
Most people won’t have given much thought as to how their email gets from A to B or how that video arrives from YouTube. It just comes down the broadband connection which is plugged into the router next to the phone (or somewhere like that). Right?
Well today the worlds biggest router manufacturer, Cisco, announced their latest and greatest product. It isn’t something that you will want to plug into your phone line though because it would take up most of the living room and there wouldn’t be enough room left for the sofa.
It would also be a bit of an overkill because this router, the CRS-3, is powerful enough to handle up to 322 Terabits1 per second, which is roughly a hundred million times faster than the average UK broadband connection speed!
In the context of the debate going on over copyright protection in the Digital Economy Bill there is an interesting event happening tomorrow night at the Performing Rights Society in London.
Entitled ”Is Pre-Release Killing Our Business?” tomorrow’s discussion is centred around the fact that in order to raise awareness the music industry conducts promotional campaigns for up to three months before a CD is released. This stimulates demand for a product that is not yet available and it only takes one promo copy of a CD to be pirated and loaded onto a P2P network for that CD to be freely available which of course eats into sales at launch.
Because of this industry bodies including ERA and the MMF are calling for abolition of pre-release windows in their entirety. Tomorrow night’s speakers including the BBC’s Head of Music for Radio 1 George Ergatoudis, Martin Talbot, MD of the Official Charts Company, Ben Drury of 7 Digital and Emily MacKay of the NME.
It just goes to show that the whole fight against music piracy is something that has to be conducted across many fronts.
More details on the Music Tank website here.
It strikes me that there are so many discussion points/arguments surrounding the Copyright aspects of the Digital Economy Bill that it will be worth collating them all in an easy to access format – watch this space.
You have to ask what’s the point!?
It’s so exciting when you come across announcements such as that made by the Government this week saying that they are attempting to get over 7 million people who can’t get online today, access to the internet. By 2014!
This is of course great news!
The plan is being underpinned by funding in a number of areas (more…)
The ISP industry is up in arms today as the House of Lords yesterday rushed through ill considered amendment 120A to the Digital Economy Bill proposing to allow rights holders to serve notice on ISPs to block access to sites considered by them (rightsholders) to have illegal content – music, movies, software etc.
This is a huge issue. Rightsholders would be able to ask ISPs to block sites without a court order. If an ISP refuses and the rightsholder subsequently succeeds in getting a court injunction then the ISP will have to pay costs.
