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!
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
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.
The Digital Economy Debate has generated a flurry of responses today – no doubt people getting messages out of the way before the rugby this weekend!
Firstly the UK hotel industry, via its mouthpiece the British Hospitality Association, has issued a press release expressing grave concern that their members could have their internet access cut off because of the illegal activities of naughty guests.
The miscreants will of course have long checked out by the time the long arm of the law reached out to behind the reception desk.
From personal experience (of having hundreds of hotels as customers and not of Torrenting whilst staying at them) hotels are particularly prone to guests taking advantage of the internet in the room to download material via P2P.
A long long time ago, way before Timico, I worked for Mitel who had at that time something like 80% of the UK hotels using their phone systems. Research in those days suggested that 90% of all internet surfing out of hotels was to pornographic websites. It was more unusual for people to have broadband at home and access from the office was strictly filtered.
So the BHA now joins the Educational system in wanting immunity from prosecution under the Digital Economy Bill. McDonalds will be next. At this rate a large part of the UK broadband estate will be seeking immunity from the Bill.
Also speaking out today is Parliament’s own Joint Select Committee on Human Rights which says the Government’s response to the problem of illegal file-sharing in the Digital Economy Bill may have created over-broad powers.
Andrew Dismore MP, Chair of the Committee, said: “Illegal file sharing is itself a breach of important rights, but the concern we have with this Bill is that it lacks detail. It has been difficult, even in the narrow area we have focussed on, to get a clear picture of the scope and impact of the provisions. The internet is constantly creating new challenges for policy-makers but that cannot justify ill-defined or sweeping legislative responses, especially when there is the possibility of restricting freedom of expression or the privacy of individual users.”
At least people are starting to shout louder. Andrew Dismore MP seems to have his head screwed on.
If you want to keep up to speed on the debate in the Lords go here.
I was talking to some people today about what type of broadband they had. One of them surprisingly said she didn’t have broadband. I found this astonishing. However the truth came out when she told me she just used next door’s which was unsecured.
Whatever you think of the morals of this it is a real life pointer as to the problems of proof when it comes to accusing a broadband owner of illegal downloading.
I present here, for your delectation, the winner of the “dontdisconnectus” “Sing our Petition” competition. The opposition to the Digital Economy Bill is building but it has some way to go yet I feel.
