The heavily lobbied Digital Economy Bill, part of Gordon Brown’s Digital Britain strategy, has been powered through Parliament in the annual wash up. Perhaps it has been intentionally kept below the radar due to the immense opposition to it, although one could ask whether MPs even knew about it given the disgracefully low turnout.
Read more on Contentious Digital Economy Bill passed but only a third of MPs voted ‘yes’…
It turns out there may have been something behind the recent and sudden shift in timescale for the Government’s proposed anti-file sharing measures.
I may be miles behind on this given that the Sunday Times reported it a few weeks ago, but it appears on the face of it that Handy Mandy is behind it all. According to the ST, Mandelson had dinner with the boss of Dreamworks, David Geffen and the Prince of Darkness returned to press the Government into tougher and more rapid action on blocking file sharing.
Megalomaniacal psychopath
Today it seems our illustrious Government have decided to bring forward proposed legislation to block file sharing protocols on the internet.
Previously scheduled to come in in 2012, there is now some kind of urgency to get the laws in place. No, I’ve no idea why either, but I’m sure large amounts of cash were involved.
More ISP madness and lobby group loving!
I’ve just read on TorrentFreak that another UK ISP, Karoo, has been disconnecting users on request of third parties such as the BPI.
I’d not heard of Karoo before, but it is owned and operated by Kingston Communications in the Hull area. Kingston is, if I recall, run by Hull City Council and was wholly owned by them until they floated it on the LSE. According to the article on TorrentFreak and accompanying one on the BBC website, Karoo have been partaking in some quite unpleasant practises in relation to allegations of distribution of intellectual property for which the user is not the copyright holder. Whilst Virgin Media sends letters to its users on behalf of the BPI, Karoo just disconnects you because you’re deemed to be instantly guilty. What’s worse is the only way you can get your connection back is to sign a form admitting guilt, and in Hull there is only one ISP – Karoo.
So, Lord Carter today will be announcing a £3billion “Digital Britain” project for delivering broadband internet to every home in the UK as well as plans for “combatting” piracy.
Their benchmark for bandwidth is 2Mbit which, yes, compared to dialup is fast but compared to all broadband connections in the UK at the moment is the slowest and is certainly not a speed that will provide good content delivery for much longer than a couple of years.
In some countries such as Sweden and South Korea, the norm is 100MBit with some homes able to have 1000MBit. Investment was placed in better, future proof technology and they are benefitting from the foresight of their Governments by having the means to deliver high speed data into almost any home.
In the UK we are stuck with DSL: if you can get a BT telephone line – which everywhere other than extreme rural cases can – the chances are you can easily get 2MBit already and have been able to for 4 or 5 years. Standard broadband speeds in the UK are between 8 and 20MBit depending on what you want to pay for. Yes, there are a few rural villages that consist of a few giant farmhouses, mansions and barn conversions that are so far away from urbanisation that they can only get dialup, but having seen some sob stories from these people about it my conclusion was that they probably have enough money to buy the entire internet.
So where’s the story?
The story, I believe, is that the “broadband in every home” chunk of the forthcoming statement is a whitewash for the underlying business deal that I suspect has occurred between the music industry lobby groups and the Government in relation to the other part of the story.
Remember I said it would cost £3billion for the broadband project? Well, that money has not been allocated by the Government, which means somebody else is paying for it and I believe it’s the music industry.
But what would be in it for the music industry? Simple really, the license to continue to bully people into believing that downloading a few tunes turns them into a criminal with the percieved backing of the Government and Police.
I would even go further and suggest that these internet connections that the Government is wanting to put into homes would come with a caveat – that the music industry can monitor them and can freely acquire personal details and surfing habits of users in order to build a case against them.
Currently this isn’t possible, because ISPs are not allowed to disclose details of their customers due to the Data Protection Act. Most of them do not want to either. The only reason anyone would even want to pay for a premium 20 or 50 Megabit connection is to download movies, music and games and if ISPs decided to hound them about it, they’d either leave or cut their subscription to a cheaper one.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Media is “leading the way” on this so called anti piracy jaunt. Given their love affair with the BPI I was not shocked to hear that they are now promising to disconnect people that they percieve to be downloading copyrighted content.
We already know that the BPI crawls torrent sites, tries to download complete files from people and then sends a threat to Virgin who pass it on to their customer. I have had one myself, and due to my own anger at that and Virgin Media’s throttling policy I am now an O2 Broadband customer. I suspect this is how Virgin will continue to determine someone that is using their network for distribution of copyrighted content, but given their acceptance of spying services such as Phorm I would not be surpised if their statement that they will not spy on users is a complete lie.
In fact, Virgin said they wouldn’t disconnect users for file sharing less than a year ago but a quick wave of the wallet from Universal and they have gone back on that promise.
Thankfully they are the only ISP as yet that is persecuting its users in this way and actually there are plenty of superior ISPs in terms of performance these days. When I phoned them to cancel I was told all other ISPs throttle like they do and they started offering TV packages and so on. I was leaving anyway.
As I said I am with O2 Broadband (also known as Bethere/Telefonica) now. I was told I’d get 13MBit down my phone line, and I get 13MBit so I am happy about that. I got about 14MBit with my 20MBit Virgin cable line. The big difference is that after 30 minutes of downloading on Virgin, they cut the bandwidth by 75% for the next five hours, completely nullifying the point of having a high speed “unlimited” connection.
Working it out, it appears that in any 5 and a half hour time bracket on Virgin Media, I was able to download about 10GB. 3GB in the first 30-40 mins and the rest across the next 5 hours. On O2 Broadband I can download 26GB in that time and the best bit is I’m paying four times less for it than I was for Virgin Media. Winner!
Once again the upper echelons of big business appear to be pushing through their own agendas in the House of Commons. No, it’s not cash for questions or cash for peerages this time.
No, following on from my last blog post, it’s the British Phonographic Industry again with its cash for laws. This self appointed, self serving music industry lobby group has in the last week or so managed to – in conjunction with the Government – pressure Internet Service Providers into sending threatening letters to people accused of illegal file sharing.
Essentially the BPI will be the judge and jury. They will be trawling torrents, getting IP addresses, looking up which ISP that IP address is controlled by and then instructing the ISP to send a threatening letter, however they refuse to disclose their methods so who really knows whether any of the data they are basing their accusations on is accurate?
Obviously due to data protection laws, ISPs are not allowed to disclose any private details of their customers to the BPI but personally it would not shock me in the least if they were found to be being pressured by BPI lawyers into doing this.
The pressure is mounting: the Government are considering allowing the BPI to obtain personal details of ISP customers without having to go to Court to get a Court Order to do so. So much for privacy and justice when a group of racketeers can determine whether or not you are guilty of something they themselves are accusing you of.
The Government and BPI want ISP’s to threaten to disconnect their customers but thus far no ISP has said they would be prepared to do this and Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse has said;
“I cannot foresee any circumstances in which we would voluntarily disconnect a customer’s account on the basis of a third party alleging a wrongdoing. We believe that a fundamental part of our role as an ISP is to protect the rights of our users to use the Internet as they choose. We will fight any challenge to the sanctity of this relationship with every legal option available to us.”
Well done Mr Dunstone!
ISPs are obviously affected by any possible legislation because if downloading music is driven underground and becomes difficult for the masses then people wont bother with the expensive premium high speed connections and would opt for the 1 or 2 megabit packages.
Multimurderer
John Hutton MP, the head of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and Culture Secretary Andy Burnham MP have also discussed the possibility of applying a tax on internet connections. The figure mentioned was approximately £30 per year and this tax would be channeled into the music business to make up for alleged ‘lost revenue’ due to downloading.
The self-serving culture of MPs is remarkably similar to the music industry and it’s lobby groups. Indeed, it wont come as much of a surprise that Andy Burnham is one of the MPs that voted against reforming MPs expenses.
Their intention for the download tax is clearly to subsidise the music industry and probably cream off a little for the Government itself, however I think the delicious irony of this idea is that it would be the stake through the heart of the music, film and game industry.
Who would buy a game, or an album or DVD when it could just be downloaded legally provided you paid £30 a year to the Government? All online music stores such as iTunes would be history yet CD sales would probably do a little better since they would be the source for people to rip their digital copy and share it.
It seems to have been overlooked in everything I have read that the BPI is just a private organisation that only exists because of music industry profits (5% of music income goes to the BPI). Why should I pay to subsidise an archaic business model? Why should I fund an ailing industry that cannot be bothered to reform itself, instead using its incredible financial might and completely farcical claims to press the Government into creating new laws to protect it?
The music industry has this in-built – but completely absurd – philosophy that people that download an album or a song would have bought the song if the download wasn’t available and as a result they feel they ‘lost revenue’. Is that what used to happen before the internet and peer-to-peer boom?
Of course not. People simply recorded tracks from the radio or taped CDs/vinyls that were borrowed from friends. With DAB digital radio and multiple digital recording media you could record a decent copy of a popular track from any radio station that broadcasts DAB.
This backwards step would ultimately mean that those smaller alternative bands or producers that have been virally advertised via the sharing of music would never be popular since radio stations don’t play that type of thing in general. Back to the old days of endless generic pop music and nothing else with a few moguls such as Pete Waterman sat at the top making millions from it.
Unfotunately with those in charge at the Government having no grasp of real scenarios and situations they take the bait of the BPI hook, line and sinker.
Safe and Legal
It’s often mentioned by BPI and British Music Rights spokespeople that the music industry wishes to ‘work with ISPs’ to create a ‘safe and legal’ system for downloading music. What? What on earth has any of that got to do with ISPs? It’s like demanding that electricity suppliers should work with home owners to improve the function of their dishwasher.
Did iTunes have to ‘work with ISPs’ in order to set itself up as the premier online source for legal music? No it didn’t. Unlike these self serving music lobbies, iTunes didn’t sit there accusing its demographic of being common criminals and instead set up a decent service. The only problem with it aside from relatively low quality (bitrate) of MP3 is Digital Rights Management, or DRM.
This draconian system was demanded by the big music industry companies and iTunes had to comply else it could not operate. DRM is an encryption system applied to media files which requires the supplier of the file (in this case iTunes) to supply the ‘key’ to decrypt the file to each playback device registered with them. As a result, Apple knows you can only play that track on the devices registered with them.
There are of course limitations on how many PC’s, iPods and so on that you can register with Apple and furthermore you are restricted to only iTunes compatible MP3 players (which according to Wikipedia totals just 5 different devices: iPod, iPhone and 3 Motorola mobile phones).
Unfortunately for the music industry, DRM only hurts ‘legal’ users so does not solve any of the issues that it was implemented for. Those that use torrents or newsgroups for downloading music wont be affected, will get higher quality tracks as well as no DRM. And this, it seems, is a concept the music industry cannot – or does not want to – grasp.
Instead of looking at providing a really good music archive with almost any track ever made in it at a reasonable price in a common easy to manage format that works with any MP3/4 player with no strings attached, they choose to lean on the Government to pass legislation that will allow a private organisation (the BPI) to basically police the internet in the UK.
Proposed Draconian measures to restrict file sharing include filtering content, i.e. blocking access to sites determined to be related to copyright theft are in the pipeline. This is similar indeed to the Great Firewall of China which only allows the Chinese to see what their Government wants them to see.
Throttling of users is another thing on the agenda, but Virgin Media are doing this already whether you download legally or not.
Knock Off TV advertising
The copyright lobbies have been advertising on the television over the last couple of years with some laughable scenarios. One common theme is that by purchasing copied DVDs or music you are funding drug dealing, child trafficking, paedophiles and terrorism. Another is the comparison between downloading music and DVDs and stealing a car or stealing from your grandparents.
With the latest Knock Off Nigel advertisements they are attempting to encourage social stereotyping, so if you are someone that downloads copyrighted material from the internet then you are also someone that would steal cars and money from your family as well as steal money from work colleagues try to avoid buying rounds in the pub.
The latest advertisement shows a guy in an open office supposedly downloading films on to his laptop only to be mocked by his colleagues and some moustachio’d pied piper character and labelled a Knock Off Nigel.
But this is what makes me laugh: in reality, everyone would be placing their order for films rather than attempting to outcast the guy downloading them. Further to this, he wouldn’t actually be downloading them from work anyway and wouldn’t charge people for what he has downloaded either.
It just goes to show how devoid of reality both the Government and the private industry lobbies are. The scenarios they use in their propaganda are farcically exaggerated and ironically you could use Gordon Brown as the one that steals your grandmas pension, Gordon Brown as the one that funds terrorism, etc.
I guess he’s a Knock Off Nigel then.
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