UK Government Announces Copyright Plans; Surprisingly Good, With A Few Problems
from the and-expect-a-huge-legal-fight dept
As was expected, the current UK government has made it clear that it would like to follow the (relatively mild) suggestions of the Hargreaves report. Glyn Moody does an excellent job breaking down the details of the government's announcement, noting that it's mostly good, though there are a few areas of concern. One nice thing is that the government insists that it will require actual evidence that stronger IP laws actually benefit the country, rather than just taking it on faith. Hopefully they follow through on that.There are a few interesting specific notes in the report, including saying that it will not support "site blocking," as a way to deal with infringement. I'm not quite sure that fits with the recent Newzbin2 ruling in the UK that ordered BT to block the site, but it certainly seems notable. Unfortunately, they are implementing a £20 fee for anyone who wishes to appeal a "strike" under the Digital Economy Act. This is problematic, as it again seems to assume guilt before innocence, and makes you pay to get a review of your own innocence.
The government's plan also appears to support a broadcast treaty, which is a dangerous plan to give intellectual property-like rights to broadcasters over works they broadcast even if they're in the public domain. This recommendation seems wholly out of place. In the end, Moody sums it up, saying that while there are some bad things, there's a lot to be encouraged by:
However, to summarise an over-long post, the UK Government's response to the Hargreaves Report is much better than I expected. It has largely accepted Hargreaves's main points, including the crucial one about the need for evidence before policy is formulated, or action is taken. Of course, there remain problems - the £20 fee for appeals is hugely discriminatory - and the UK Government did not address the underlying problems with copyright and patents, but that is not surprising - neither did Hargreaves and his team.For the most part, I agree. I am curious how this will play out in actual policy however. The entertainment industry is an incredibly powerful lobby, and history has shown that they have had tremendous success, decade after decade, in convincing politicians of their evidence-free claims on certain things. Often it just takes trotting out some celebrity to complain. At other times they use a variety of tactics that get politicians to make proposals that clearly favor the specific interests of a few legacy players, pretending they're for actual content creators instead. I have no doubt that we will see quite a battle in the UK over this pretty quickly, and while I'm encouraged by much of what's been said, I have little faith that those implementing the policy will be able to successfully do so without being pressured by the industry into changing those plans.
By setting himself a more modest goal of pointing out the most flagrant absurdities of the system in our digital world, and offering plausible fixes, Hargreaves seems to have managed to convince the UK Government of the wisdom of accepting more or less all of them. That's no mean achievement, and both parties deserve kudos for arriving at this starting point, even if the real legislative journey has only just begun.
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Filed Under: copyright, hargreaves, uk
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If you run a red light, protest it and lose, you pay court costs.
They have reasonable cause to flag you, and just like with red lights, most people are guilty.
If you haven't secured your wi-fi already, try reading the instruction manual. It isn't difficult to come up with a password that's hard to crack.
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As ever, I honestly hope that your IP address gets repeatedly flagged whenever this idiocy is tried wherever you live. It might not change your tune, but at least we won't have to endure your foolishness once you get kicked off.
"t isn't difficult to come up with a password that's hard to crack."
Because the complexity of the password and not the level of encryption is what matters... I love the fact that you also try to pretend that open wifi is the only way that someone innocent can be flagged, despite the many, many examples of other problems.
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You don't like what the guy said, so you want to see him framed for something he didn't do.
You must be a police officer.
Or a prosecutor.
I don't like what he said either. So I guess that makes me a "moralfag" in the modern vernacular. Make that an "old moralfag".
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I merely think that he should be subjected to the punishment he advocates for other innocents.
"I guess that makes me a "moralfag" in the modern vernacular."
Are you 5, or do you just hang around 5 year olds a lot? That doesn't sound like a term I've ever heard.
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Then you don't lurk around the wrong networks.
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If any lawyer defends a guilty party he should be prosecuted as an accessory and accomplice for trying to let the bad guys go free.
Any politician that copies another one should be fined millions and if anybody on his staff did something wrong he should be the one to be punished for it.
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You see, it is difficult.
And there's EVERYTHING wrong, you are paying to prove you are innocent. How can you produce adequate evidence that your wifi wasn't broken or poorly configured whithout spending a few more pounds in the process. Oh and how can you prove your ip was spoofed without spending some huge effort?
Your comment is plain fail ;)
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But only after you've been found guilty. The court doesn't make you pay a fee just to get in the door and claim your innocence.
Analogy fail.
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You just have to have a little faith man ... just trust us. Trust the money we give you in campaign contributions.
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How in the heck do you prove you didn't download something? How do you prove it wasn't you? Where do you get this locked in concrete evidence on digital goods? Haven't we seen enough booboo's already that show that doesn't work? What? It's no knock police raids next?
This �20 charge will become an income for some agency that will be loath to lose what it sees as it's money and it's source of income. This pretty much happens every time there is money involved. It may be well intentioned but then the path to hell is paved with them.
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There would be no laws if we tossed out every one of them because there was the occasional error. That's what the court system is for: to remedy such errors.
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You have zero experience investigating computer crime.
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The few geeks that spoof ips pale in comparison to the millions that don't.
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Prove me wrong. But first pay me $20 please.
See the scientic method for proving a negative..... oh wait.... even they cannot prove a negative.
Your arguments are fallacious and trollish.
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See? It's for geeks and morons like yourself.
Get a life, loser.
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Ah - is it okay now to insult you? I mean you started it... I just made a (potentially) unfounded accusation.
So in response you attack me personally, state factually about my having a retarded intelligence, insult me and ignore any attempt to disprove my point.
You know very well what that's called.
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a trollololol?
hey, how come there isn't a button for that on this site?
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That's written permission, right? Just so we're are both completely legally clear on that.
Mike - Can I please have his IP address? He won't mind. After all - he must be guilty... it was his IP address. (/sarc)
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I'm guessing I'll have to wait in line tho...
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You always comes back to "hitting you in the balls", did people do that to you in high school that often?
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Where's my $20 bucks? You responded after all!
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"IP addresses correctly ID SOMETHING 100%of the time. Just like red light cameras and cops do."
Redlight camera's correctly identify the registration plate 100%, NOT the driver, or for that matter the vehicle if rego plate is not the correct one.
LEO's (Cops) correctly identify the individual 100% based on the evidence at hand, this does not mean the evidence they have is correct though.
If IP addresses identified actual people 99& (or even 90%) of the time criminal courts would have no problems with IP addresses as provable evidence, when in fact even civil courts that use balance of probability have serious issues with IP addresses being specifically about an individual.
Spoofing IP though not a major problem (i'd say its even less than 1%) is NOT the problem with IP identifiers, the problem is that just because an IP might point to a specific device, it does not mean without a whole lot of further supporting evidence that a specific individual has used that IP at that point in time for an allegedly unlawful purpose.
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According to a private consultant who is employed by the cable companies to track down people who have faked cable boxes there are some parts of the UK where you can't get a jury to convict people of these offences because the odds are that the jury members will be doing it themselves.
The geeks work out how to hack the boxes - then the barrowboys do it in large numbers and Joe public buys the resulting device from a bloke in the pub.
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Of course, the AC also misses the point that the reaction to these attempts won't go the way he wants. He assumes that the reaction by the guilty will be to stop pirating. The reality is, his industry just provided a sterling reason for the "non-geeks" to learn how to spoof & hack, and there's plenty out there who will happily help them and provide easy tools to do so...
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proxies & IP replicators/spoofers, now what?
yeah you would think but it seems to not work out that way alot of times, especially when copyright is involved it seems these errors just get abused more often than remedied
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Yes that they do... if fact I will go with an even higher percent than 99. You are absolutley correct - Sir.
It just may well be a person that did not commit the theft/piracy/infrigemnt/rape/speeding office/child molestation/sex with photogenic monkeys/photos of photogenic monkeys having sex/.
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should end "...having sex/Insert claim here. IP was correct and indeed assigned to the person you identified correctly... but THEY DID NOT DO IT.
You Sir... need to be accused of (insert list above) and see how you go proving your innocence.
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And as for you second statement, what about the law on the books in Florida where it is illegal to go on a beach without a $5 foot permit if you're wearing sandals?
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And 1 state out of 50?
Ergo, all red light cameras are worthless. Effective logic there...
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Re: Baloney. IP addresses correctly ID someone 99% of the time
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Lol. The fact that you think IP addresses identify *people* is enough to show you don't know enough to take part in this discussion.
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the powers that be seem to have conveniently forgotton this ruling in their haste to press forward with the DEA.
Just to remind all the Trolls out there,......AN IP ADDRESS DOES NOT IDENTIFY AN INDIVIDUAL.
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In my country, if the police find drug paraphernalia in a shared house, nobody can be charged if the paraphernalia is in a common area, regardless of whose name is on the lease agreement.
Why should a string of ones and zeros be treated more harshly than illicit drugs?
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If you weren't an infantile non-contributing member of society, you would have learned that long ago.
Darwin and his hammer await you.
Go somewhere and die, parasite.
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Hum, (s)he's a worthless member of society, and yet, here you are, angrily posting on a random site on the Internet about how you are morally superior to everyone else, while resisting every attempt to educate you a bit about networks and computers.
Well, at least my programs are compiling while I'm doing this. Are yours? Or are you one of those infantile non-contributing members of society I keep hearing about?
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Yeah, and I think a lot of them have taken jobs as middlemen and lobbyists for the entertainment industries.
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That is false. Have you ever heard of NAT? One IP address can be the visible face of hundreds or thousands of individual computers/devices.
Also, there are methods of disguising yourself to look like someone else (IP address spoofing). It wouldn't be the first time someone's (innocent) life was almost screwed because of some idiot who spoofed the IP address or hacked a router to download child porn or something.
To claim that an IP address is solid proof of anything is being at least ignorant of reality. Worst case scenarios is you being a moron, in which case, I have wasted my time here.
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For the rest of the normal web-surfing *millions*, ip addys are incredibly accurate.
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We're talking about so-called evidence that's had people sued who don't even own a computer, dumbass. Plus, the people who don't understand are the *victims* in these cases.
Few people know how to hard code a virus from scratch. By your logic, that means viruses aren't a problem, right?
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Millions use TOR, thousands use I2P, millions pay VPN service providers, millions use NAT without even knowing it.
Just keep pulling your ass found statistics.
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Well you are contradicted by the Computing Department of one of the worlds leading Universities :
"Although these tools need to be created by competent people, they are intended for mass use"
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Journalist
Broadcaster
DJ
musician
Yes a musician many have been accused of uploading content when they actually own the copyright.
so RIAA troll answer that one.
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I'm sure the non-tards that stumble on this site didn't notice that this little bit of reality was ignored...
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...and then you have laws like copyright, IP & patents which are loaded with errors front to back, up & down and all around
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Think about it this way: if your computer does not work the way you expect it, what do you do? Do you forgive it for not working correctly, and carry on working in a non-working computer? Or do you try to fix/get a new one?
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Laws are made by people, who are, by nature, imperfect.
You live in a fantasy world.
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You are the one that lives in a fantasy world: a world where humans are stuck being mediocre beings who settle for half-assed laws that only benefit one small subset of society, in detriment of the others. As long as YOU are ok, nothing else matters. Good luck with that.
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Hah. Talk about living in a fantasy world.
Laws are made by organizations who have the most money to lobby with and these organizations are, by nature, shortsighted, self-serving and really don't give a shit about the greater good.
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Praise for...Murdoch?
Rupert Murdoch's manipulation of British politicians and subsequent bad publicity has resulted in all parties having a morbid fear of 'getting into bed' with any media.
I'm pleased I live in a country where corruption is still frowned upon, rather than just renamed to 'lobbying'
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HOw stronger IP laws NEVER are better for an economy.
B) Saying in lax countries its bad is false due to the fact money NOT given to A) which removes larger and larger chunks of money from the economy, and due to that needs to keep pushing for more and more to maintain a lifestyle that is in affect unsustainable ( see us debt and how its not going to end well)
C) Poor guy with 100$ is more apt to spend all 100$ in local eocnomies thus stimulating said economy vs as said in A) and B) where he gives say 50$ out time ssay a million others like him where of that 50 million maybe only a million gets spent and 49 million goes to a bank or institution or saved offshore to furthar reduce or evade or do tax avoidance....POOR man cant afford tax avoidance or evasion....another reason to lesson all these issues.
Copyrights at 10 years ar at what i'd call an outer limit and patents especially on drugs should be no less then 4-5 years with an option of set prices on drugs that are needed in larger quantities for governments say. WHERE they can buy out the patent for there nation without any exporting.
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Broadcasts
As for the web-blocking stuff, again that was misleading; they only said they wouldn't be using the DEA web-blocking process as it was "unlikely to be effective because of the slow speed that would be expected from a full court process". Instead the various documents mention possible voluntary web-blocking agreements with ISPs (using Cleanfeed, avoiding the courts), getting MasterCard/Visa/PayPal to block payments, getting advertisers to back away and getting the London Police to seize domain names. The web-blocking stuff is, in many ways, even worse than the Newzbin2 method.
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