The Government Just Doesn’t Get the Digital Economy
Posted: May 4th, 2010 | Author: Jeff Lynn | Filed under: 1 | 4 Comments »
In a webchat hosted by The Guardian today, DCMS Secretary Ben Bradshaw defended the passage of the Digital Economy Act as follows:
“The problem of protecting copyright in a digital age has been discussed for years. We had a white paper, a formal consultation, several select committee reports and then the bill which received more scrutiny in the House of Lords in the last session than any other piece of legislation. We think it is a fair and proportionate solution to a real problem that threatens the future of our creative sectors and that it carefully balances the rights of rights holders with those of the consumer and the ISPs.”
Coadec believes that this response is emblematic of just how poorly many of this nation’s leaders understand the digital economy. First, the extensive discussion he refers to — the white paper, the consultation, the select committee reports — dealt with a very different set of policies than what ultimately came to be embodied in the Digital Economy Act. More importantly, the notion that cutting off people’s internet connections and blocking websites based on the mere appearance of copyright infringement, without proof or due process, is “fair and proportionate” and “carefully balances” consumers’ rights is very far off the mark. Bradshaw and others supported a piece of legislation that was written by the record labels for the record labels, and they did so without any real understanding of the impact it will have on the small entrepreneurs who actually drive the digital economy. Reasonable measures to protect copyright are important, but the Digital Economy Act is very far from reasonable, and the fact that Bradshaw and his colleagues fail to see that shows a serious deficit of awareness and comprehension about how the digital economy actually works.
After the election, Coadec will fight to repeal the detrimental provisions of the Digital Economy Act and will work with Ofcom and Parliament to ensure that, if not repealed, the provisions are implemented in the least harmful way to the digital economy. Please show your support for our work by signing up here: http://bit.ly/bje2dp.
I have yet to find anyone who supports this bill apart from the odd politician and they don’t even understand its implications. It must be repealed because it will have a severe impact on our digital economy if it stays in its present form. Politicians don’t get IT.
(they still have emails handed to them on dead trees, they don’t know how IT works)
chris
I’ve yet to hear a coherent and positive argument for the Act. The only people who would disagree with what you say are the politicians who still fail to understand the appeal of honesty (ie ’sorry – we screwed up’) or those who are in the pockets of the record company lobbyists.
I’ve also blogged about the issues from a slightly different perspective http://blog.innerhippy.com/?p=199 just in case anyone was still unconvinced.
But now the argument against the act has been won, all efforts should now be focused on how to repeal it.
The problem is that during the transition between the era in which only a few had reproduction technology (18th Stationers’ Guild to 20th century record labels) and the era of instantaneous diffusion (21st century Internet – the public) when everyone does, we are going to get doublethink, i.e. “Copyright is good” combined with “Enforcement against infringement should only affect ‘real’ criminals”.
Not only does the Open Rights Group support the 18th century privilege of copyright (an exemplary anachronism), but even the Pirate Party supports it.
This is doublethink, and entirely due to indoctrination, not logical analysis. Organisations that seek popular support must also adopt popular views, and that means they must adopt the popular view that copyright is a fundamentally good thing, and the popular view that Internet is a fundamentally good thing. Two contrary views simultaneously held.
To reconcile the application of an 18th century privilege that prohibits cultural exchange, with technology that facilitates it, is left as an ‘issue to be resolved’. By thus postponing the intractable issue people focus on the more tractable ones such as properly enjoying the commercial exploitation of their 18th century reproduction monopoly, AND properly enjoying the benefits of extremely efficient 21st century cultural exchange facilities.
The legislators are left with the dilemma of listening to the few well heeled lobbyists demanding the preservation of their traditional monopoly, or the vast numbers of delinquent voters complaining about the pointy end of the instrument of injustice being poked at their new found cultural liberty.
The proposition that an 18th century cultural contraint might just be invalid in the larger scheme of things, that it is an abberation in mankind’s vast cultural history from Lascaux cave paintings 15,000BC to post-renaissance patronage of the 17th century, is a modern heresy. And yet it is the heresy of heliocentricity that got us to the moon.
There needs to be a movement prepared to confront the fact that it is copyright that must be abolished, and that until it is, ever more draconian enforcement legislation will keep being enacted.
Is the Coalition for a Digital Economy Prepared to confront a future without copyright?
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