Followers of my Twitter and Livejournal will know I wrote to Glenda Jackson, my MP about the stupid ‘3 strikes’ rule that EU (not just UK apparently) are trying to pass with the Digital Economy bill, where if you’re caught 3 times filesharing they can cut off your internet.

Thinking ‘I don’t fileshare’ or ‘I use military grade crypto dark nets’ or ‘I use only mediafire or blogspot’ so it doesn’t affect you?

Well it will…pretty sure it means say goodbye to free WiFi in the EU (who is going to risk disconnection by strangers filesharing, like this example from the States where a whole town’s WiFi was shut down over ONE download?) which doesn’t bode well for the government’s other aims for a ‘Digital Britain‘, also the likes of Talk Talk (the ISP) threatening to sue the Government over this, and BT claiming the costs of policing will cost more than the losses, or at the very least will put up internet costs drastically (an estimated £25 EACH).

WiFi hacking will go up – people will just use other people’s connections, and let them take the rap – and as far as the current bill stands that would be tough, you’ll be disconnected without judge nor jury even though the popular WiFi standards now WPA and WEP have been hacked. In fact public sharing will go either way – either mass disobedience, or more likely all shared networks will go private for fear of disconnection…so no leeching off a neighbour’s network – or at least networks will cripple their connections and not allow any file or torrent downloads (not an easy nor simple thing to do atm).

People will use encryption more and more – like Tor. This might be a good thing, but interesting that M15 are against these proposals realising a mass move to crypto will make finding criminals harder, especially as the tools will probably get easier to use in response. More ambivalent about this one – but I don’t like the idea of say, child porn or actual terrorism (rather than ‘domestic extremism’ LOL) going unmonitored and more underground, do you? Not happy about making the police and M15’s job of tracking us all, Big Brother style easier though…I’m a fan of crypto but it’s an all-in or all-out situation, no use using PGP emails if none of your friends do.

One up side is apparently same legislation might make mashups legal – but only in your own home, don’t SHARE them, Nanny will now allow you to make them – even though you always could, like CD-ripping without sharing because no-one would know nor care. Silly huh?

Anyway I wrote to Glenda and unsurprisingly she is against signing the EDM and is anti-filesharing given her acting past and relationships with the movie industry, but she did write to Lord Mandelson on my behalf. So we’ll see.

I think the points about criminalising the wrong people, better licensing and also threatening the growth of legal digital uses as well are pertinent ones for Mandy – legislation like this is ALWAYS abused and misused, and will have knock-on freezing effects in other areas too. It’s definitely not a case of ‘I’m alright Jack’ because Jack will be made to pay for his own monitoring, chastisement and will lose more digital freedoms, rather than gain more.

And yes I’m sure filesharing mashups will be as illegal and probably as ‘3-strikes’ gaining as sharing whole movies and albums. And ignores the fact that people who share music also buy a lot of music also.

EDIT: Brilliant video by Dan Bull responding to Lily.

OK the land of Twitter (I twittered about the whole affair on the 16th – keep up at the back there ) and now blogs has been entertained by the latest shite to fall out of Lily Allen’s mouth – this time her hypocrisy regarding file sharing.

You see It’s Alright for her to share mixtapes of full songs (not 30 seconds!) of other’s music, her Myspace demos or even copy articles without attribution, but apparently she supports the governmental ‘3 strikes’ law to cut off file sharers.

She turned up to support a meeting of ‘minds’ in music at Air Studios, organised by Ed O’Brien of Radiohead and the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) – where they agreed that rather being cut off as per the people’s bandwidth should be throttled to 56k-level speeds for file sharing,. Oh that’s alright then

The buck doesn’t just pass to Lily, surprisingly the likes of Billy Bragg (sorry Billy but your beloved Woody Guthrie must be spinning in his grave, he understood more about the concept of public ‘commons’ than you ever will) supported such a measure as did such intellectual alumni and thinkers:

Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason
George Michael
Annie Lennox
Patrick Wolf
Tim Rice-Oxley
Ed O’Brien
David Arnold
Guy Chambers
Sandie Shaw

I eagerly await the full list so I can make sure I can sanction all the fuckers and never pay them a penny…definitely a case of ‘I’m alright jack’ and bloated irrelevant rock stars not really understanding the real issues behind downloading and file sharing…as several people have pointed out, the problem of widely downloaded tracks ‘by the kids’ will not be bothering most of these acts anyway, being either bland corporate mulch or being severely over the hill.

They don’t seem to understand that the whole issue was created by an industry that refused techological and legal change, screwed consumers repeatedly, expected special copyright laws, special treatment and arcane kickbacks that other industries do not have, and that there’s very little proof that like home taping before it that downloading really affects sales – in fact my experience with blogs, podcasts, torrents and P2P et al is it actually creates sales.

And it does tend to support the idea that musicians should keep well away from things they don’t understand…and if said acts pretend to be radical or daring in future I will laugh in their faces. Sorry, you are corporate cock-sucking bloated whores shilling for an industry whose death (or at the very least radical change) is necessary for some semblance or creativity and sanity to return.

As Techdirt later pointed out, as did Boing Boing that pointing a finger at Lily’s hypocrisy, or her using ‘rare’ ska samples on her records (her first LP is full of them, I do hope they were all cleared?) isn’t helpful, even if she did moan “i made those mixtapes 5 years ago, i didn’t have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then… “ Baroness Scotland-style. It’s harder and harder to work as an artist in the modern copyright sphere, things such as free mixtapes and mashups and sharing files (transformed or otherwise) for free SHOULD be possible for a 21st century artist to do. And like Lily, they DO, but you would hope they then have the sense not to cut the strings for anyone else coming up who would like to do the same. The current position of copyright is untenable…rather than slapping Lily’s wrists (oh OK, go on for a bit, it’s fun!) it shouldn’t be an issue for people to share content of all types, and the laws against that will have a freezing effect from the bloated rock stars to the kids just starting their music careers. It’s bad, and will affect everyone.

And reading Lily’s Myspace post about EMI, the company whose Cease and Desisted creativity in the mashup world and mismanaged by Guy Hands, are apparently losing jobs, well I cry for them, I really do.

At least it isn’t all bad, Lily is apparently leaving the music industry. Can I hold you to that, Lil? Maybe she’ll go into politics And she also deleted the blog posts that started all this – toys, meet outside of pram, pram, exit toys.

EDIT: Best response ever to this whole thing (via Bush No. 10)