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.

Well those in the UK are – and should be concerned because Orwell’s predictions (and even Alan Moore’s in V for Vendetta) are seemingly comng true. With The Fear this time being terrorism – despite a terrorist attack happening last nearly 4 years ago – they are clamping down on a variety of things. They might seem small, even trivial – but the right to photograph protests, or anything you like in a street – have already been eroded, and if they think you might be a terrorist however spurious they can lock you up for a long time – stop me if you can see the way this can be politically used to oppress people?

And if they take any DNA off you, they can store it in their beloved police database against EU law:

And now with the new Coroners and Justice Bill the State want the right to use that information, or any other information they collect however spuriously for anything they like and use it for something else – as Boing Boing put it:

Clause 152 allows any Minister to take any information gathered for any purpose and use it for any other purpose

So now councils can spy on you to see if you’re emptying the bins correctly (ooh you terrorist) you can guarantee this clause WILL be misused, whatever they say – they said that about the anti-terrorism laws and there is a mounting pile of abuses that go FAR against the intention of that law and with all this CCTV, DNA databases and soon to be ID cards, we have become the most snooped country in Europe, if not the whole world.

What can you do? Well those in the UK can write to your MP – no don’t yawn and switch off it’s REALLY PISS EASY, I mean a muppet like me could do it, so can you – I did it and got results and a shiny letter from Glenda Jackson AND a big warm feeling that I had actually DONE SOMETHING – so can you. You can do it by email via WriteToThem and takes a few minutes. And you can join this Facebook group. – publicise, Twitter about this, bother friends, talk, phone – get the word out.

That’s not hard is it? Or are you going to be the kind of stupid person that Pastor Niemoeller wrote about? These are YOUR laws, if you just sit there eating your grub and shrugging then don’t moan at me when they come through your door.

Also word to my pirate radio bruvs (and gals out there – they’ve just raided about 30 of them in the UK and shut them down, heard via John. Keep going, keep the faith, don’t let em win. And that bullshit about emergency frequencies – they still using that as an excuse? As a former frequency scanner and radio geek, I can tell you the ambulance and other systems moved to higher frequencies from publically accessible radio waves (ie. on your dial) back in the 80’s – they use special frequencies with digital encoded systems for the ambulances, and obviously the police realised being listenable on a normal radio wasn’t really a good idea, so they did too. So I don’t see how the pirates could affect this unless some faulty transmitter is sidebanding. I call bullshit on that until I hear otherwise.

You see what I mean? It’s easy to shout fire in a crowded theatre, but since before Gordon Brown and that Weapon of Mass Distraction called a war where they ignored us, politically things have been shifted to make a whole bunch of people seem they are a potential threat, rather than the necessary watchguard (and yes the watchers?) to try and keep an increasingly distant and corrupt set of politicians accountable…ignorance and apathy just gives them the power to eventually really fuck up your day (or life).

This current state of affairs is really bugging me, there is a real danger we are going down the path of 1984 – you may scoff but do some research about what laws have been passed recently – and it will chill your blood.

Beggar’s dog – Hoboken (LOC)

I usually cover copyright issues of a different nature; ones regarding audio. But as a keen photographer and designer I love images, and know how hard it is, or was, to find open source images. One big addition to this is Flickr Commons – several big museums and collections have gotten together with Flickr to share imagery that has no copyright, old photographs or has governmental uses like the legendary FSA and wartime images. The collections are good – from Smithsonian who started this, to Library of Congress, George Eastman House, Bibliothèque de Toulouse and so on.

Sadly I’m surprised (although not shocked having dealt with these organisations via John) that there are no British museums or collections yet taking part. Certainly governmental ‘public’ works has a different stance here – Crown copyright vs the US model where if public money is used it rightly stays in public domain – and a non-sharing approach with British galleries and museums means yet again America and Europe lead the way in copyright advances and public amenity. Sigh. I hope that changes – because I know the likes of the V&A, British Museum, British Library, The Hulton/Picture Post archive and the Tates have amazing treasures to share.

Will we ever be allowed to, though?

Paris Exposition: ship, Paris, France, 1900

Just got this email from Pandora (the online streaming intelligent ‘learning’ radio site)

hi, it’s Tim,

This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.

As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the
U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming
in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a
solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently
with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee.
After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which
represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music
publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high
to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing
to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.

Based on your email address, we believe you may be listening from the UK. If you are
in fact listening from the U.S., please disregard this email. It continues to astound me and the rest of the team here that the industry is not
working more constructively to support the growth of services that introduce
listeners to new music and that are totally supportive of paying fair royalties to
the creators of music. I don’t often say such things, but the course being charted
by the labels and publishers and their representative organizations is nothing short
of disastrous for artists whom they purport to represent – and by that I mean both
well known and indie artists. The only consequence of failing to support companies
like Pandora that are attempting to build a sustainable radio business for the
future will be the continued explosion of piracy, the continued constriction of
opportunities for working musicians, and a worsening drought of new music for fans.
As a former working musician myself, I find it very troubling.

We have been told to sign these totally unworkable license rates or switch off,
non-negotiable…so that is what we are doing. Streaming illegally is just not in
our DNA, and we have to take the threats of legal action seriously. Lest you think
this is solely an international problem, you should know that we are also fighting
for our survival here in the US, in the face of a crushing increase in web radio
royalty rates, which if left unchanged, would mean the end of Pandora.

We know what an epicenter of musical creativity and fan support the UK has always
been, which makes the prospect of not being able to launch there and having to block
our first listeners all the more upsetting for us.

We know there is a lot of support from listeners and artists in the UK for Pandora
and remain hopeful that at some point we’ll get beyond this. We’re going to keep
fighting for a fair and workable rate structure that will allow us to bring Pandora
back to you. We’ll be sure to let you know if Pandora becomes available in the UK.
There may well come a day when we need to make a direct appeal for your support to
move for governmental intervention as we have in the US. In the meantime, we have no
choice but to turn off service to the UK.

Pandora will stop streaming to the UK as of January 15th, 2008.

Again, on behalf of all of us at Pandora, I’m very, very sorry.

-Tim Westergren (Pandora founder)

This is not an unusual occurence – If I go to MTV the video streams are blocked cos I’m from the UK, and it seems Pandora is following suit. In this digital age the record companies, industry bodies such as BPI/RIAA and collection companies such as PPL and MCPS-PRS seem to want to put the genie into the bottle. They would love to reinstall the cultural apartheid that existed before the internet with ‘zones’ (like DVD, I’m sure if they could do that with DRM they would) and country-based markets, and restrictive practices and a legal minefield that make streaming, podcasting et al difficult, rather that embracing the cross-country and cross-market opportunities that exist today, and accepting that internet streaming does not have the same commercial clout than broadcast radio and is not broadcasting in the traditional sense.

Really they are shooting themselves in the foot, because UK artists and music won’t get the opportunities overseas and vice versa because blocking the cross-pollination via demanding high royalty rates – which tbh are mostly eaten up by the agencies themselves – will prove bad and uncreative for the traditional music industry; and those who want to create online will move to CC and self-publishing models, because if more podcasts and streams go non-MCPS/PRS/RIAA it won’t be viable to join those associations – in fact it’ll be commercial death, at least on the Net. But it’s sad because Pandora is a great service and I heard some great music via their intelligent suggestion system, and it’s going to be only the big companies like Yahoo and MSN who will be able to afford those rates, so the whole of internet radio will become like mainstream podcasting a reflection of the takeover by large conglomerates like ClearChannel….large, bloated and boringly commercial, promoting the latest bland urban cack like Souljah Boy and Umbrella rather than anything specifically niche or related to these local markets….

Related, I heard a stupid conversation last night on Radio 3 proposing that intellectual thought would ‘go global’ in 2008, more stupid inane middle-class chatter from the likes of Jonathan Miller; but we don’t want ‘global’ thought, we need local action and thought; but not so local to restrict the cross-talk from other localities. Global does not always equal good; you need to apply to local to the global, rather than what these corporates are doing which is applying the global to the local.

(via viridescence) Yep Facebook is using a tracking system that even logs (or tries to log) what you do even when you’re logged off via other sites using the system; it records all manner of info – rather worrying for a site which people entrust their personal info to. And the irony as you can’t delete your FB profile is you can’t easily opt out of it! Aargh!

More here and here – and how to block Facebook Beacon as I have done. I’ve just posted this link over at Facebook – let’s see what happens

I’m really starting to get ambivalent about FB, I’ve locked down  all the privacy options but the amount that FB is used by news agencies and governments and employers is VERY alarming. At some point I might discontinue my account- not before my Strummer remix LP though