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The Draft Communications Bill [.pdf]
is one of the most controversial pieces of UK legislation proposed in
recent years - not least because it represents a betrayal of election
promises by the coalition to roll back state surveillance in the UK.
As usual, the government is attempting to claim that current plans are
"different" because the databases are distributed, not centralised; but
the fact that searches will be possible across all the decentralised
holdings means that there is no practical difference. This is quite
simply another example of politicians promising one thing to get
elected, and then doing its opposite.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
It seems a long while ago now, but June was a pretty hectic month in this neck of the woods, since it saw the final push to get ACTA rejected
in the European Parliament. But of course, plenty of other things were
happening then, and one in particular that I wanted to cover was the
release of this UK Open Data White Paper entitled "Unleashing the Potential".
On
Open Enterprise blog.
When the UK Hargreaves Review of intellectual monopolies in the digital age came out last year, Techdirt noted
that one of its innovations was an emphasis on basing policy on
evidence. The fact that this was even notable shows how parlous the
state of policy-making has become. One important way to gather evidence
is through public consultations, and in the wake of the Hargreaves
Review, the UK government conducted a major exercise in gathering views and information in this field.
On
Techdirt.
Last year Techdirt wrote about the almost unbelievable Meltwater
decision in the UK, where the courts said that viewing a Web page
without the owner's permission was copyright infringement. In November last year, leave was granted to Meltwater to make an appeal against the ruling to the UK's Supreme Court.
However, that still leaves the inconvenient matter of the infringement
by tens of millions of UK Web users hundreds of times every day in the
meantime.
On
Techdirt.
They say that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has
got its boots on, and the same seems to be true about Internet policy:
the bad ideas spread like wildfire, while the good ones languish in
obscurity. Snooping on the Net activity of an entire population is the
latest example: now Australia wants to join the club that currently
consists of the US and UK, with Canada waiting in the wings. Here's part of the EFF's excellent summary of what the Australian government is proposing:
On
Techdirt.
I've written elsewhere
about how open access - the idea that academic research paid for by the
public should be freely available online - was directly inspired by open
source. So it's great to see open access making huge strides recently,
including the following:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Yesterday, Techdirt reported
on the UK government's plans to make publicly-funded scientific
research freely available as open access. One concern was that its
approach required funds to be diverted from research to pay for the
article processing charges levied by so-called "gold" open access
titles. One figure being bandied around was about $80 million per year,
but a new report in the Guardian suggests this is a huge over-estimate,
and that the true cost will be more like a fifth of that figure.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt reported
in 2010, the passage of the Digital Economy Act was one of the most
disgraceful travesties of the UK parliamentary process in recent times;
it was badly drafted, hardly revised and then pushed through with almost
no debate in the dying moments of the previous government. Since then,
two UK ISPs -- BT and TalkTalk -- have challenged the Act in the
courts, but lost earlier this year.
On
Techdirt.
Until recently there has been an unchallenged assumption that the
more copyright, the better. Although people have begun to realize
that's not the case – and that extending copyright diminishes the public
domain because we must all wait longer for works to enter it --
governments around the world continue to make copyright longer, stronger
and broader.
On
Techdirt.
We knew it was coming, and here it is: the Communications Data Bill (.pdf.). First the good news:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As expected, the UK government has published its Draft Communications Bill
(pdf) -- better known as the "snooper's charter," since it requires
ISPs to record key information about every email sent and Web site
visited by UK citizens, and mobile phone companies to log all their
calls (landline information is already recorded).
On
Techdirt.
As I've noted before, open data is one area where the UK government
shines - unlike open source, where it has yet to deliver the goods. One
of its bright ideas was the creation of an Open Data Institute (ODI),
which I wrote about at the end of last year. It still doesn't exist yet, but it does have a Web site with some interesting further information about its intentions.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week Techdirt wrote about the possible introduction of an "opt-in" license to view porn online in the UK. As we noted then, there is nothing to stop parents from installing their own filters to block access to certain kinds of Web sites now. But it seems that soon, they won't even have to do that:
On
Techdirt.
One of the beloved tropes of the copyright industries is that they
are being destroyed by online piracy. Superficially, it's a plausible
claim, not least because of the false equation of copyright infringement
with "theft", and the lingering suggestion that every time something is
shared online, a sale is lost. Of course, as Techdirt's report, "The Sky is Rising", demonstrated from publicly-available figures, the facts are very different: all of the creative industries are thriving.
On
Techdirt.
Governments around the world are seeking to monitor more and more of
their citizens' online activities -- and it's not just the most
obviously repressive regimes doing this. In the US, there is CISPA, while the UK is drawing up the Communications Capability Development Programme.
Thomas Steen alerts us to a further escalation of this desire to spy
on the public, in Norway. The secret service there (known by the
acronym PST) want details about comments posted on all Web sites
retained (via Google Translate):
On
Techdirt.
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