No Art Please, You're Not British

I thought we had got beyond this daftness:

A Cellist was held at Heathrow Airport and questioned for 8 hours this week. A terrorist suspect? False passport? Drug smuggling? If only it was so dramatic and spectacular. Her crime was coming to the UK with her cello, to participate in musicology conference organised by the School of Music at the University of Leeds and it was for this reason that Kristin Ostling was deported back to Chicago. What was UK Borders Agency (UKBA) thinking? That she would sell her cello to earn some cash, or do a spot of moonlighting at some secretive classical music gig, while she was here?

The Conference organiser, Professor Derek Scott informed the Manifesto Club that “She was not being paid a penny for this, but these zealous officers decided that playing a cello is work and, paid or unpaid, she could not be allowed in.”

Lovely logic here: if you are a professional cellist it follows that putting bow to string is work, and therefore not permitted according to the terms of your visa. And as the article explains, it's the same for painters and photographers: if you dare to create a masterpiece here in the UK, you might end up being deported, and blacklisted.

Now, call me old fashioned, but it seems to me that we should actually be *begging* artists to come here and create: it not only enriches the cultural ecosystem based on the UK and all it contains, it makes it more likely that other artists and non-artists will want to come to the country to see where these works were spawned, bringing with them all that valuable touristic dosh that everyone seems to be scrabbling after these days.

But the problem is really deeper than this simple loss of these earnings. What is really disturbing is the crass way the UK Borders Agency equates artistic creation with work: if you act as an artist - even if you are not paid - you are theoretically doing something that should have a price on it. This is really part and parcel of the thinking that everything should be copyrighted and patented - that you can't do stuff for free, or simply give away your intellectual creations.

It's a sick viewpoint that leads to kind of shaming situations described above. And of course, in the usual way, the people imposing these absurd practices haven't though things through. After all, if musicians can't play, or artists paint, when they come to the UK, surely that must mean by the same token that visiting foreign mathematicians can't manipulate formulae, and philosophers are forbidden to think here...?

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Personal Luggage *Will* be Subject to ACTA

One of the fairy tales being told about the oppressive ACTA is that it's only going to apply to large-scale criminal offenders, and that the Little People like you and me don't need to worry our pretty heads. But that's a lie, as this fascinating blog post has discovered:

It was very interesting to talk to Mr. Velasco. He said the negotiations could be understood, in a very very simplified way, as you basically could get cheap cars in exchange for IPR enforecement laws.

Interestingly enough, his materials published on the interenet also provided some kind of explanation to why people are afraid of having their iPods searched. Under "What is new" in a presentation about Enforcement of IPR Mr. Velasco says:

[it] "No longer excludes from the scope of the regulation counterfeit or pirated goods in a traveler's personal baggage where such goods are suspected to be part of a larger-scale traffic."

But don't put any great hopes in that fig-leaf "where such goods are suspected to be part of a larger-scale traffic": you can bet that once customs officials have the power to search through your laptop or MP3 player, they damn well will.

After all, potentially a *single* unauthorised copy can be used to spawn thousands of copies that would certainly constitute "larger-scale traffic"; so surely that means that all it takes is for a sufficiently suspicious customs official to "suspect" that single copies on an MP3 player might be part of larger-scale traffic - and then Robert is your father's Brother.

Make no mistake: if ACTA is agreed in its current form, it will impact every one of us directly - and direly.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

The Biter Bit - by Bits

Now that the flow of highly-personal "security" information between the US and other countries is a two-way thing, I predict people in the former are going to become as unenthusiastic about it as those in the latter:

Welcome to the new world of border security. Unsuspecting Americans are turning up at the Canadian border expecting clear sailing, only to find that their past -- sometimes their distant past -- is suddenly an issue.

While Canada officially has barred travelers convicted of criminal offenses for years, attorneys say post-9/11 information-gathering, combined with a sweeping agreement between Canada and the United States to share data, has resulted in a spike in phone calls from concerned travelers.

...

Oh, and by the way, if you don't need to travel to Canada, don't think you won't need to clear your record. Lesperance says it is just a matter of time before agreements are signed with governments in destinations like Japan, Indonesia and Europe.

"This," Lesperance says, "is just the edge of the wedge."

Oh, yes, indeedy.... (Via Slashdot.)