The Digital Economy Bill: My thoughts
by DouglasSo the Digital Economy Bill has passed Lords and Commons, despite public uproar and condemnation of how rushed through and little debate it has had in parliament. Here are some of the things which I think are most confusing:
Disconnection
From what I saw of the Second Reading Debate on BBC iPlayer (since I watched it all the way from Brisbane, Australia) it seemed that the general consensus was that MPs backed the bill because it would help smaller artists and content makers keep their income. What confuses me is that if the MPs are so concerned with the artist’s income, then why don’t they fine people, and have the artist compensated for any money lost (through legal expenses, content, etc)? Instead they choose to send out notices, which are initiated only if you are suspected of breaching copyright. Whatever happened to “Innocent until proven guilty”? Does there have to be some form of evidence for the copyright holder to be able to contact an ISP and have these notices sent out? Also, what stops the copyright holder from constantly accusing a person of constantly breaching copyright?
Also, it has been established in places like France, Greece, Estonia and Finland that internet is a human right. I suspect that either a court ruling, a UN directive or EU directive will change the legality of the Digital Economy Bill.
Big Business
Another question that almost frightens me is: What constitutes the “Copyright Holder”? Now, I am not up and current with my Intellectual Property Law (although my sister specialises in it), but could a record company — say the illustrious MPAA or RIAA — file a report to have my internet monitored based on this act?
A lot of the talk is that the reason the DE Bill came about is because the big record companies were complaining that they were losing money from piracy, which has been criticised and research has shown that they are making more money than ever. However, this seems to not be the main focus of the DE Bill (for reasons I have stated above) but I thought I should touch on it.
What’s wrong with the bill?
The Digital Economy Bill is pretty much a mish-mash of things that the Government wanted to get put though as quick as possible as to avoid election back lash or controversy. I can safely say they failed, and you will see a major shift in young voters away from Labour, who proposed the bill in the first place.
The Digital Economy Bill should not have existed in the first place, what I think should have happened is that after the election there would be a reform of the Copyright system in the United Kingdom. The main problem is not that people are stealing, the main problem is that copyright law in general makes no sense! This comes to the argument of the “Am I buying a licence or media” issue and DRM.
The problem with today is that media is easily available on the internet, however, some channels are legal and some aren’t. The main issue with the world today is “what is legal?” Media Distributes need to stop grasping at the law to try and help them scrape back lost profits from piracy, the reason that people pirate is that the Distribution companies don’t want you to use the things you pay for how you want.
Copy Protection
This isn’t really related to DE Bill but I think helps people understand where (at least my view of) piracy stems from.
Say I go to Amazon UK and buy a DVD that I like for a fiver, it comes in the mail a week or two later and I watch it. As I watch the film I think, “Wow this film is awesome, would be great to have on my iPod when I am bored.” However I can’t just simply take the DVD, put it in my computer and convert it so that it works with my iPod. At least, I can’t do it legally. The Distribution Companies think it swell to put copy protection measures on media, and makes it illegal to make a duplicate of the media and use it on another device. Is it illegal for me to lend the DVD to a friend and have them watch it? Is it illegal to watch it on specific DVD players? Is it illegal for me to scratch the DVD, since the Distributor seems to think that the data is still their property? So I would have to go and buy another copy of something I already have on different media.
Now this comes into the debate of “is it a license or is it media” because then I hit ‘Buy’ on Amazon, I am not shown or have agreed to any license set out by the Distributor. However I am supposed to have read and understood this license saying what I can and can’t do with what I buy! A license that doesn’t seem to exist!
The problem with companies today is that they are so stuck on this “You can’t watch it any other way” mind-set. People want to be able to get something, say a movie or music or books, and be able to personally use it how they see fit. Big companies need to drastically rethink how they deliver media to people in this day and age, where more and more things are not on the form of a physical media. Since people can’t access the data how they want to legally, they find a way to do it illegally since they don’t see the logic behind having to spend even more money just to get the content that they have in a different format.
Content
One of my main gripes with DVDs today is the adverts and everything you have to watch previous to the menu, everything that causes a “Not Permitted” message to come up. Frankly, I think this should be outlawed, or that I be able to opt-out of it. If you kept getting spam through your e-mail or regular mail, or got telesales people calling you, you can legally opt-out of this. Not tell me, how is this different to DVDs, where you have to watch intros and adverts on the start of a DVD? If anything DVDs are forcing you more to watch this. The equivalent is like not getting your mail cause you wont accept junk mail, or having to watch through ads to get your e-mail, or having your phone like cut off because you don’t answer your phone to telesales calls. If I have to sit through adverts I expect what I am watching to be free of charge like television and radio and the internet.
In closing
The Copyright system needs to be completely reformed across all countries to accommodate to the Digital Way of Life. In a world where all content in all forms is available at your finger tips, and people creating remixes and derivatives of works, the artists need to find a way to help protect their work.
A lot of photo sharing sites have coined on to this and allow people to specify licenses for pictures (e.g. Picassa and Flickr), however people aren’t given the same treatment on most other places. I can’t specify a license for my videos and I dont know what licences people release their videos on.
The government needs to educate people on what is and isn’t legal for media. They also need to educate people on how to protect and especially release their content so that it can be altered and changed (Creative Commons, etc). This will protect those who create the content, and also still allow the astronomic creativity that the internet brings to us all.
Finally, legislation isn’t the solution to this. Everyone to some degree breaks copyright law (ripping CDs, downloading MP3s, downloading a copy of a movie you own) only because the companies impose stupid restrictions on what the consumer buys. A reform of copyright law and education to the consumers (as well as the producers) needs to happen.
PS: Sorry for the rather heavy handed rant, but I wanted to get this out of my system.
The economy is so bad, a picture is only worth 200 words these days…lol we can still afford to laugh a little, right?
Thank you for sharing this. Well done and very informative.
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