The Digital Economy Bill

So the government has railroaded through the deeply-flawed Digital Economy Bill in the dying days of a Parliament with completely inadequate discussion or consultation. It’s being sold as an urgently-needed measure to tackle widespread internet piracy, but I see it as a massive power-grab by old-media giants who want to destroy those parts of the Internet they don’t like.

Nobody apart from the major media cartels and a bunch of corrupt and/or technically-illiterate politicans are actually in favour of this thing as it stands. Even the strongly anti-filesharing Featured Artists Coalition opposes the bill.

I have always maintained that the major labels overstate the losses caused by file-sharing for largely self-serving reasons, and their real agenda has always been about maintaining market share. There are still people who claim that every illicit download represents a lost sale, which is so transparently ridiculous that they deserve to be slapped repeatedly with the proverbial Very Large Haddock until they see sense. They ignore the multiple studies concluding that file-sharers actually spend more money on music and other media than average, and frequently use file-sharing to guide their legitimate purchases.

Even if you believe illicit filesharing is a terrible thing, the whole collective punishment aspect sticks in the throat. This bill targets households, not individuals. I know I’m going to risk Godwin’s law saying this, but from occupied France in World War Two downwards, collective punishment has always been the last resort of the authoritarian thug with no moral authority. So we will see parents losing internet access due to the actitivies of their teenage children, or similar things in shared houses. That lodger you kicked out last month because he didn’t pay the rent? Turns out he’s cost you your internet as well. And that’s before we get into how cafes and libraries providing free wi-fi are now going to be expected to police their customer’s activity. No, small businesses are certainly not exempt, and many people are predicting a sharp decline in free wi-fi facilities.

Then there’s the whole ‘guilty unless proved innocent’ thing. How are they going to determine what’s a legal and what’s an illegal download? What guarantees are there that whatever data-mining or traffic analysis they propose to use isn’t going to generate significant numbers of false positives? What happens if you listen to an Internet radio station or download free songs from a band’s own website, and those sites don’t appear in some major-label approved whitelist? I’ve asked the bill’s apologists about this, and all I get is bland assurances that “it’s only going to be used against a hard core of persistant file sharers”. But there is nothing in the bill that states this.

The bits in the bill about site blocking are just as bad - again the wording is so vague that it can end up being used against virtually anything that the big media companies don’t like - much like Britains hopelessly broken libel laws.

But perhaps the most toxic thing about the entire bill is the way it undermines public support for the notion that creative artists deserve to be paid for their efforts. From the sleazy way it emerged from a meeting between the unelected twice-sacked-for-corruption Peter Mandelson and label boss David Geffen while being wined and dined on Philip Rothschild’s yacht in the Med, to the cynical way the government rammed it through Parliament without proper discussion, the whole thing has the effect of making file-sharing look like a righteous act of civil disobedience. And that will persist even if the DEB fails.

There’s still an outside chance that the House of Lords will see sense and kick the bill out, but I wouldn’t bet on it. In the meantime, if your MP voted in favour of this travesty, be sure not to vote for them in the election.