Mandelson argues that Britain's Digital Economy will be based on the contrafactual premise of a steady decrease in computer speed, drive capacity, technical competence, network versatility and network ubiquity. Of course, the real digital economy is in those British companies that figure out how to thrive whether or not copying occurs - companies that use networks to reduce their costs, reach larger customer bases, and provide services whose demand and profitability grow with network use, companies such as Last.fm or Moo.com.Why does Mandelson favour the Analogue Economy over the Digital?These companies' businesses are inconceivable without the net, but they also risk being collateral damage in Mandelson's war on the British internet. Just increasing the liability for copyright infringement (and creating a duty to police user-submitted files for infringement) could bankrupt either company overnight. How would Moo sell business cards with your personal photos on them if they could be sued into oblivion should those photos turn out to infringe copyright?
Mandelson is standing up for the Analogue Economy, the economy premised on the no-longer-technically-true idea that copying is hard. Companies based on the outdated notion of inherent difficulty of copying must change or they will die. Because copying isn't hard. Copying isn't going to get harder. This moment, right now, 2009, this is as hard as copying will be for the rest of recorded history. Next year, copying will be easier. And the year after that. And the year after that.
- BREAKING: Leaked UK government plan to create "Pirate Finder ...
- Brits: send a message to Mandelson and fight "three strikes ...
- Brit business secretary promises to punish accused file-sharers ...
- Britain's new Internet law -- as bad as everyone's been saying ...
- Britain's new Internet law -- as bad as everyone's been saying ...
RSS Feed
> "...with the implausible aim of reducing UK file-sharing by 70 percent in one year."
Translated: "What is the absolute worst possible scenario for the public interest in clamping down on filesharing and how quickly can we do it?"
Oh well, it worked pretty well for Nikolai Ceaucescu, didn't it? For a while, at least.
I don't think you're quite being fair.
Anyone can see that all of the factors you've listed are going to increase steadily for the conceivable future. I don't think Mandelson can possibly imagine that copying unprotected files is going to get any harder.
He has to be basing the idea that he can reduce piracy on one of two things. He either thinks:
a) better copy protection will emerge that will prevent people from pirating, or
b) his new copyright regime will scare people into wanting to pirate less.
Personally, I think his beliefs reflect more on the latter. Of course, I think both concepts are absurd, but frankly, either is more believable than "copying unprotected files will become easier."
Frackit. Last word of my previous post should read "harder" not "easier."
There must be a great Gilbert and Sullivan parody here. "I am the very model of a Pirate-Finder General..."
Funniest thing I've read all day-and a little scary. As little as I know about computers, I do know that lot's of file-sharing goes on outside of Britain, and that people routinely route around problem areas. Adapt, or die, 'pirate-finder General'.
Oh, yeah, since increasingly, smart business models adapt to, and use current technology, (and consumer/business models) this sounds a little like shooting oneself in the foot. And then wondering why it hurts so much. Seems like Britain and France are having some weird cognitive-disascociation meltdown...
My kitchen has a sign proudly proclaiming it a UNION bar, but even I wouldn't want the ice-cutters on Lake Ontario to still have a job!
Time marches on, businesses are born and die.
Cory, you're being unfair to Mandelson. Britain has a long and proud history of ludditism. Two examples: the lobbying of gas lighters against electric lights and the red flag in front of lights come to mind. According to many historians of science & technology, stunts like these were part of the reason Britain lost her technological edge to Germany and America. (Hell, remember where the original luddites came from?)
Mandelson's merely carrying on a long and proud British tradition. Have a crumpet and calm down.
I have nothing to add except that I love the mock title "Pirate-Finder General". Just the right comic opera touch to help highlight the absurdity of the whole sorry situation.
Cory, if you coined the term, very nice. If you snagged it from someone else, nice find, and thanks to that person!
All must be sacrificed to appease the Copyright Cartels!
A citizen's right to association (over long distances), a right to their family life (eg. free Skype phone calls to Australia), the ability of people and students to educate themselves, people's access to health information, to political ideas and the ability to speak politically or engage in religious communities online. People's ability to shop at e-tailers such as Amazon, or engage in downloading Creative Commons music, art, video, literature and expressing themselves and their culture online.
All these things are as dirt beneath the feet of the mighty American entertainment industries and the unelected elite of the UK who would sell us all out for a favour.
it's prob. only a matter of time until such laws become reality in Australia, considering we have such a great track record of taking the worst laws of America/UK & making them our own.
We find this asinine because we're on the digital side, and the digital side is clearly the way of the future. I can't fault the analog guys for fighting it, though. That's who they are. That's what butters their bread. The change is bad for them and they couldn't easily adapt even if they wanted to.
A small nit to pick; charging for access to Napster would have killed it as surely as the lawsuit did. They could have put up ads, though.
The elephant in the room is that regardless of how you slice it, people are not going to pay $12-15 for an album (or 99 cents a track) for music anymore. Especially if that money isn't going to the artist.
@Wirelizard, I think we must give respect to Monkey Dust for subverting the very original term...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZY8RnHiTT0&feature=related
... although, Cory's usage stands...
I've said this before, and I'll say it again (and I encourage everyone else to do the same if it ever comes to this):
If my internet is ever disconnected for any reason by a government body / demands from big business I am going to do a very simple thing...
Get my hands on as much copyright protected material as I can, empty my bank account and buy as many DVD-Rs as possible. Duplicate thousands upon thousands of discs of infringing material and drop into peoples mailboxes around my city. Let's see them prosecute thousands of people. There is simply not enough judges or court time to do so.
Rest assured, if it was one particular company that had pushed for my internet to be cut then the discs would be exclusively filled with their content.
Cutting the digital connection between me and the peeps of the world doesnt mean shit. If they ever find a way to make illegal downloading hard/risky - people will simply take their increasingly inexpensive TB+ drives to their mates places and have a good ol' fashioned LAN party. Its how we did it in the dialup days so what makes them think its gonna be any different if they ever succeed in curbing illegal downloads?
DUMB MOTHER FRUCKAS. Their moves are as ham-fisted as someone who has never driven trying to rewrite the road rules.
You are gonna fail. You are gonna waste millions/billions in the process. You are going to destory the lives of many people. You are gonna look stupid in the end.
I would love if HJ Anslinger was still alive to see present-day cannabis culture & the 13 (and counting) US states with legal medical use. His life's work was an abject failure and I don't expect Britain's scummy Pirate-Finder General's work to be any different.
From "Life-Line" by Robert Heinlein (1939)
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all."
@ nyrath. An excellent quote. When "Big Entertainment" started to notice that people were breaking the law by file-sharing etc, they were perfectly entitled to point this out to the Government. The correct Government response should have been: "Yes, the world is changing. Thanks for pointing this out. But this pesky technological evolution is making the old rules increasingly unenforcable without acting contrary to the public interest. We will likely have to change the rules to decriminalise this activity. Sorry. Get over it. You'd better figure out a new business model if you're not yet ready to retire."
I'm curious about this opposition to electric lighting, and I don't know what the red flag is about. Where can I learn more?
Just the right comic opera touch...
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/19/breaking-leaked-uk-g.html#comment-642025
I'm curious about this opposition to electric lighting
In Elizabethan times, there were complaints about candles because candlelight is so much colder and deader than torchlight. Seriously.
Frankly, Antonius, you're going to have to do better than that. Elizabethan candles were either made from tallow (cheap, smelled a bit, smoky) or beeswax (pretty expensive, no smell, no smoke).Large candles were often called torches, and, of course, your source could well have been talking about stage lighting, where the choice of implement was often meant to create mood (candles=indoors, torches=outdoors), and not to actually light an outdoor, daytime performance. (My own source is a gloss of "Lighting the Shakespearean stage, 1567-1642", though I could well be mistaken)
My source, which is a book in a box in someone's garage, is a first-hand account of Elizabeth I's coronation.
I think wederas meant to type "cars" instead of "lights" the second time.
Home taping is killing the record industry! Keep up the good work!
Way to go Labour, doubling down on the evil and stupid going into the election. I expect them in April to unveil a "revamped" national ID program, as a campaign promise.
meh, analogue vs digital. vinyl is cool again, again.
> I think wederas meant to type "cars" instead of "lights" the second time.
I was. D'oh!
I remember reading about opposition from the gas-lighters' union to electrification at the uni library, but I may be misremembering the details. Answers.com has an interesting take on this:
[1882] The Electric Light Act passed by Parliament empowers local British authorities to take over privately run power stations in their areas after 21 years. British municipalities have invested heavily in gas lighting and will impose regulations to thwart competition from electric-light companies while Germany and the United States embrace electricity wholeheartedly. By making it virtually impossible for a private electric company to recoup its investment, the new law will discourage development of power stations (no private company will generate electricity for the next 6 years, and although the new law will be amended in 1888 to permit private ownership, such major cities as Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, and Nottingham will still have no power stations in 1890, and many places will not have electric lighting for 42 years). -- http://www.answers.com/topic/1882
As for the red flag in front of lights ^W cars, I meant the Locomotives Act of 1865.
You're being unfair to Luddites, dude. The Luddites were reacting to the destruction of their centuries old way of life, & being driven into poverty with cheaper inferior goods. Go read The rape of the rose by Glyn Hughes.
There's a saying that ideas don't change. People change.
It's a good job that Labour will be out of power before they get the chance to implement any of this bullsh*t.
For completeness, the problem with this idea is that there's not even a theoretical hint as to how this might work technologically. That doesn't mean that it's impossible, of course, but it does mean that it'd involve a fundamental break-through in cryptography (or some other field). One might reasonably hope for such a break-through on a time-scale of 50-500 years. Plus, of course, a further 5-50 years to make it practical and a couple of years for actual deployment. Even then, it would be no more than a hope; maybe it'll come, maybe it won't.
Sabik - erm, no.
As long as we are analog beings, digital goods will need to be transformed into analog for us to appreciate them. Once they are analog they are functionally free text, and they can thus be transformed back into a digital format and re-distributed.
That's it, really.
Well, yes. However, I'm willing to concede that on a time-scale of 50-500 years, we might invent something that we can't even imagine now.
(Apart from the analog weakness, even the purely digital parts of the mechanism have problems, because they necessarily put the key into the hands of every attacker.)