A source close to the British Labour Government has just given me reliable information about the most radical copyright proposal I've ever seen.

Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson -- or his successor in the next government) the power to make "secondary legislation" (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).

What that means is that an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright. Mandelson elaborates on this, giving three reasons for his proposal:

1. The Secretary of State would get the power to create new remedies for online infringements (for example, he could create jail terms for file-sharing, or create a "three-strikes" plan that costs entire families their internet access if any member stands accused of infringement)

2. The Secretary of State would get the power to create procedures to "confer rights" for the purposes of protecting rightsholders from online infringement. (for example, record labels and movie studios can be given investigative and enforcement powers that allow them to compel ISPs, libraries, companies and schools to turn over personal information about Internet users, and to order those companies to disconnect users, remove websites, block URLs, etc)

3. The Secretary of State would get the power to "impose such duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified in connection with facilitating online infringement" (for example, ISPs could be forced to spy on their users, or to have copyright lawyers examine every piece of user-generated content before it goes live; also, copyright "militias" can be formed with the power to police copyright on the web)

Mandelson is also gunning for sites like YouSendIt and other services that allow you to easily transfer large files back and forth privately (I use YouSendIt to send podcasts back and forth to my sound-editor during production). Like Viacom, he's hoping to force them to turn off any feature that allows users to keep their uploads private, since privacy flags can be used to keep infringing files out of sight of copyright enforcers.

This is as bad as I've ever seen, folks. It's a declaration of war by the entertainment industry and their captured regulators against the principles of free speech, privacy, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence, and competition.

This proposal creates the office of Pirate-Finder General, with unlimited power to appoint militias who are above the law, who can pry into every corner of your life, who can disconnect you from your family, job, education and government, who can fine you or put you in jail.

More to follow, I'm sure, once Open Rights Group and other activist organizations get working on this. In the meantime, tell every Briton you know. If we can't stop this, it's beginning of the end for the net in Britain.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's international policy crimefighting duo, Eddan Katz and Gwen Hinze, have published a scholarly article analyzing the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in light of US law and policy. Called "The Impact of ACTA on the Knowledge Economy," it was recently published in the Yale Journal of International Law, and constitutes a fantastic, reference-heavy resource for understanding just how creepy it is that the Obama administration is sneaking around behind Congress's back (not to mention the backs of the American public) to create a privacy-invading, internet-breaking trade agreement that the US will be bound to bring into its law.

In brief, the ACTA process has been deliberately more secretive than customary practices in international decision-making bodies to evade the debates about intellectual property (IP) at established multilateral institutions. The Office of the USTR has chosen to negotiate ACTA as a sole executive agreement. Because of a loophole in democratic accountability on sole executive agreements, the Office of the USTR can sign off on an IP Enforcement agenda without any formal congressional involvement at all. But the negotiations do not have to be secret, and the sole executive agreement process does have mechanisms for oversight: they have not been used in ACTA, but can and should be.

The excuse for using sole executive agreements is that ACTA will be fully respectful of U.S. law. But the constraint of coloring within the lines of US law, as one anonymous trade official described it, is a fragile linchpin upon which the weight of public trust and democratic legitimacy is bearing down.

Stopping the ACTA Juggernaut

Marilyn sez, "To kick off Geography Awareness Week, National Geographic asked all the senators in Congress to draw their home states freehand. Some of the results are pretty funny!"

(Shown here: Al Franken's cartographically masterful Minnesota rendering)

Senators: Can You Draw Your State? (Thanks, Marilyn!)

A new conservative children's book titled Help! Mom! The Radicals Are Ruining My Country! prominently features Nancy Pelosi as an evil villain. Author Katharine DeBrecht, whom you may have seen on Fox News, explains:

When Nancy Pelosi was elected Speaker of the House all we heard was how wonderful it was that a mother and grandmother rose through the ranks to such a position. In reality, that mother and grandmother has played an enormous role in ensuring that our children and grandchildren are shackled with debt for decades to come.

JZ sez, "The OpenNet Initiative, a joint effort of U. Toronto's Citizen Lab and Harvard's Berkman Center, tracks Internet filtering by governments around the world. We published a book detailing such filtering in 2008 called Access Denied, and the sequel is about to come out, called Access Controlled. ONI colleagues Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinksi were at the Internet Governance Forum today in Egypt, where they hosted a reception about Access Controlled. It featured a poster describing the book. The poster contained the following sentence: The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China's famous 'Great Firewall of China' is one of the first national Internet filtering systems. That was apparently enough to trigger concerns on behalf of the Chinese government, and UN-liveried security guards knocked over the poster and then later removed it."

IGF 2009 event rattled by UN Security Office (Thanks, JZ!)

My last few trips to Canada, I've been puzzled by difficult-to-follow advocacy ads in which the broadcasters and the cable/sat operators have fought each other tooth and nail, begging Canadians to take side in a dispute over -- well, that's the problem. What was it over?

This Writers Guild of Canada YouTube clip does a great job of sorting it out. Both groups receive enormous subsidies to promote Canadian television (broadcasters get a "local programming fee" and cable/sat operators get a state-backed monopoly that keeps foreigners out). Both want more money, and both want the other guy to collect the fee, so they other guy looks like a jerk.

A pox on both their houses.

WGC: "Tv Tax?" "Save Local TV?" Here's the truth! CANADIAN tv! (Thanks, Emily!)

Danny from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Copyright lobbyists often indulge in what's called "policy laundering" -- if you can't get an amendment to copyright in one country, just shop it around until you find somewhere that will take it. Keeping track of changes and variations in over 180 countries and dozens of international venues is a challenge, but necessary if we're going to stop ill-advised copyright law from taking hold and spreading. That's why EFF, librarians, and researchers all around the world have teamed up to start Copyright Watch. We've spent months pooling together every copy of every country's copyright law that we could find. From now on, Copyright Watch will be spotting new changes, identifying quirks and novelties in different laws, and keeping watch at the IP fronter -- wherever in the world that might be."

Copyright Watch collects and monitors copyright laws from all over the world. (Thanks, Danny!)

Prompted by a new GQ article about Ayn Rand (The Bitch is Back with this great illo by John Ritter), our friend Richard Metzger wrote about his relationship with her writing and ideas.

Via mail order I collected single issues of The Objectivist and The Ayn Rand Letter until I had them all and I kept them in bound cases like holy relics. This is what can happen when bright kids read Ayn Rand, they get obsessed, but hopefully, like me, they will grow out of it. Discovering Lenny Bruce, Marx, Marcuse, Crowley, Burroughs and the Firesign Theatre deprogrammed my teenage ass but good and by that time I was 14 and I soon stopped caring about Ayn Rand altogether.

...

It’s Rand’s dialogue that seals her reputation as an author you just can’t take seriously. To be fair, she was writing in her second language, but the problem with her books is that no one actually speaks to one another, they just make speeches at each other. Hectoring, long-winded speeches. It’s fine to read stuff like that as a teenager, but when I crack open one of her books today, I shake my head in disbelief at how bombastic and horrible her writing is.

Ayn Rand Assholes

Here's a 20-minute, must-see lecture on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement -- the secret copyright treaty currently being negotiated, which stands to fatally wound all user-generated content sites from mailing lists to YouTube; which stands to criminalize kids for noncommercial file-sharing; which stands to put your internet connection in jeopardy if anyone in your house is accused of infringement, and much, much more.

The ACTA Threat: My Talk on Everything You Need To Know About ACTA, But Didn't Know To Ask

The MPAA has successfully shut down an entire town's municipal WiFi because a single user was found to be downloading a copyrighted movie. Rather than being embarrassed by this gross example of collective punishment (a practice outlawed in the Geneva conventions) against Coshocton, OH, the MPAA's spokeslizard took the opportunity to cry poor (even though the studios are bringing in record box-office and aftermarket receipts).

Mike LaVigne, IT director, said the number of people who access the Internet using the connection varies widely, from perhaps a dozen people a day to 100 during busy times such as First Fridays and the Coshocton Canal Festival.

It's used by Coshocton County Sheriff's deputies who can park in the 300 block and complete a traffic or incident report without leaving their vehicle. Out-of-town business people can park and use their laptops to make connections.

During festival times, vendors find it a convenience to check the status of credit cards being used to make purchases, LaVigne said.

Because it's a single address used by many people, it's difficult to tell who made the illegal download, although the county plans to investigate the matter .

Illegal movie download forces shutdown of free Wi-Fi (Thanks, Dan!)

Monsters and Rockets sez, "Sesame Street is 40 years old today! In this early clip, Grover and a little boy named Jesse define marriage. It's a cute bit, but the remarkable thing is that given recent headlines this actually plays a lot like a PSA about gay marriage. At no point do Grover and Jesse say that a married couple has to be a man and a woman, and the things they say make up a marriage - kissing, hugging, being friends, helping each other - would apply to any married couple, straight or gay."

Sesame Street: Grover discusses What Is Marriage? (Thanks, Monsters and Rockets!)

The Open Rights Group is collecting "Messages to Mandelson" -- that is, photos and brief textual messages to UK Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, who has proposed that you should lose your access to the Internet if anyone in your household is accused (without proof) of violating copyright law. You can upload your photo and message and let Mandelson know how you feel.

Message Mandelson (Thanks, Jim!)

Remember the BBC's daft plan to put DRM on high-definition broadcasts even though it's illegal for the BBC to put DRM on its broadcasts? Remember when people rose up and sent angry letters to Ofcom, the UK regulator that oversees the BBC's broadcasting activity?

It worked. Ofcom told the BBC to forget about it. Score one for the good guys. Give yourselves several pats on the back.

Meanwhile: the Beeb should be ashamed of itself. Especially for this disingenuous smear-job they published after I wrote about this ridiculous plan in the Guardian.

Ofcom received a large number of responses to this consultation, in particular from consumers and consumer groups, who raised a number of potentially significant consumer 'fair use' and competition issues that were not addressed in our original consultation. In view of these responses we have decided not to approve a multiplex licence change without giving these issues further consideration. We remain keen to support the successful introduction of HD services on the DTT platform and are willing to consider a further round of consultation on the licence amendment if you could provide more information and evidence in the following three areas:

1. The anticipated benefits to citizens and consumers, and to the DTT platform, of the proposed approach;

2. How you propose to address the potential disadvantages to citizens and consumers associated with the impact on the receiver market under the proposed approach;

3. An explanation of potential alternative approaches that would impact less on the receiver market, and the extent to which those alternatives would be able to deliver similar outcomes and benefits for citizens and consumers.

We are keen to provide early clarity on the licence amendment to all stakeholders affected by the DVB-T2, MPEG 4, HDTV upgrade on the DTT platform and would welcome your early response on these three issues. Until we reach a final decision on the licence amendment the HD service information broadcast on Multiplex B should be provided in a free to air format. If Huffman compression is used then the related tables should be made available to receiver manufacturers without the need for a licence for Huffman look-up tables from the BBC.

HD on DTT content management proposals (PDF) (Thanks, Glyn!)

Dan Gillmor sez, "Slow food was a great idea. Maybe we need 'slow news' in an era of accelerating -- and wrong -- information."

Like many other people who've been burned by believing too quickly, I've learned to put almost all of what journalists call "breaking news" into the categories of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, "interesting if true." That is, even though I gobble up "the latest" from a variety of sources, the closer the information is in time to the actual event, the more I assume it's unreliable if not false.

It's my own version of "slow news" -- an expression I first heard on Friday, coined by my friend Ethan Zuckerman in a wonderful riff off the slow-food movement. We were at a Berkman Center for Internet & Society retreat in suburban Boston, in a group discussion of ways to improve the quality of what we know when we have so many sources from which to choose at every minute of the day...

But this isn't about saving the old guard. It's mostly about persuading audiences to, among other things, "take a deep breath" before leaping to conclusions, as PaidContent's Staci Kramer tweeted. (I don't trust journalists to do this anymore, with too few exceptions.)

In a practical sense, we can help it along if we find ways to preserve a happy by-product of the manufacturing process. Or, as Clay puts it in an email, "the idea -- that we have to get back, by design, the kinds of things we used to get as side-effects of the environment -- is so important right now, and especially for news."

Toward a Slow-News Movement (Thanks, Dan!)

Christian sez, "Just now it has been announced in the press by the official Danish Anti-Piracy agency, Antipiratgruppen, that they are throwing in the towel and will seize their operations completely; to find and prosecute music copyright offenders. Here is a translation of the first published article in today's Danish press."

"We have to, because it is has been announced by the state court, that it takes very strong and concrete evidence to have these people prosecuted. We have simply not been able to establish the necessary evidence..."

An overview of Danish trials shows an extremely small possibility of getting sentenced - unless the the accused confesses. Four principal state court trials last year lead to three acquittals and only a single sentence for illegal file sharing. And this sentence only came into place because

"Out of the four cases we can establish, that the courts do not sentence owners of Internet connections simply because of technical identification of IP-adresses and technical recognition of files," they say.

Danish anti-piracy agency throw in the towel (Thanks, Christian!)

Michael Geist sez, "The latest round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (the secret copyright treaty) talks have now wrapped up with the usual bland press release confirming that the talks focused on Internet and criminal enforcement, indicating that the next meeting will be in Mexico in January 2010, and pledging to complete the treaty as quickly as possible. More interesting is the unofficial release - the leaked document that provided the information on what the Internet enforcement chapter actually says."

The Leaked ACTA Document (Thanks, Michael!)

You might have seen that the EU's "Telecoms Package" squeaked through with some protection for users' rights intact -- specifically, the proposal to allow "3-strikes" rules (whereby everyone in your house would lose internet access if any member was accused, without trial, of copyright infringement) was killed. But it's not as good as it could be, nor as good as it was before the content industry's lobbyists got their chums to rewrite it.

Jérémie Zimmemrmann writes,

The European Parliament and the Council of the EU came to an agreement on the "Telecoms Package" negotiations. They laid down legal and procedural guarantees against restrictions of Internet access. The new provision gives[1] "effective judicial protection and due process", guarantees "the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy" and the respect of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

However, the text only speaks of "a prior fair and impartial procedure" instead of a prior ruling by the judicial authorities, guaranteed by the original "amendment 138", and contains loopholes and ambiguities. The invalidation of freedom-killer measures such as "three strikes policies" will now depend on interpretation by the European Court of Justice and national courts. Moreover, the text only relates to measures taken by Member States and thereby fails to bar telecom operators and entertainment industries from knocking down the founding principle of Net neutrality.

Europe only goes half-way in protecting Internet rights.

Michael Geist sez, "According to the official agenda, in a few hours the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement talks will continue on the Internet provisions and then move into the criminal provisions chapter. It is worth highlighting the ongoing criminal provisions as well. As previously leaked, the U.S. and Japan supplied the initial text for this chapter. Their proposal included extending criminal enforcement to both (1) cases of a commercial nature; and (2) cases involving significant willful copyright and trademark infringement even where there is no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain. In other words, non-commercial infringement could lead to criminal penalties. Plus, jail time for unauthorized camcording of films and even for fake DVD and CD packaging."

ACTA Negotiations, Day Two: What's On Tap (Thanks, Michael!)

James Hughes sez, "The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies is holding a seminar on the 'Biopolitics of Popular Culture' December 4, 2009 in Irvine, California. The seminar will explore the biopolitics that are implicit in depictions of the future, enhanced humans and emerging technology in literature, film, gaming and television. Speakers include Annalee Newitz, Richard Kadrey, Natasha Vita-More and Jamais Cascio, as well as writers for TV and film, game designers, artists and culture critics."

Biopolitics of Popular Culture Seminar (Thanks, Jim!)

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

• * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

• * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

• * That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

• * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

The ACTA Internet Chapter: Putting the Pieces Together

Next: More on secret copyright treaty: your kids could go to jail for noncommercial music sharing

I pulled up my sample ballot for Minneapolis elections today, and found something absolutely fabulous. Take a look at the second-from-last candidate. Specifically, his party affiliation. God, I love this town. The ballot just gets better when you know what an Edgertonite is.

I've written before here about the impact that Sue Townsend's comic Adrian Mole novels have had on my life since I was a young teenager, so it'll come as no surprise to learn that I was completely delighted by the latest volume, Adrian Mole: the Prostrate Years, which is sweeter, darker, more sentimental and more grim than the earlier installments.

For the uninitiated, the Adrian Mole books chronicle the life of a young man born near Leicester, whose dysfunctional family, intellectual impulses, gormless bumbling and terrible poetry make for a meaty, multi-volume series that serves as a wicked history of Britain and the world since the 1980s.

In the latest volume, Adrian is nearly 40, and is increasingly estranged from his (latest) wife, the mysterious and sexy Daisy, who seduced Adrian in Weapons of Mass Destruction. Their five year old is a High-School Musical-crazed monster, their finances are in tatters, and they're living with Adrian's elderly parents in their converted pigsty. Adrian's mother is writing a fictionalized agony memoir called A Girl Called Shit, and the lovely bookstore Adrian works at is going bust. And there's something wrong with Adrian's prostate, a problem compounded by all the friends and acquaintances who insist on calling it a "prostrate."

And yet, there's plenty that's sweet here. Adrian is figuring out fatherhood. His childhood flame, Pandora Braithwaite (now an MP) is back in his life. His half-brother Brett is back, his career as a hedge-fund manager in ruins. His son, Glenn, on deployment in Afghanistan, is shaping up to be a critically minded sharp young man. And Bernard, the alcoholic librophile who's helping out at the store, turns out to have quite a good approach to life that Adrian stands to learn much from.

Reading these books every year or two is a magic experience. Townsend recounts and recasts recent history in a way that makes you realize just how funny and tragic it all is. Townsend's vision has recently failed her, but she continues to write these books at an amazing clip. It's a real inspiration, as well as superb entertainment.

Adrian Mole: the Prostrate Years

Entire Adrian Mole series

Lobbyists at the EU have gutted the definition of "open" (part of a proposal to require more open standards and open source tools in European government) to mean "the willingness of persons, organisations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge." This meaningless drivel replaces a more robust definition that included, "The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.)."

According to this line of thinking, if everyone were forced to use Microsoft Word for document interchange, then that would provide interoperability. Except that it wouldn't, because interoperability implies at least two *different* things are are operating together: self-interoperability is trivial. Version 2's "homogeneity" is better described as a monopoly and a monoculture - and the last two decades have taught just how dangerous those are.

It's not hard to see why some companies might prefer the wording of Version 2. Version 1 specifically says: "The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis." This would allow alternative implementations from the free software community, which is unable to pay royalties. The current wording, which allows patented, proprietary solutions as part of the "open continuum" would mean that free software could not compete. How convenient.

EU Wants to Re-define "Closed" as "Nearly Open" (via /.)

Digby does a great job of rounding up the criticisms of outspoken Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson, who is being pilloried for such rhetorical crimes a calling Enron lobbyists "whores" (yes, it's an insult to whores, but that's not what's got some people upset):

You see, it's one thing for Republicans to give speeches on the floor of the House saying that Democrats want to murder the elderly or that they plan to create sex clinics and force teenage girls to have abortions. That is simply folksy language these people use to communicate with their people. When Newt Gingrich blamed Susan Smith's murdering of her own children on liberalism, Lady Frothenberg understood that it was harmless hyperbole. When Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and the rest of the conservative movement leadership say daily that Barack Obama is a black racist who hates America, it's simply their way, and we all understand that it is just entertainment for the masses who require this type of crude stimulation.

But when one calls a former Enron lobbyist a K-Street whore on an obscure radio show, one has simply gone too far, sirrah, and it will not be tolerated.

There will be a town hall meeting this evening led by Pastor Dick Cheney to discuss the possibility of witches in the village and what types of enhanced interrogation might be used to determine the breadth of the infiltration. Our deep sense of decency, morality and civility demand it. And thank you once again, Lady Frothenberg, for bringing this egregious breach of proper behavior to our attention.

Whatever the rest of you do, don't encourage this miscreant Alan Grayson to do more of this boorish behavior by donating money at his crude web site: Congressmanwithguts.com. If you do, I certainly hope you don't plan on being invited into the any of the finer homes and establishments in the Village because you just aren't welcome there!

Lady Frothenberg Laces Up Her Corset (via Making Light)

French copyfighter Jérémie Zimmermann sez,

The negotiations on the Telecoms Package may come to a close this Wednesday. The Council of the European Union is still pushing for 'three strikes"' policies in Europe but is also attempting to allow private corporations to restrict citizens' Internet access. Will the European Parliament continue to hide behind a disputable legal argumentation provided by the rapporteur Catherine Trautmann, and accept the unacceptable for the future of Internet access in Europe?

A campaign page has been set up to allow everyone to contact Members of the European Parliament and urge them to refuse any proposal from the Council allowing "three strikes" policies in Europe, and to explicitly protect EU citizens' freedom to access the Net.

The new version of the compromise amendment presented by the Council of the EU still allows for restrictions of Internet access such as "three strikes" policies in Europe. Moreover, contrarily to the Parliament's version, the Council's proposal also permits private corporations to restrict Internet access, notably enabling entertainment industries to pressure Internet service providers in order to police the Net.

(Thanks, Jérémie!)

I'm giving two talks in the UK this week -- the first in Cambridge, as part of the Arcadia Seminar, held at Robinson College; the second is at Sheffield, as part of the DocFest premiere of RIP: A Remix Manifesto, a documentary on copyfighting and art that features some interviews with me. Hope to see you at them!

Cambridge: 3 November 2009, 6PM
Arcadia Seminar: 3rd Nov. "Thinking Like a Dandelion: Cory Doctorow on copyright, Creative Commons and creativity"
Umney Theatre, Robinson College, Cambridge. Please email mh569@cam.ac.uk if you are planning to attend.

Sheffield: 5 November 2009, 2:25PM-4:30PM
RiP! A Remix Manifesto
Showroom 1, Sheffield DocFest (tickets)

Update: CORRECTION -- I'm at Sheffield Doc/Fest from 1425h-1630h, not 1600-1800h as previously stated!

A new British independent poll conducted by Ipsos Mori concluded that the people who do the most illegal downloading also buy the most music. This is in line with many other studies elsewhere and is easy to understand: people who are music superfans do more of everything to do with music: they see more live shows, listen to more radio, buy more CDs, buy more botlegs of live shows, buy more t-shirts, talk about music more, do more downloading -- all of it.

And of course, these are the people the music industry's supergeniuses have set their sights upon for bizarre enforcement regimes like the one that British Business Secretary Peter Mandelson has promised: anyone who lives in a house that generates three or more copyright infringement notices will be barred from Internet access.

"The latest approach from the Government will not help prop up an ailing music industry. Politicians and music companies need to recognise that the nature of music consumption has changed, and consumers are demanding lower prices and easier access," said Peter Bradwell, from the think-tank Demos, which commissioned the new poll conducted by Ipsos Mori.

However, music industry figures insist the figures offer a skewed picture. The poll suggested the Government's plan to disconnect illegal downloaders if they ignore official warning letters could deter people from internet piracy, with 61 per cent of illegal downloaders surveyed admitting they would be put off downloading music illegally by the threat of having their internet service cut off for a month.

"The people who file-share are the ones who are interested in music," said Mark Mulligan of Forrester Research. "They use file-sharing as a discovery mechanism. We have a generation of young people who don't have any concept of music as a paid-for commodity," he continued. "You need to have it at a price point you won't notice."

Illegal downloaders 'spend the most on music', says poll (Thanks, Libbi!)

Update here, with Q&A.

Rachel Maddow, host of all that is worth watching on television, very kindly invited me back to The Rachel Maddow Show tonight for a "Moment of Geek" on the big ICANN news today: starting soon, domain name extensions will be available in non-Latin character sets. Chinese, Greek, Arabic, or any one of the more than 20 official languages in India. In other words, the alphabet you're reading this blog post in will no longer be the default for web addresses.

You can watch the video here.

When Ms. Maddow's team invited me in earlier today, the first thing I did was phone Hong Kong-based journalist and global 'net culture researcher Rebecca MacKinnon (Twitter: @rmack), who was in Seoul attending the big ICANN meeting. She has written extensively on this topic, and helped me parse the news.

First up for the "non-Latin" extensions? Country-specific domain names (.cn for China, for instance). Later on, everything else (.com and the like). Don't expect to see "dot china" in Chinese characters right away, explained Rebecca: starting November 16, registrars can begin to apply, but it'll be a while before the domains show up in the wild.

Some US tech reporters covering the news ran with but what about meeee! headlines. "This is a bad day for the English language," wrote one. Well, someone call the whaambulance -- it's an awesome day if you read in Farsi or Hebrew. It's not about our language, it's about the languages spoken by the next billion people to come online, and most of them don't speak English or write in a language based on our Latin character set.

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Boing Boing readers may remember a year ago when the great State of Oregon asserted copyright over the Oregon Revised Statutes, sending take-down notices prohibiting reuse by Justia and Public.Resource.Org. In a shining example of democracy, the legislature held hearings, heard us out, and unanimously waived copyright on the laws. The results of opening up the law were pretty spectacularly demonstrated when a 2nd-year law student, Robb Shecter, created the beautiful OregonLaws.Org (compare to the official site for a night and day look).

Well, those copyright assertions are back, this time by the Attorney General, who asserted ownership over the (for real!) Attorney General's Public Record and Public Meeting Manual. I spent last week in Oregon meeting with law school faculty and giving lectures at 3 universities on the topic of who owns the law.

The results have been compiled into a formal pleading which we are submitting to the Attorney General for his consideration. He seems like a good guy, and we've asked him to issue an official Attorney General Opinion on when the state may assert copyright, covering not only his Public Meeting manual, but also the Secretary of State's Administrative Rules, the Fire Marshall's Fire Code, and the Building Codes. We have quite a few of those documents already on line, so there is an actual issue on the table and we're hoping he'll do the research and make a ruling.

The Oregon Question (Thanks, Carl!)

I have an op-ed in today's Times about the British plan to disconnect people from the internet if someone in their home is accused -- without proof -- of infringing copyright, and how utterly unjust this is.

Even more radical is the Mandelson proposal to disconnect entire families from the internet if a single member -- or a neighbour who uses their internet connection -- is accused, without proof, of violating copyright. Leave aside the fundamental injustice of collective punishment, a practice so abhorrent that it is outlawed in the Geneva Convention; think instead of the utter disproportionality of this.

The internet is an integral part of our children's education; it's critical to our employment; it's how we stay in touch with distant relatives. It's how we engage with government. It's the single wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. It isn't just a conduit for getting a few naughty free movies, it is the circulatory system of the information age.

Denying physics won't save the video stars

Rishab sez, "Knowledge Ecology International is organising a petition to President Obama to make the US position in negotiations on the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement transparent to the public. Boing Boing readers may remember previous posts on ACTA, the 'throw people in jail for sharing' agreement being developed in secret by rich countries who find the semi-public consultations in forums like WIPO tiresome."

Obama's administration has refused to disclose the drafts of ACTA on the grounds of "national security" (yes, really!), but we know from leaks and memos that it includes universal surveillance of the net; mandatory loss of Internet connections without trial for households where one member is accused of violating copyright; and a duty to search your laptop and personal devices at the border for infringing material.

Petition to President Obama, regarding transparency of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Thanks, Rishab!)

Glyn sez, "TalkTalk, the second largest internet service provider in the UK, has threatened to launch legal action if the government implements three strikes [ed: the plan by which whole households will be disconnected from the net if one member is accused of violating copyright]. They claimed the government's plan was based on users being 'guilty until proven innocent.'

"The approach is based on the principle of 'guilty until proven innocent' and substitutes proper judicial process for a kangaroo court,"

"We know this approach will lead to wrongful accusations."

TalkTalk threatens legal action over Mandelson's filesharing plan (Thanks, Glyn!)

Lord Mandelson, Britain's business secretary, has promised to create a system of collective punishment without judicial review for people accused -- but not convicted -- of illegal file-sharing. Under Mandelson's proposal, anyone living in the same house as someone who has been accused of three acts of infringement will be denied access to the Internet (at the expense of their education, employment, and access to government, health information, distant relatives, etc) even though no judge has reviewed any evidence or wrongdoing, let alone entering a judgement.

Hilariously, Mandelson expects that this will work to reduce file-sharing. Similar measures -- removing websites without judicial oversight, mass lawsuits, even industry-wide prohibitions on whole classes of legitimate technology -- have totally failed to reduce infringement in the 14 years since the first WIPO Copyright Treaty. Indeed, these increasingly Draconian measures have merely deepened the alienation that the public feels from copyright -- to the detriment of all rightsholders.

But, for unspecified reasons, Mandelson believes that cutting whole families off from the information society on the strength of unsubstantiated accusations will cause them to embrace the copyright industries and buy their products.

"It must become clear that the days of consequence-free widespread online infringement are over," Mandelson said. "Technical measures will be a last resort and I have no expectation of mass suspensions resulting."

The legislation is expected to come into force in April next year.

The effectiveness of the warning letters to persistent illegal filesharers will be monitored for the first 12 months. If illegal filesharing has not dropped by 70% by April 2011, then cutting off people's internet connections could be introduced three months later, from the summer of that year.

Lord Mandelson sets date for blocking filesharers' internet connections (Thanks, Brady!)

A Harvard psych study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology shows that when people are present during torture, they gradually come to believe the torture victim is guilty as a way of assuaging their consciences for their complicity in torture:

Participants in the study met a woman suspected of cheating to win money. The woman was then "tortured" by having her hand immersed in ice water while study participants listened to the session over an intercom. She never confessed to anything, but the more she suffered during the torture, the guiltier she was perceived to be...

"Our research suggests that torture may not uncover guilt so much as lead to its perception," says Gray. "It is as though people who know of the victim's pain must somehow convince themselves that it was a good idea -- and so come to believe that the person who was tortured deserved it."

Not all torture victims appear guilty, however. When participants in the study only listened to a recording of a previous torture session -- rather than taking part as witnesses of ongoing torture -- they saw the victim who expressed more pain as less guilty. Gray explains the different results as arising from different levels of complicity.

"Those who feel complicit with the torture have a need to justify the torture, and so link the victim's pain to blame," says Gray. "On the other hand, those distant from torture have no need to justify it and so can sympathize with the suffering of the victim, linking pain to innocence."

Pain Of Torture Can Make Innocent Seem Guilty

Thug life, Kabul-style, courtesy of American tax dollars. The New York Times reports that "Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country's booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials."

A related story out in tomorrow's paper covers the push for more US troops in Afghanistan's cities and agricultural areas, where the poppies that support the Taliban are cash crop numero uno.

Boing Boing readers: wonder what kind of cellphone he's using in the photo above? Better yet: your caption, please! A brick of CIA-funded heroin to the winner, but you'll have to fly to Bagram to pick it up. [ via Wired Danger Room on Twitter. ]

Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic writes in with this update on the "Yes Men pwn the US Chamber of Commerce" story I blogged about last week, which Cory further updated here. Michael says,

Kate Sheppard [of Mother Jones] was at the fake US Chamber of Commerce press conference in DC where a Yes Man, posing as a Chamber rep, claimed the Chamber was reversing its draconian position on climate change, which has caused lots of big Chamber members -- Apple, Nike, Exelon, and others -- to quit the national business group. But then a REAL Chamber PR man arrived at the meeting to declare it a fraud. (And Sheppard ended up on Maddow that night).

Today, Sheppard reports that the Chamber is suing its impersonators: "The defendants are not merry pranksters tweaking the establishment," the Chamber said in a press release issued with the suit. "Instead, they deliberately broke the law in order to further commercial interest in their books, movies, and other merchandise."

Mother Jones stories on the US Chamber (here's an index):
* Chamber Sues Yes Men
* Chamber Uses Yes Men 'Attack' to Fundraise

Here's a related item in the New Yorker.

Image: by Wikimedia Commons user Tavis used under a CC License

A new augmented reality app from Layar allows Android and iPhone 3GS users to view recovery.gov contract dollars at play work in the real world.

Image above: an example of what those happy blue bailout bubbles look like, bouncing about on the thoroughly bailed-out streets of Washington, DC. My only criticism so far (I haven't tried the apps): instead of blue circles as representational icons, the designers really should have chosen taxpayers' tears. Snip:

Layar is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the movie theatre you're trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. If you have an iPhone 3GS or Android device you can install the Layar app for free and then search for "recovery" or "sunlight" within Layar to find this layer. The layer works best near large cities where you are most likely to find recovery contracts.

Recovery.gov Augmented Reality Mashup [Sunlight Labs, via Micah Sifry]

Layar Reality Browser [Layar]

Michael from the Open Rights Group sez, "Open Rights Group has lined up Bruce Schneier for its next fundraiser event on Friday 4 December. The title is 'The Future of Privacy: Rethinking Security Trade-offs' and he'll be explaining why data is the pollution problem of the information age and how we should deal with it."

We live in a unique time in our technological history. The cameras are ubiquitous, but we can still see them. ID checks are everywhere, but we still know they're going on. Computers inherently generate personal data, and everyone leaves an audit trail everywhere they go.

Bruce Schneier, internationally-renowned cryptographer, technologist and author, will share his vision of current and future technologies' effects on privacy. Schneier rejects the traditional "security vs. privacy" dichotomy in favor of a more subtle and realistic one.

Data is the pollution problem of the information age and we need to start thinking about how to deal with it.

When? Doors open at 1830, Friday 4 December 2009

Where? St Albans Centre, 18 Brooke St, London, London EC1N 7RD (More info here)

Come see Bruce Schneier talk in London (Thanks, Michael!)

Over the weekend, the White House new media team announced (via AP) that whitehouse.gov now runs on the open source content management system Drupal. Tim O'Reilly puts this news into context:

This move is obviously a big win for open source. As John Scott of Open Source for America (a group advocating open source adoption by government, to which I am an advisor) noted in an email to me: "This is great news not only for the use of open source software, but the validation of the open source development model. The White House's adoption of community-based software provides a great example for the rest of the government to follow."

John is right. While open source is already widespread throughout the government, its adoption by the White House will almost certainly give permission for much wider uptake. Particularly telling are the reasons that the White House made the switch

Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal [radar.oreilly.com]

British journalist Matt Salusbury decided to investigate the information that the London police had gathered on him as part of their intimidation campaign against activists and protestors -- the Met spends over GBP9MM/year gathering "intelligence" on nonviolent, noncriminal demonstrators -- and discovered a file filled with paranoid notes about his presence at lawful public gatherings.

I don't really understand how or why the Met has become so pants-wettingly scared of peaceful protest. I have spent my life in various protest movements, and can count the number of violent or out-of-control demonstrations I've seen on the fingers of one hand, and in every instance, the loss of control began when the police decided to suddenly and forcefully break up the event.

Now Salusbury has produced a guide to getting your file from the London cops. Something we should all do, I think.

This all seems part of the change in the British government seeing its role as representing people to seeing its role as managing people.

After two Data Protection Act requests to the police, I'm bemused rather than outraged to discover 17 extant entries on me in the Metropolitan police's Crimint (criminal intelligence) database. I feature in the database because I was "seen" or "observed" at various public events. In Crimint's most recently recorded entry on me in 2007, I was stopped and searched approaching an arms fair protest that I was reporting on, and found to have my press card on me. There is no suggestion in any of my Crimint reports of any remotely criminal activity.

My Crimint database entries suggest that the Met's forward intelligence team (FIT) are interested in who's turning up to anti-arms fair demos and what they're doing there, which journalists are covering protests, and who's with the volunteer legal observers who monitor and gather evidence on arrests and other police activity on demos (usually from a safe distance). In most of my Crimint reports, I seem to be of interest to the police because I'm taking an interest in them. Much of their data is alarmingly inaccurate or poorly recorded, they get basic facts - like the colours of my bike and rucksack - wrong, and one Crimint entry finished in mid-sentence.

FIT surveillance is deliberately obvious, its "overt surveillance" carried out by police in uniform, or by uniformed civilian photographers hired by the Met. To me, it looks as if their attention's aimed at ensuring that new faces don't feel like showing up on demos or actions again, that pub landlords and other venue managers become reluctant to let activist groups use their meeting spaces, or that bands get cold feet about playing at anti-capitalist benefit gigs again... One entry on my Crimint file records a conversation I had with a City police officer back in 2002, who seemed preoccupied by me "taking note of officer's shoulder numbers", and that's a pretty good place to start. Most data I've got out of the police is the result of me scribbling down a note of the shoulder number of the police officers who have photographed me or appeared to take notes about me, the time and location, and what event they were policing, and putting these details in a letter requesting this "personal information", invoking the Data Protection Act

Protesting against police tactics

On today's episode of the Search Engine podcast, Jesse Brown talks to Konrad von Finckenstein, Canada's chief telecoms regulator -- the man who brought down the recent ruling allowing Canadian ISPs to throttle their users. In the interview, Commissioner von Finckenstein arrogantly dismisses Canadians who are threatened by this ruling as "Internet hogs" and pretends that he hasn't heard any of the research that shows Canada is badly lagging the rest of the developed world in Internet access, paying far more to get far less than others, despite the enormous public subsidy Canada's ISPs have received in the form of exclusive rights-of-way and access to taxpayer-built infrastructure. He also purports to know nothing of the existing abusive policies used by Canada's big ISPs. If this is the man running Canada's Internet policy, it's no wonder that Canada's net is in such sorry shape.

The Neutral Throttle? An interview with CRTC Chairman Konrad von Finckenstein

MP3 link

Davide sez, "Guess how Italian politicians take care of comments on YouTube against them? On 22 October, Cuffaro laid charges with regard to the first 4609 comments on a video clip on You Tube, entitled 'Costanzo Show: Totò Cuffaro aggredisce Giovanni Falcone' (video clip posted on You Tube on 14 January 2007). Antonio Di Pietro decided to pay defence for all."

We will defend you all from Cuffaro (Thanks, Davide!)

Boing Boing reader Ken Ward caught Friday's Rachel Maddow Show segment, in which I joined Ms. Maddow for a discussion around John McCain's "Internet Freedom Act."

McCain, who once described himself as technologically "illiterate" and is the single largest senate recipient of telecom lobby money, is now campaigning against the net neutrality fundamentals recently reaffirmed by FCC actions.

Our reader suggests another reason McCain is dead-wrong: "At the risk of sounding like a dinosaur, I have to point out that McCain's positions is, in fact, a danger to National Security." Ken's email to Boing Boing, after the jump. Your thoughts welcomed in the comments.