I went over to Westminster earlier this evening to participate in the Open Rights Group’s demo against the Digital Economy Bill. We had a number of speakers from across the political spectrum. I think there’s a growing realisation in the House of Commons that they can’t leave it to the Lords and the Lobbyists.
It’s a long time since I have been on a demo; I was trying to work out what my last one was. …
So, just seen the Panorama article,”Are the Net Police coming for you?”. Interesting! Only Billy Bragg has it right.
Capitalism is killing music.
It’s like confiscating your record players and complaining you aren’t buying music
Music is thriving, it’s the record industry that’s dying on its feet.
The Panorama URL is a BBC iplayer address and so may become unavailable 7 days after its publication. He didn’t say Capitalism is killing music in the show, he said it elsewhere. …
Paul Carr in his column on TechCrunch, wrote an interesting and balanced article on the DE Bill. He argues that, the law is not that bad but that
Mark Thomas is a well known campaigner against corporate lawlessness, greed and against capitalism’s consumption of humanity. He recently made a TV article for the culture show on the Digital Economy Bill, …
In which David first comes across Orange’s adult content filters….
I moved into a rented flat last weekend, it was all a bit exciting because our original plan had been to drive to London with our stuff on the Saturday and drive home on Sunday. We wisely decided not to; the journey to the station, normally 20 minutes took two hours because of the snow. Anyway we got there and moved in. Rented accomodation doesn’t include either phone or broadband so I spoke to BT to get the phones in and since they have lead times it meant that I was without a WiFi LAN at home for the week. It hasn’t been that long since we first got broadband at home but its been very noticeable not having it. …
I have an “Unlimited” download contract with BT Broadband and I received a Fair Usage policy warning in November. It seems that if their “Unlimited” customers look likely to exceed 100Gb download per calendar month, they receive a warning letter, but if they exceed the limit for two months in a row, they’ll restrict the download speed to 1 Mbps for a further month during peak times. (This is 1/7th of the speed I usually get.)
This seems a bit disproportionate to me since online games, and streaming content from the TV companies replayer sites become unusable. What do the think a residential site uses broadband for? Anyway, I rang them to discuss this, and have posted my notes at a new page called BT Broadband, which discusses the fairness, transparancy and management measures. It also has a link to Ofcom’s site. (Further thoughts and notes are held on the BT Home Hub page. ) …
I submitted evidence to the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, (BRERR) on their proposals to regulate illegal file sharing, it said what you’d expect and when I get time to polish the evidence I’ll publish it in White Paper form. It’ll be no surprise that I argue. Get it here…. …
I have just posted my final blog posts to my Sun blog, including one called Free, the right price for software. (Now republished on this blog,as Free, the right price for software.) This uses a Welfare Economics approach to argue that the correct price for software is free. This is designed to be an abstract for an essay I have promised myself, which will also be the basis for my evidence to the UK Government Consultation on regulating and restricting file sharers. This article briefly looks at economic equity, efficiency and academic publication regimes.
Two points that I failed to put in the abstract, are firstly that economists see equity, as in fairness, as having two dimensions and that paying people with the same skills and abilities different amounts is inefficient and thus sub-optimal but arguing about the fairness of paying differently skilled people different amounts is the domain of politics. Efficiency tries to remove considerations of political equity from the model. It’d be interesting to see if this can be worked into the essay; why is Tom Cruise paid so much?
The second issue is that pure science research has to be published, peer-reviewed and refereed before it is adopted. Sharing knowledge for free is what professionals and scientists have been doing for years, why is software and the media any different. I hope to work these questions into the essay. …