The London Mayors and their tax affairs

There has been some complete shite written about Ken Livingstone’s tax affairs; he has replied in this article at the Huffington Post.  Here’s the law. The HMRC insist that people once known as sole traders incorporate themselves and run fully regulated companies so that the might of the Companies Act applies to their record keeping.  As a reward, or inducement, unlike those of us who pay PAYE, they are allowed to evaluate and pay their tax bill a year in arrears. …

Neither the UK, nor the EU should sign ACTA

Red Sin Censura, published an Internet in Danger page the other day, which pointed me at Le Monde’s “What’s wrong with ACTA”. This has been worrying me, since much of the opposition has been based solely on secrecy, although this bleeds into democratic oversight. Since the treaty has been negotiated primarily between democracies and their politicians and public servants, to me secrecy alone is not sufficient to win broad support to opposition to the proposed treaty; there’s a lot of people that trust their politicians. …

I wanna be in the ICE, by the Serious Organised Crimes Agency

The UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, part of the UK’s small national police force and a Home Office QUANGO, undertook a US Government style raid on the web site of rnbxclusive.com, which was reported by Techdirt in an article called “UK Now Seizing Music Blogs (With American Domains) Over Copy Right Claims”. The most startling part of this, for Brits, is the amazing splash screen factoids that greeted visitors to the site, which among other things states that the people behind the site have been arrested under suspicion of fraud, they know who you are (or more accurately, who your ISP is), the penalties for conspiracy to commit fraud and the quote below. The most startling part of this for Yanks and their law enforcement officers is that a foreign law enforcement agency can take down a .com i.e. a US site.

Glyn Moody in a an article called “Serious Organised Crime Agency Takes Down Music Site”, after talking to SOCA states that SOCA are pursuing enquiries to prove, to the point of arrest, that some, their notice said most, of the sound tracks previously available had been obtained pre-release by hacking. This is a crime under UK law and the copyright owners and licensees deserve the protection of the law, as the accused deserve a fair trial.

Arstechnia also comments in an article, entitled “Police: download a file, go to jail for 10 years and pay an “unlimited fine”. They clearly examine the notice and deconstruct the lies and disinformation. The notice includes statements about theft and the economic impact of the downloaders actions. i.e.

“As a result of illegal downloads young, emerging artists may have had their careers damaged. If you have illegally downloaded music from this site, you will have damaged the future of the music industry.”

It’s a disgrace that a law enforcement agency is publishing the BPI’s propaganda. The interests of a copyright licensors and the interests of artists are not synonymous!

Why are the police using our taxes to fund such bullshit? Why use British taxes to fund a free advert pointing at an american registered web site for so-called legal music? How much would that cost on google?

Innocent until proven guilty means that even the most egregious, industrial scale pirates are innocent until proven guilty.

Others have made the point that this notice may well prejudice any trial. I am also informed that the scary spyware doesn’t work with Mac or Chrome. Also IP addresses are private data under UK and European law, the use of the program code that displays the IP address requires a number of compliance actions. Perhaps I’ll check if SOCA registered this use of private data under the Data Protection Act. …

Was the DE Act a Hybrid Bill?

The DE Act was passed during the Parliamentary wash-up. While researching for my blog article, “Copyright in the UK, the next steps”, I looked for some facts on “Hybrid Legislation”, which I had been, wrongly, told was not permitted. I found the BBC’s page on Hybrid Bills, which states Hybrid Legislation is that which affects the public interest, but also specifically the private interests of a person, organisation or community and that interested private parties are entitled to a select committee hearing. So instead of an accelerated passage, a Hybrid Bill requires additional steps in the parliamentary process.

Does the restriction of the “Initial Obligations Code” to six specific internet service provider companies, make the DE Act a Hybrid Bill?

If so, that’s two failures in parliamentary processes that the passage of this bill required. …

In the nick of time, a hero arose

Finally got my thoughts on Sabam vs Scarlett out. This is the first European Court ruling on the copyright trolls attempts to wreck the internet. I have backdated it to November, when it first happened because I want to. The article has obviously been amended as things move on. Please read the full article here.

In summary the Belgian collective rights society, i.e. the private sector organisation that taxes pubs, cafes and jukeboxes on behalf of monoploy capitalism lost its attempt to force Belgum’s biggest ISP to do everything they wanted. The upside is that copyright trolls lost, the downside, they asked for everything and so some of what they want may still be legal.

Further  upside is that the European Court stated that the rights of citizens and ISPs must be balanced with those of copyright holders! This is our hope. …