Yesterday afternoon, I posted some of my current thoughts on the Digital Economy Bill at my now defunct labour party hosted blog. This is I believe a Labour Party members only site and the article hopes to provoke Labour Party members and supporters into campaigning to see this bill defeated or amended. It’s still on the front page so if you want to catchup with my thinking, check it out, especially if you are a Labour MP. …
Wifi and academic freedom
One of the, some would claim unintended, consequences of the DE Bill debate is the fear that public wifi will become impossible. A number of public sector organisations including many Universities, but also hospitals and public libraries are becoming concerned that their current policy of offering free or cheap unauthenticated access to wifi will open them to suit by rights holders or their agents if their nomadic, or mass user base decide to behave in such a way as to incur the attentions of rights holders or their agents. The Government are proposing to give these organisations no protection against the provisions of the DE Bill. …
Against the DE Bill
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. …
Panorama and the DE Bill
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. …
Perhaps it’s not so bad
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
- businesses should not be disconnected, only fined and only if it can be proved they have colluded,
- site filtering should be replaced by borrowing from the US DMCA by implementing take down notices and rights holders and their agents should be fined for vexatious behaviour
- there isn’t a rush, speedy law is usually bad, this can wait ’till after the election but most importantly ’till after a proper debate
The DE Bill, Mark Thomas and BBC Balance
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, …
Filesharing, Economics & Human Rights
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…. …
Free software, fairness and scientists
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. …
Good British Universities
Why is the LSE not one of the top Universities in the world according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities? I scattered some thoughts on the UK Higher Education system in an article on my blog the other month and promised to look and see what Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s methodology thought of, what I thought to be three highly competitive British Universities, i.e. LSE, Sussex and Warwick, which had failed to make the top 100 of their 2007 ranking. I have come to the conclusion that what seems to me an anomaly, illustrates either a flaw in the methodology, or a misuse by me as the ranking’s design goal does not meet my needs. …
Does knowing stuff help?
How important are Universities to the software industry productivity. One would hope fairly high. For various reasons, I have been considering this question and some collaborators pointed me at the Academic Ranking of World Universities which is referenced at Wikipedia as well and I first referred to in this blog last November. This is produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in China. I know that a discussion on ranking methodology may not be very helpful when considering economic growth issues, but there are some quite interesting and surprising results. …