Blogs The government is as clueless as the music industry about the Internet

Phil Wilson voted in favour of the bill, the ****. And yes, I had written to him explaining some of the problems with the bill.

Right, because the right to privacy and sane regulation over who controls my data pipe and the powers they have completely doesn't factor into my views. I couldn't care less about the ability for the government to sensor any website they feel like. ****, I wish I lived in China.


And it appears the Labour government is clueless about networking - or at least they don't know the difference between a bit and a byte.

 

You're datapipe?? You lease your phone line, you don't own it.

On the privacy issue; there are ~18.5 million households in the UK, most of which will have an internet connection. This is in addtion to the thousands of businesses/services/education facilites etc. which have huge numbers of workstations connected to the internet and you are worried that somebody is watching you? Get real.

 

I think it's a shame that very few MPs turned up to debate and then vote on the issue, however I do stand by the point that if an MP isn't interested / doesn't understand all the issues at hand (which is another issue entirely), then they shouldn't vote on it.

Obviously I'm not suggesting that all the Labour MPs who turned up to push it through (I suspect mainly at the behest of the whips) had actually read and understood more than a small portion of it!

lacuna: for what it's worth, I did lobby my MPs (both my MP at home, and Roberta Blackman-Woods in Durham), but only heard anything from Vince Cable. I got a very interesting reply from Dr. Cable, saying that the Lib Dems wouldn't support it unless it was heavily amended, and to their credit, all the Lib Dem MPs who turned up voted against it, but I was disappointed that he didn't bother to vote at all.

 

actually yes i did write to my local (labour) MP but heard no reply from him

this and a few other things have me as a genuinely undecided leaning towards conservatives atm

 

Owning or renting, there's no difference (the government don't own it either) as I'm paying for a private connection. You lease your phone line too, does that mean you'd be happy for your neighbour to listen in to all your calls too, because you don't own the line?

For all intents and purposes, if you pay for something, while you're paying, you own it.

 

No, leasing is not like owning. Leasing a phone line is not dissimilar to paying road tax and driving on the public highway. You wouldn't say that you owned the road because you paid your tax. In both situations you pay for the right to use the infrastructure provided by BT or the Government. It is now the case that both types of infrastructure are monitored and governed by 3rd parties (ISP's and the police).

When the two are compared in terms of punishment for misuse the 'unfairness' of the 3 strike policy for the internet seems trivial. You could, by process of accumulation, lose your driving licence by speeding or suffer an immediate ban for a serious offence. The additional fines and costs make this far more severe than just losing your connection.

This law was brought about because we, as a populous, apparently do not have the ability to control ourselves when it comes to downloading copyrighted material.

 

I get fed up with all the car analogies. Why not say something like.. I dunno.. when you sign up to rent a storage space, you agree to not store bombs, gas cylinders or body parts. Then you go against the policy set and decide the zombie you killed the other night is starting to whiff a bit, so you disguise it and store it in your rented/leased storage space.

After a while, obviously it's going to be noticable.

Similar enough to constantly downloading music/films/games/cars illegally?

 

I can't believe the shortsightedness of the people defending the actions of parliament, or the terms of guilt in this case. To be honest, the only thing that citizens of the UK can now do to ensure that they're not being consistently monitored by the greedy dogs of war online, is to stick everything through a Tor pipe.

Oh, and what stops you from getting "banned" from the internet if your computer gets infected with a virus, and downloads the material to distribute to themselves?

 

As glad as I am that I'm not in the UK, I'm more scared if the US pulls this on us.

The problem is first of all enforcement and classification of said crime, not all P2P sharing is a crime firstly and the thing is we can't really classify it anyhow.

At any rate, the out of proportion for theft of INTELLECTUAL property is insane as it is.

 

Because that analogy isn't set in reality, nor does it have sufficient similarities to the case in hand.

I chose to compare the internet and the public highway because they are both forms of national infrastructure that the public can lease the right to use.

 

Okay, how about if you had 3 zombies then?

It'd have to be a fair sized lockup that you leased though. I mean, if one was a boomer that hadn't boomed, that's going to cost an arm and a leg to store. Mind, it wouldn't be there for long as I guess it wouldn't be long before it did boom and the bile would surely seep under the door. Hmm..

 

It isn't? Since when? The 3,594 people who have read the "The weapons you would use at your last stand against a legion of zombies" thread and the 1,634 people who have been reading and listening to the " The songs you would play at your last stand against a legion of zombies" thread as well as the 8,733 people who have been reading the "What's your Zombie Plan?" thread are not going to be impressed if you have scientific proof that zombies don't exist.

Oh, also theres a guy looking for you, he says he's a lawyer from something called Umbrella Corp?




Edit : I just realised this forum is seriously into Zombies!

 

Road tax didn't even exist when German tank rolled into Poland. VED covers your car not the road you drive on. The roads are paid for either from general taxation or local council tax depending on the road. The Zombie analogy was more grounded than this fantasy that car tax is used entirely for the upkeep of the moonscape that is the average British road.

 

It is completely irrelevant what amount of money is spent on the roads or even where the money originates from as these issues have no impact upon the validity of the analogy. I can't see where the link with WW2 fits in at all. The point is that if you want to drive on the public highway in a car then you have to pay, just like if you want to use the internet on the telephone network you also have to pay.

 

Wrong again! If you want to own a car you must pay VED (with some exceptions) or keep it off the public highway. If one wants to use the public highway one must only go for a walk or a bike. If one wants to drive on the highway then one could rent a car, drive a pre 1973 car, drive a governmental vehicle....
Please make sure your analogies are correct, the road network is paid for from general taxation there for it is completely different from the leasing of a private phone line or broadband connection from a private company.

/pedantry.


For your general ignorance Road Tax was stopped in 1937, before WWII broke out.

 

It is not just the internet this is how they do everything.

 

We all pay for our phone lines and internet connection. I pay €29.99 + cost of calls. Every month, on the dot - no stealing from me, no sir-ee.

The only car analogy I can see work is when you lease a car (like you lease a phone line): the car isn't your property, but you'd be pretty pissed if the leasing company went through your wallet whenever it's in the car; or if you'd have to have a body search every time you wanted to enter the car (just to make sure you're not going to blow it up).

I pay for my internet connection (and DRM-free media). I don't want my taxes (as they do now in France) to be used to spy on what I do online.
If the internet was 99% pedophiles exchanging pictures, I would agree to surveillance - now it's 99% normal guys jacking it to adult pictures, so there's no need to treat us all like criminals (serial masturbators, though...). As a decent, law-abiding, tax-overpaying citizen, I find this really ****ign insulting, and I'd rather have a daily kick in the balls from Ass of the Republic Sarkozy himself.

 

its amazing how some people are so ignorant!!!

1. internet is invented by the people for the people! and i dont mean what was created for in the beginning connecting 2 computers blah blah! i mean this is one huge network created by people! therefore i fail to see how the government has any rights on it... but that's completely different story!

2. I do not understand why people continue to believe is for their own good? its not! i would very much would love for these people to share their address online so someone demonstrates how easy it is to frame you for downloading! this is done for the benefit of the companies... companies that obviously bribe lords and mp's and what not!

3. fences are meant to keep people in since they have never done a good job to keep people out! this ban is stupid and i hate to see taxes i pay go to such a waste! if i want to download something i will.... get a VPN encrypt and download as much as i want... HA-HA-HA! just made all their debate pointless!

4. car tax and internet is unbelievably far fetched analogy... this just goes to prove how short-sighted people can be! internet is the internet and nothing else! there are different ways there and these ways have to regulate laws! you cant simply copy and paste laws to accommodate this and that! if it was that easy we might as well copy and paste from the beginning! murder = murder-------- 500 years later----- pirated song = death sentence!

this is a classic problem! there is NO WAY stooping the internet and preventing people from downloading one way or another people that do not want to pay... simply WONT PAY! its irrelevant if you just opened a kick ass factory for horse shoes! WE DRIVE CARS! these businesses need to grow up and move on!

for the rest of you guys:
http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/index

Bindi Edit: Corrected all your spelling mistakes for you.

 

you know that's true.. the botnet could be run outside the country and get a lot of people in trouble.. that's a good point really

the loophole could be as simple as saying- I'm innocent.. enough good people get banned from their isps there will be a backlash on the law itself

this law could also be used to damage a business.. trojan into the business computers and get them to infringe on a copyright.. I've always laughed at how the music and movie industry do things.. there's no way for them to truely know if the offender is just a poor sod on the botnet

I was wondering when it would get down to the isp level as they see everything..

it's the only way to stop piracy really.. but they also have to make a living, it's not in their best interest to lose their customers.. and you can see the problem with innocents- it's one of those laws that looks great on paper and would only work in utopia

 

Are you sugesting that someone biulds a cs sorce map of the houses of parlement
not me
someone nealy got arested for
making a map of there school

just a Side note to stop me double posting:
anything that is put on the Internet will be made public
if the govoment trys to block a site I will take less than a week to have the site acsessable again.
This has already happened when one country blocked fackbook and within a week a total incription progam had been made to get round it