Over The Counter Culture

(Primary source for this post: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/nov/19/filesharing-timms-digital-economy-bill)

Who exactly does Lord Mandelson *not* give the creeps to? (hint: yacht owners). This former alumnus of my Oxford college is to be given some of the most wide-ranging legislative powers any secretary of state for business has ever been given. The government proposes to give Mandelson the power to:

"impose such duties, powers …on any person as may be specified with or for the purposes of facilitating prevention of reduction of online infringement of copyright"

He could, if he wanted, rename the Tower of London Beefeaters ‘Copyright Inquisitors’ going around nabbing laptops and slapping you around until you dob in your mates for downloading the latest autotuned voxpop shite off the webs (and quite right, too).

The safeguard? Positive approbation of the relevant Statutory Instrument in Parliament (which could be as little of a nod-through without debate, most MPs having not the foggiest idea what the cost-benefit and scale of the problem at issue actually is, nor, apparently, giving a fuck).

Guess how many SI’s have been rejected by Parliament. The House of Commons last did it in 1979, or 1969 where they *have* to give it their OK (10% of all SIs). The House of Lords hasn’t done it in nearly 9 years (ref).

Oh but of course, there’d a be a

public consultation. It would be a very, very public process. This would be a very public process indeed. It wouldn’t be possible to slip something through clandestinely. That’s the biggest safeguard. People will obviously want to look at what the clause says. But it simply gives us the ability to tackle what’s likely to be a growing problem."

So when I ‘publicly’ air my disagreement government can ‘publicly’ ignore me. Doubtless they’ll still be ignoring me when I publicly dance on Mandelson’s grave, shortly before he rises AGAIN from the dead to stalk the public Earth – there are still powers he has not been granted, and corridors of power he has not trod.

Does the giant loophole being granted to the Secretary of State (SoS – the clue’s in the acronym) force him to actually set up publicly accountable measures? No.

So Murdoch might be made a Copyright Wytchhunter and come bother you for looking at his news stories through Google not The Sun, alongside all the tits and bile they like to sling at you in carefully worded 7-year-old grade sentences (try it yourself: run something like this page through this readability tool)

Don’t forget that existing copyright law makes you an offender if you store a file on your computer or your server without the rights holder’s permission. What’s not simple and effective about that? Why give Mandy the power to be an unelected, unelectable but, good for him, unaccountable lawmaker with the power to put SI’s giving himself new powers that Parliament can only accept or reject, but not amend?

“The answer is the same as peer-to-peer, we need an effective way to deal with it. It’s an effective answer to do this so we don’t have to work out a proposal [to control copyright infringement in some new way] where we would need to develop and go through the whole process [of enacting legislation]. But we need this to be able to address parts of the problem other than peer-to-peer."

Damn the pesky problem of having to get our elected representatives to legislate in response to evident problems. Oh by the way, do we actually HAVE the problems this claims would deal with?

"It’s reflecting the fact that technology is changing very fast," said Timms. "The existing [method] is quite cumbersome. We might need something else in the future."

What amount the main issue faced by enforcers of copyright – is this going to help tackle the issue that servers are often in another country, out of this jurisdiction?

"No, it’s not that.

Right then. So just to recap, we don’t know what the problem is, nor what it’s going to be. We don’t like having to bother our ‘democratic’ legislators in Parliament for legislative solutions to future legislative pickles. We do like giving unelected bodies gigantic loopholes so that they can amend their powers over the public upwards and outwards. We don’t like prescribing messy democratic and accountability safeguards. We don’t care that illegal filesharing is now receding faster than the government is capable of responding to it – CLEARLY, the problem is so big that batshit insane powers should be granted to those incapable of even coherently identifying the problems or where existing solutions are coming from (iTunes, Spotify are typically credited with the move away from illegal filesharing).

Some say the Rule of Law is replacing Parliamentary Sovereignty as the fundamental constitutional underpinnings of the UK’s legal system – see for example the comments of our top judges in Jackson and others (Appellants) v. Her Majesty’s Attorney General (Respondent) [2005] UKHL 56 – but what we’re equally seeing is Parliamentary Sovereignty being replaced by a system of dilute Parliamentary Oversight over unelected legislators, enforced by special tribunals.

Perhaps you’d like to see how Mandelson goes about consulting with the public on these measures.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 9:32 am and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.