“Everything about viruses is extreme,” Zimmer began. The number of viruses
on Earth is estimated to be 1 followed by 31 zeroes. Small as they are, if
you stacked them all up, the stack would reach 100 million light years. They
are the planet’s most abundant organism by far.

They’re fast. We take decades to reproduce. A flu virus can generate
billions of itself in us within hours. And they evolve
10,000 times faster than us, because they’re creatively sloppy about making
copies of their genomes, and they readily combine genes among varieties when
jointly infecting a cell. Each of us has four trillion viruses on board, in
1,500 all-too-fungible varieties.

Yet they can also be “time stealthy.” You may have a bout of childhood
chickenpox that is over in days, but the viruses may hide in your nervous
system and emerge decades later as shingles. HIV spreads inexorably because
of the lag of months or years between infection and visible symptoms.

The earliest record of a virus in human history is the smallpox marks you
can see on the mummified face of Ramses V, who died in 1145 BCE.
Viruses leave no fossils, but in a sense they ARE fossils, with the ancient
gene sequences of retroviruses buried in the genomes of every creature
they’ve infected over the ages. About 8 percent of our genome—some
100,000 elements—comes from viruses, and some of those genes now work for
us (enabling the mammalian placenta, for instance). One French scientist
revived from our genome a functioning 2-million-year-extinct virus just by
deducing the original code from the current variety in that stretch of DNA.

For billions of years the planet’s life consisted solely of bacteria and
their viruses, the bacteriophages. They became a planet force, and remain
so today, determining the makeup of the atmosphere, among other things. Every
day half of all the bacteria in the oceans are killed by phages. Some of
the carbon from the bodies sinks to the bottom, some is freed up to
fertilize other life. Ocean viruses cart around and transmit genes for
photosynthesis to previously incapable
microbes—10 percent of oceanic photosynthesis happens that way. If some
day we have to geoengineer the atmosphere to manage climate change, we may
want to employ the viruses that are already doing it.

Virology will be revolutionizing science for decades to come. One body of
investigation suggests that the so-called giant viruses may be a whole
fourth domain of life (added to bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes). As the
ultimate parasite, viruses were assumed to come along after life evolved,
but they might an instrument of that evolution. One hypothesis is that
viruses took primordial RNA and generated DNA to better protect the
genes. They might have created life as we know it, a long time ago.

–Stewart Brand

Related posts:

1. Using viruses to deliver upgrades to your brain
2. Your food has… software?!

“Many users of infringing sites may be unaware that the sites they are viewing carry content unlawfully, and they may find it useful for such unlawful sites to be less readily available.”

Just… wow. Orwell would be proud of such a literary creation. I thought previous New Labour governments were Big Nanny, but this is just absurd. A website owner does not have full rights to the words on the website. Please, Mr ISP, take an active and detailed concern in what websites I visit, and save me from the commercial horror!

Full letter available from its eventual recipient, Matthew Temple (http://www.mattytemple.com/)

Related posts:

1. The Facebook Data Protection Act letter
2. DRM: what’cha gonna do about it?

read here: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110317/full/news.2011.167.html

Last week saw the news that it is now possible to create superblood by taking it out of the body and using very clever, targeted gene therapy to upgrade the DNA. It’s currently being trialled in AIDS patients, making a subtle mutation to their white blood cells so that they’re more like the HIV-immune cells of so-called HIV controllers – people that can resist HIV attacks because of different ‘flags’ on their cells. Once upgraded, you infuse the blood cells back into the patients where they can start taking on HIV with newfound immunity.

read here: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110301/full/471016a.html

The usage is therapeutic so far, but each year sees new approaches to blood doping in the Tour de France. How long until this becomes one? How long until someone creates a safe virus capable of boosting your brain functions, and sells it on the Internet? What happens when not just your organs are modified, but also the DNA capable of being passed on to your children (“germ line” modification) – would you leave them with a trust fund, or spend the money permanently making your progeny handsome geniuses?

So humans can now be patched and bugfixed. How long until we have open-source humans? Jokingly, the time is apparently already upon us – a user of popular software source code sharing, review and editing site GitHub uploaded his genome for ‘patching’. We don’t yet have widespread technology to implement the patches that are being written and suggested, but as gene therapy progresses and gets commercialised (and maybe even amateurised), we one day doubtless will.

What a bizarre feeling it must be, knowing that the open-source crowd can pore over the very blueprints to you and start imagining and coding “You, version 2.0“…

Related posts:

1. Genetically engineering human tissues enters clinical age
2. Stewart Brand, on viruses and the scale of things

On this issue, we disagree.

—-

Tim – I feel this misses Google’s point almost entirely. How does cheaper dispute resolution help a business that argues that it the reason it could build a billion-dollar business based on creating value for users is that the US doesn’t grant as far-reaching intellectual monopolies as the UK does. It thrives, and employs tens of thousands of people, without relying so heavily on monopoly-backed scarcity, whereas the harder our industries try to do so (no videos on YouTube, unfair, draconian DRM, paywalls, even rootkits), the harder the market has punished them.

I’ll return to this, but I feel it’s only fair to address your suggestion more head-on, first.

If ADR is the solution, we already (post Woolf reforms) have CPR costs biases in favour of parties that want to pursue cheaper alternatives to lawsuits (see this important bit of our litigation rules, the Civil Procedure Rules’ Pre-Action Protocol). So far as I know, this includes copyright, so what can be added? Why is it not working (if indeed it isn’t?)

Would a singular ADR mechanism be better than the free choice of ADR given to parties at the moment? I don’t think it will.

The copyright industries have so far proven themselves to be tremendously capable and ardent lobbyists. A single ADR ‘choke point’ is a wonderful opportunity for focused and (cost-) effective lobbying – especially when, as you suggested, it should be staffed by industry practitioners (and where are the representatives of institutions, academics and other noncommercial/non-market users?). This allows the straightforward corrupting influence of the ‘revolving door’ effect into an ADR process, whereas other ADR is usually overseen by barristers or off-duty judges. I can’t help but allege that other forms of corruption would also find purchase in this suggested system, all the more so because (presumably) the RCP would be protected from legal liability from its decisions, so systematic misrepresentations of the law would go unpunished.

–

Now, to return to the part about the UK’s overstrong copyright system. As I said, Google built a billion-dollar, 20,000-staff-strong business because it wasn’t overly restricted by intellectual monopoly. So pointing them to ADR doesn’t really help, when it says that such monopolies / IP rights are too strong in the UK.

But what ADR suggestions also totally, totally miss is the fact that the once-professional copyright arena is now swamped with millions upon millions of non-market participants. The digital era has made everyone with an email account or an iPhone a publisher. Copyright law *has* to evolve to match the revolution in who it binds. And only block exemption and DRM, not ADR, can meet that need.

I am not going to pay hundreds of pounds to ask a Pearson-staffed panel whether I can send my mum one paragraph or two of an FT article that talks about me. WhatDoTheyKnow is not a business – so it has no business model into which in can fit/attenuate the cost of ADR when a council relies on copyright to prevent WDTK from publishing/publicising FOI returns.

There is no conceivable way in which non-market copyright actors can stomach the cost of either ADR or full-on litigation. Either nonmarket uses are granted appropriate block exemption, or they must be asked to remove themselves from the copyright arena – hand in any device capable of copying text, images, sound or video (or have it taken from you after three strikes).

Related posts:

1. Default public licensing of copyrighted works
2. DRM: what’cha gonna do about it?

Copyright (CC-BY-NC) Santanu Vasant

There’s very simple but well-delivered blog post by Rob Weir doing the rounds at the moment that counterattacks a recent position adopted by the BSA (Business Software Alliance – a lobby for traditional software providers).

The UK Cabinet Office (a core unit of the government here) declared that it was in everyone’s interests if royalty-free, open technology standards were adopted (encouraging, as they do, interoperability and ease of migration between competing providers, without having to pay royalties just to use certain file formats).

The BSA lobby insists: by preferring technologies “publicly available at zero or low cost” and that have “intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis” (the UK Cabinet Office’s words), the BSA claims that the government “will inadvertently reduce choice, hinder innovation and increase the costs of e-government”. Such courage and brazen ballsiness is rare today, so the BSA’s lack of sanity can only be saluted. They clearly are bold explorers of alternate realities, pioneering a potent melange of absurdity and conviction.

So, back to the blogpost. Luddismm and monopoly are actually pretty old-school. The post revives a clever, ironic piece by Bastiat that reaches through the ages to elegantly skewer the BSA. It dates back from 1845, 5 years before his death. It is an open letter to the French Parliament entitled A PETITION From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting.

Plus ca change…

To the Honourable Members of the Chamber of Deputies.

Gentlemen:

You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and have little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.

We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity for your — what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy; therefore we shall call it your practice — your practice without theory and without principle.

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.

Be good enough, honourable deputies, to take our request seriously, and do not reject it without at least hearing the reasons that we have to advance in its support.

First, if you shut off as much as possible all access to natural light, and thereby create a need for artificial light, what industry in France will not ultimately be encouraged?

If France consumes more tallow, there will have to be more cattle and sheep, and, consequently, we shall see an increase in cleared fields, meat, wool, leather, and especially manure, the basis of all agricultural wealth.

If France consumes more oil, we shall see an expansion in the cultivation of the poppy, the olive, and rapeseed. These rich yet soil-exhausting plants will come at just the right time to enable us to put to profitable use the increased fertility that the breeding of cattle will impart to the land.

Our moors will be covered with resinous trees. Numerous swarms of bees will gather from our mountains the perfumed treasures that today waste their fragrance, like the flowers from which they emanate. Thus, there is not one branch of agriculture that would not undergo a great expansion.

The same holds true of shipping. Thousands of vessels will engage in whaling, and in a short time we shall have a fleet capable of upholding the honour of France and of gratifying the patriotic aspirations of the undersigned petitioners, chandlers, etc.

But what shall we say of the specialities of Parisian manufacture? Henceforth you will behold gilding, bronze, and crystal in candlesticks, in lamps, in chandeliers, in candelabra sparkling in spacious emporia compared with which those of today are but stalls.

There is no needy resin-collector on the heights of his sand dunes, no poor miner in the depths of his black pit, who will not receive higher wages and enjoy increased prosperity.

It needs but a little reflection, gentlemen, to be convinced that there is perhaps not one Frenchman, from the wealthy stockholder of the Anzin Company to the humblest vendor of matches, whose condition would not be improved by the success of our petition.

We anticipate your objections, gentlemen; but there is not a single one of them that you have not picked up from the musty old books of the advocates of free trade. We defy you to utter a word against us that will not instantly rebound against yourselves and the principle behind all your policy.

Will you tell us that, though we may gain by this protection, France will not gain at all, because the consumer will bear the expense?

We have our answer ready:

You no longer have the right to invoke the interests of the consumer. You have sacrificed him whenever you have found his interests opposed to those of the producer. You have done so in order to encourage industry and to increase employment. For the same reason you ought to do so this time too.

Indeed, you yourselves have anticipated this objection. When told that the consumer has a stake in the free entry of iron, coal, sesame, wheat, and textiles, “Yes,” you reply, “but the producer has a stake in their exclusion.” Very well, surely if consumers have a stake in the admission of natural light, producers have a stake in its interdiction.

“But,” you may still say, “the producer and the consumer are one and the same person. If the manufacturer profits by protection, he will make the farmer prosperous. Contrariwise, if agriculture is prosperous, it will open markets for manufactured goods.” Very well, If you grant us a monopoly over the production of lighting during the day, first of all we shall buy large amounts of tallow, charcoal, oil, resin, wax, alcohol, silver, iron, bronze, and crystal, to supply our industry; and, moreover, we and our numerous suppliers, having become rich, will consume a great deal and spread prosperity into all areas of domestic industry.

Will you say that the light of the sun is a gratuitous gift of Nature, and that to reject such gifts would be to reject wealth itself under the pretext of encouraging the means of acquiring it?

But if you take this position, you strike a mortal blow at your own policy; remember that up to now you have always excluded foreign goods because and in proportion as they approximate gratuitous gifts. You have only half as good a reason for complying with the demands of other monopolists as you have for granting our petition, which is in complete accord with your established policy; and to reject our demands precisely because they are better founded than anyone else’s would be tantamount to accepting the equation: + x + = -; in other words, it would be to heapabsurdity upon absurdity.

Labour and Nature collaborate in varying proportions, depending upon the country and the climate, in the production of a commodity. The part that Nature contributes is always free of charge; it is the part contributed by human labour that constitutes value and is paid for.

If an orange from Lisbon sells for half the price of an orange from Paris, it is because the natural heat of the sun, which is, of course, free of charge, does for the former what the latter owes to artificial heating, which necessarily has to be paid for in the market.

Thus, when an orange reaches us from Portugal, one can say that it is given to us half free of charge, or, in other words, at half price as compared with those from Paris.

Now, it is precisely on the basis of its being semigratuitous (pardon the word) that you maintain it should be barred. You ask: “How can French labour withstand the competition of foreign labour when the former has to do all the work, whereas the latter has to do only half, the sun taking care of the rest?” But if the fact that a product is half free of charge leads you to exclude it from competition, how can its being totally free of charge induce you to admit it into competition? Either you are not consistent, or you should, after excluding what is half free of charge as harmful to our domestic industry, exclude what is totally gratuitous with all the more reason and with twice the zeal.

To take another example: When a product — coal, iron, wheat, or textiles — comes to us from abroad, and when we can acquire it for less labour than if we produced it ourselves, the difference is agratuitous gift that is conferred up on us. The size of this gift is proportionate to the extent of this difference. It is a quarter, a half, or three-quarters of the value of the product if the foreigner asks of us only three-quarters, one-half, or one-quarter as high a price. It is as complete as it can be when the donor, like the sun in providing us with light, asks nothing from us. The question, and we pose it formally, is whether what you desire for France is the benefit of consumption free of charge or the alleged advantages of onerous production. Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you ban, as you do, foreign coal, iron, wheat, and textiles, in proportion as their price approaches zero, how inconsistent it would be to admit the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!

Related posts:

1. Default public licensing of copyrighted works
2. Should new media actually try to compete with piracy?

The man who, because of a lack of external enemies and opposition, was forced into an oppressive narrowness and regularity of custom impatiently tore himself apart, persecuted himself, gnawed away at himself, grew upset, and did himself damage—this animal which scraped itself raw against the bars of its cage, which people want to “tame,” this impoverished creature, consumed with longing for the wild, which had to create out of its own self an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness—this fool, this yearning and puzzled prisoner, became the inventor of “bad conscience.”

-Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting

Is the recent UK violence engaged in as resistance to an oppressive state (oppressing by cutting welfare, charging more for access to university education, etc) – or are they in fact resistance to a vacuum within society itself? I ask whether they fight to ward off the predictions of Orwell, or Huxley.

The riots don’t make sense to me if it’s the former. I say this because it seems to be to be clear that the modern state absorbs mass protest pretty effortlessly. At least, no possible purpose beyond sussing out tactics of police states, and how to get messages into the media. In other words training in preparation for future war against an Orwellian state). And I don’t think these protests have reached that level of sophistication.

But if it’s about discovering and asserting an identity, discovering energy and violence and comradeship, turning cobblestones into missiles and in so doing, seeing the soil below – i.e. touching wilderness in a world which society and distraction have banished it – well then it makes more sense to me. In that light, rioting then has immediate dividends, in that it draws the mind out of numbness, and long term dividends, in that it is forging a liberal or socialist head of steam within society that will be a force in future politics.

If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

Johnny Cash cover

Lastly: I suppose the same question can be asked of the cyber-activist movement, Anonymous – possibly reaching a different answer.

See also: Bad Conscience: Reflections on a Riot

Related posts:

1. Education, Unltd: Part 4 – closing thoughts
2. Stolen post: BONUSES & IDEOLOGY

“All of your messages with someone will be together in one place, whether they are sent over chat, email or SMS. You can see everything you’ve discussed with each friend as a single conversation.

I’m intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From “hey nice to meet you” to “do you want to get coffee sometime” to “our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight.” That’s a really cool idea.”

Related posts:

1. The Facebook Data Protection Act letter
2. Conversation platforms will make blogs increasingly redundant

It would be interesting to know what more the world of software development could teach the law profession. Without further ado, I re-post the following summary of the principles of Unix Programming:

• Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.

• Rule of Clarity: Clarity is better than cleverness.

• Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected to other programs.

• Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines.

• Rule of Simplicity: Design for simplicity; add complexity only where you must.

• Rule of Parsimony: Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.

• Rule of Transparency: Design for visibility to make inspection and debugging easier.

• Rule of Robustness: Robustness is the child of transparency and simplicity.

• Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data so program logic can be stupid and robust.

• Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.

• Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.

• Rule of Repair: When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.

• Rule of Economy: Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time.

• Rule of Generation: Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can.

• Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.

• Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for “one true way”.

• Rule of Extensibility: Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think.

Related posts:

1. DRM: what’cha gonna do about it?
2. Your food has… software?!

Many focus on the immediate:

"Wealth is a measure of your ability to do what you would like to do, when you would like to do it – a measure of your breadth of immediately available choice."

You obviously get the standard sepia-tinted stuff:

“Health.”

“Carving pumpkins with my daughter.”

“Wealth is waking up this morning to a beautiful woman bringing me a cup of tea made "just so".”

Some classic related questions:

“How would you differentiate between the terms wealth, freedom, and happiness (or do you consider them interchangeable)?”

The Chief Financial Officer’s answer:

“Wealth = how long you could sustain your current lifestyle (same expenses) if your income stopped, today.”

Oddly, this comes pretty close to Chris Rock’s sketch, where he defines wealth as:

“Wealthy is the point where your grandkids will never need to work a day in their life. Wealthy is getting foundations and libraries named after you. etc…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWERzwbobOk”

There’s the referenced answer:

“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth

Wealth is the abundance of valuable resources or material possessions or the control of such assets.”

But here’s one I found that, for me, nails the wealth taxonomy, albeit offering analysis that then goes down a different line to what I consider to be the crux

“Wealth (what people want) can be divided into two subclasses: transferable (money, property, …) and non-transferable (health, comfort, experiences, memories, fame, power, knowledge, ….) People generally use transferable wealth to gain the non-transferable.

People can be classified based on their patience in turning transferable wealth into non-transferable wealth. Wealth accumulators tend to be more patient in trading on transferable wealth than wealth dissipators who tend to immediately convert wealth into non-transferable form.”

It’s when people start glancing to the future, that I think people are getting warm (relative to my POV):

“The best economic definition of wealth that I have seen is George Gilder’s from his 1980 book, Wealth and Poverty. He contrasted it to resources in general, and to riches, as: Wealth is resources dedicated to future production.

A car used as a status symbol or personal transport is riches, one used in business to generate more income is wealth; similarly with education for enjoyment versus education for future production, and so on.

He also pointed out that since spending on the military and police is not productive, that though necessary to protect wealth, it is not itself wealth and should be used as thriftily as possible.”

Here was my take:

“For me, wealth is potential for future freedom from constraints on life choices. Money is one format, relationships, friendships and favours owed are another; education also counts, as do health, fitness and certain key possessions (but not so many that dealing with them constrains you; thus actually, very few, and mostly of a tool-like nature). Some of these things are not distinct, exclusive goods, but can be shared or copied amongst large groups. Focusing on doing so without being distracted on needlessly stocking (maximising) the un-shareable (distinct) parts of wealth, is a productive way forward for humanity.”

Of course, some people go a little further than I would with this:

“Wealth is the ability of an entity to create change.

Skills you know, your business network, your emotional support network, assets you can exchange.

People with great wealth can affect the world in profoundly positive or negative ways. In other words, wealth is closely tied to the notion of power.

A member of congress who has relatively low net worth could have as much financial influence as Bill Gates. While this power is not as liquid or easy to exchange as cash, it is still exchangeable and a store of value.”

But only one user really nails it:

“Wealth is an abundance of freedoms.”

(Which makes the paradox of choice all the more puzzling)

Related posts:

1. Education, Unltd: Part 4 – closing thoughts
2. Hyperefficient solar panels

In 2008, economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein made waves with a book called Nudge. It advocated the idea that socially beneficial policy could be implemented without forcing anyone to behave a particular way. All you had to do was make the socially optimal option the default; e.g. saving a certain percentage of your monthly wages.

Anybody not happy with that could opt out and do something different. No freedom or choice is taken away from anyone: you’re just nudged in the right direction.

Well, could nudges help something as ‘far out’ as copyright?

Advocates of the copyleft movement think that in this day and age, more of culture should be in the commons: free to be shared, remixed and disseminated. Scarcity business models are completely out of touch with a world where copy, paste, share & remix is such a ubiquitous feature of cultural participation.

So why not nudge creative works into the commons? I’m talking about default public licensing of copyrighted works (not to be confused with – illiberal and paternalistic – compulsory licensing).

The idea is that by default, new published work would be licensed to the public for non-commercial sharing and remixing (those familiar with the Creative Commons will recognise this as a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence).

The author would still be free to override that with any other licence. Copyright it would still fully apply to works; the rights “castle” is still there from day zero of a work. But by default, a non-commercial share/remix “drawbridge” is let down.

You would still have to go to the artist and negotiate a deal (or at least, ask for permission) if you intended to make money from the work or a from remix of it. And she would always be credited, and so the more you share, the more famous the artist would get.

I am posting this because it surely can’t be a new idea, but my googling hasn’t thrown anything up yet. I have a dozen questions/ideas, and so was hoping you either could refer me to existing discussions, or give me your own thoughts (in the comments below, or contacting me directly).

Related posts:

1. EXTEND music copyright?? What is the European Commission smoking?
2. DRM: what’cha gonna do about it?

Wonderful.

Was the current piracy regime so badly broken that this needed to happen?

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the Gallo report, the UK’s Digital Economy Act, and in particular, the brand Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Bill, will all:

a) seem completely warranted, and yet

b) will make even moderates presently optimistic about Spotify making copyright enforcement hardening unnecessary, despair

c) finally, the awful copyright policy we’ve seen pushed in 2010 (see above) will seem inadequate to all, and even harsher measures will be necessary. “Throw the safe harbour / intermediary immunity out the window, allow wanton monitoring, consider making wilful downloading of infringing content illegal, bring back DRM, etc… Three strikes? Let’s make it two!! Children are in danger in this Somalia of unregulated theft and piracy*.

And if Mulve had never come along? people would just learn how to conduct their business online with greater discretion. Privacy, anonymity, encryption, closed communities, being selective about which computers you let your PC connect to – hardly a bad schooling?

If it ain’t badly broke, don’t fix it. This is a step backwards for all concerned, not least the freetards that will gorge themselves on a service that seems too good to be true. As an acquaintance recently pointed out, if you don’t know who the free lunch is, there’s a good chance you’re it.

*yes, Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber really is that cock-mouthed. Children in danger – what a hammy line to trot out, and in the House of Lords. I mean really. And a ‘Somalia of unregulated theft’? As opposed to what, a Somalia of regulated theft? A Wales of unregulated theft? What on Earth does that mean??

How tragic that a legislator can admit that “I do not come equipped with the answers; frankly, they are way beyond my world of musical theatre” in Parliament, then gets so widely lauded (for a rhetoric and bad stat-laden tragic, melodramatic pantomime of a speech) as to be able to kick start the horrifying fisting of the Digital Economy Act (by which I mean hijacking a good bill that was about boosting Britain’s digital telecoms infrastructure, and filling it with copyright enforcement measures so draconian they would have derailed the bill completely but for the use of the ‘wash up’ subterfuge).

Related posts:

1. Major internet players stand strong against (Mandy’s) Clause 17 of the Digital Economy Bill
2. DRM: what’cha gonna do about it?

Thing is, with all the press and moaning that DRM (Digital Rights Management; a.k.a locks on mp3 files, DVDs, software and so on) has received, it strikes me that not one person has ever used the catchily-named “Remedy where effective technological measures prevent permitted acts”.

There’s a whole host of stuff you’re allowed to do with content under UK copyright law. I tried to find a good list online where someone explains them, but oddly, I couldn’t (I’d love a pointer to one though!). The best I could find was this, on the UK IPO website.

If DRM or any other technology stops you, you can report them to the Secretary of State, who can slap them around as much as he considers necessary in order to give you your rights.

I just thought that this should be more widely known. Feel free to pass this info on if you think so too.

*”The Relationship Between Copyright and Contract Law report, 2010”

Related posts:

1. Major internet players stand strong against (Mandy’s) Clause 17 of the Digital Economy Bill
2. Mulve: oh, for f***’s sake.