So, last night, the Digital Economy Bill – or #debill, as it’s known on twitter – passed its Third Reading in the House of Commons and goes to (in this case, back to) the House of Lord before becoming all Official. And I sit here not-so-quietly fuming. There are so many reasons to dislike this bill: it’s ill-thought out; in thrall to traditional music industries and lobbyists; fails to understand the difference between copyright abuse for finciancial gain and copyright ‘abuse’ for creativity that doesn’t make financial gain, and is consequently open to abuse by copyright holders and could stifle creativity; assumes that all digitial downloading is illegal, copyright abusing digitial downloading, thus making it harder for creatives to give away freebies online to give tasters to new fans/audiences/consumers; is likely to criminalise the young (who don’t have credit cards to use on iTunes, etc) and those who aren’t digitally adept but fail to really hit those who make serious money out of digitial piracy (hells bells, if the Secret Intelligence Services are concerned about the bill driving pirates/criminals to use greater encryption that is harder for SIS to break quickly enough you know there’s a problem, right?); will not try and convict those alleged to have broken the law but punish them first and then make them pay to appeal; will hold the account-holder accountable for the activity of anyone (known or unknown) using their internet connection, and threaten to disconnect whole households if *one* member of it is caught illegally downloading (imagine if your whole household was banned from going to WHSmiths because one member of it shoplifted a CD single, and then imagine that you ran business/filled tax returns/paid TV licences, council tax and other bills/carried out banking/kept in contact with relatives and many other things through WHSmiths to really think about the insanity of this), and finally – as a consequence of this, poses a very real threat to businesses and establishments that offer wifi connections to their customers and users (re. this, please see Fiona Campbell-Howes’ Open Letter posted to Network Cornwall).
