The Digital Economy Bill: Where is it?
Posted by Ceri Davies Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:08:00 GMT
For anyone struggling to find the text of the Digitial Economy Bill, the current text is on the UK Parliament web site.
The Digital Economy Bill: Write to your MP
Posted by Ceri Davies Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:31:00 GMT
The Digital Economy Bill has been proposed. Act now, before it becomes an Act. You can write to your MP via Write to Them right now. Write to a Lord or two while you’re there, it won’t hurt.
As for why, see Cory Doctorow’s summary, the Open Rights Group’s campaign (although I think this focusses a lot on the disconnection and dismisses some of the other crap and what other countries are doing.
Here’s the text of the letter I sent to my MP; it’s heavily based on Cory’s article above. If you’re writing - and if you’re not, why not? You should write even if you support the Bill (but what are you doing here?!), it’s that important - don’t just copy this, put your spin on it.
Dear Jennifer Willott,
I’m writing to outline in no uncertain terms that I feel that the Digital Economy Bill, as proposed, should be rejected by Parliament. This single issue is critical enough to directly influence how I will be voting in the next election.
Firstly, disconnection from the Internet is disproportionate and unacceptable, particularly in order to prevent what is a civil offence. Additionally, the fallout of this on members of the public who are unrelated to the accused offender are non-trivial. Examples:
1) I have bank accounts that I cannot access by any method other than online, I also work from home quite a lot. Another member of my household getting our connection disconnected is an obvious negative impact;
2) Many people do not know how to secure their wireless access points. A malicious person could easily drive around Plasnewydd potentially getting unsuspecting households disconnected by abusing their wireless connectivity (encryption of wireless access points does not really help, as all wireless protocols are rather insecure);
3) Students or young professionals in shared households could lose access due to no fault of their own, possibly directly affecting their jobs.
Apart from the question of disconnection, the new rating system will fail to protect children or consumers as all such rating systems do, and will actually make it more difficult for smaller businesses or startups to enter or stay in the market.
The secondary legislation grant to the Secretary of State is a huge concern, allowing the Secretary of State to pretty much do anything without consulting Parliament, including devolving frightening powers and levels of privacy intrusion, probably to private companies (who, as the T-Mobile data selling story this week shows, are often as poor as the government at protecting citizens’ data).
Finally, the Bill lacks any means of improving the digital economy that it purports to protect. Widening access to the Internet, rather than trying to curb it, should be the focus of the Bill, yet there is no mention of helping the poor to gain Internet access, nothing to ensure that broadband access becomes cheap and operator-neutral. There is no mention of how publicly funded media or intellectual property, such as that from the BBC, Arts Council grantee works, etc. are made available to people to actually access, embrace and use to drive creation of new art.
The Bill seems entirely focussed on protecting the income of industry (many of whom are struggling to create original content anyway - see the huge number of film “remakes” and musical cover versions) at the expense of the citizen’s ability to do what other countries are currently declaring basic rights (http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10374831-2.html).
I urge you to oppose this Bill.
Yours sincerely,
Ceri Davies
