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Secret UK Plan To Appoint "Pirate Finder General"
mouthbeef writes "A source very close to the UK Labour government just called me to leak the fact that Secretary of State Lord Mandelson is trying to sneak a revision into the Digital Economy Bill that would give him and his successors the power to create future copyright law without debate. Mandelson goes on to explain that he wants this so he can create private copyright militias with investigatory and enforcement powers, and so he can create new copyright punishments as he sees fit (e.g., jail time, three strikes)."
But this is exactly up Darth Mandelson's alley. He truly and passionately believes in the utter dominance of the State over the individual. Of course, he plans to be a most benign dictator.
For those not in the know, Lord Mandelson is the de facto ruler of the United Kingdom, and one of the chief architects of the European super state under the (also "benign") dictatorship of the unelected, unaccountable European Council of Ministers.
He is the #1 threat to individual rights and freedoms in the UK and possibly in the whole of Europe. Think Palpatine, only with fruitier ties.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
But you need more than new politicians. You need "your" politicians. You need more influence, and it will only change when people who profit from peer to peer are financing campaigns and getting people elected. It will only change when the political atmosphere changes. The old timer curmudgeons rule the political arena and until you put new minds not just new faces into these positions it will not change. Keep in mind that bribery/quid pro quo is how things get done and corruption is how things work.
...what does the government think they're doing appointing Sith Lord Mandleson?
Has it ever occurred to you that they might know exactly what they're doing?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
[Mandelson is] an out-of-control power-crazed sociopath and should never have been allowed back into government.
We didn't allow him back in. In fact, he resigned twice already under dubious circumstances. Then he got appointed to Europe, and now he's been appointed to a very senior position in Parliament after being appointed to the House of Lords. Note that the term "appointed" here implies that the people never got a vote, he was put into those positions by the Prime Minister and his chums. Oh, and the Prime Minister was appointed as Tony Blair's successor, in direction contradiction of a Labour Party manifesto promise to voters at the last general election, which they won with such a huge majority because of funny electoral math and not popular support (having actually lost the popular vote in England to the Conservatives, in fact).
Basically, these guys don't even have a shadow of a mandate for what they're doing in the first place, but since they're already a lame duck administration they seem to feel they have little to lose by wading in with the most illiberal, draconian legislation they can shove through in the final parliamentary session before the general election. Thus we get resistance to court rulings on cleaning up the DNA database, a roll-out of trials for an expensive ID card scheme that both the major opposition parties in England have long since pledged to scrap, and now this.
My personal favourite from this week's Queen's Speech was the bill to make it a legal requirement to half the budget deficit within four years, which would conveniently mean that having destroyed our economy themselves, they could then pass a poison pill to their successors when they inevitably lose the next general election. Presumably they will then claim in four years that whoever won the election has broken the law by being unable to do the impossible, and pretend that in some alternate reality Labour would somehow have been able to fix the problems they were unable to prevent in the first place.
The various extreme anti-copyright-infringement policies flying around at the moment sound like much the same thing: having mostly ignored or actively gone against the recommendations of their own Gowers Review when it comes to IP laws, they are now setting up back channel ways to suck up to big business while they still can, knowing that if they tried to push these things through Parliament properly they would face stiff opposition (not to mention probably losing even more votes, since post-Gowers they pretty much know that people overwhelmingly oppose things like copyright term extension).
As a final note, the Open Rights Group are pretty dumb if they think invoking the recent XBox cut-offs supports the case against this. I haven't seen a single report that suggests there were people cut off by Microsoft inappropriately (i.e., not after breaking the rules), the cut-off only affected their use of the XBox and not unrelated Internet services, and even the BBC carried an article based on one such person, who admitted freely that he was ripping off games illegally because it saved him money, which is exactly what the cut-off was intended to obstruct.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.