Slashdot Mirror
Lord Lucas Says Record Companies "Blackmail" Users
Kijori writes "Lord Lucas, a member of the UK House of Lords, has accused record companies of blackmailing internet users by accusing people of copyright infringement who have no way to defend themselves. 'You can get away with asking for £500 or £1,000 and be paid on most occasions without any effort having to be made to really establish guilt. It is straightforward legal blackmail.' The issue is that there is no way for people to prove their innocence, since the record company's data is held to be conclusive proof, and home networking equipment does not log who is downloading what. Hopefully, at the very least, the fact that parliament has realised this fact will mean that copyright laws will get a little more sane."
Finally a politician who acts like they have a pair, working in government to actually bring the issues faced by the Great British public to light.
Lord Lucas is a Conservative hereditary peer, and a "backbencher" at that - so he is not working in government at all at present and neither is he likely to be even after the election. In many respects this is a shame, because he's one of the few people who have been pointing out some of the other heinous flaws in the Digital Economy Bill (i.e. the parts apart from the copyright regime - the powers it gives the government to take over the UK Domain Name Registry for one).
Actually on the whole the politicians who act most independently tend to be the remaining hereditary peers because they owe their position and therefore "allegiance" to rather fewer people than almost anyone else in government (they are technically elected to sit in the house from amongst all hereditary peers by the existing members of the House of Lords but the pool of candidates is small and once elected they are there until death or, more likely, further reform of the House of Lords occurs).
Well that's a matter for the courts to decide and unfortunatly for you they have decided.
Yes, in UK law they decided that information wasn't property and thus couldn't be stolen. See the case ofOxford v Moss for more detail.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
That was Lord Lucan, not Lord Lucas
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
The Digital Economy bill has been in the lords of the last few weeks for debate. It's been grossly under-reported even on IT news sites, but to anyone that's been keeping an eye, Lucas has been quite the hero. He's been one of the the main people consistently questioning the logic of the bill's three strikes provision and so forth.
He's a smart guy, he seems to understand how the bill's plans run completely counter to hundreds of years worth of citizens hard earned legal and fundamental rights.
You're right, the House of Lords gets a lot of negative press, and perhaps that's a legacy of what it used to be like with hereditary peerages and a lot of people deciding the laws of the country purely because of who their ancestors were, but yes it's changed a lot and is actually now a very useful legislative tool (along with its judicial function). It's great that people with a lifetime of skills and experience aren't simply discarded but have a real input into the way our laws are decided, and although its structure is partisan, the voting generally isn't, people generally vote with their conscience not just to bolster their party line.
A lot of the Lords' powers to block laws have been stripped away by the Parliament Acts unfortunately. As you mention certain legislation can bypass the Lords completely, I think this includes anything to do with finance and taxation, and on top of that no law can be delayed in the House of Lords for more than - IIRC - two parliamentary sessions, so while they used to be able to send laws back to "the other place" indefinitely, now they can only delay for effectively about a year. It's good that they can't hold up new laws forever, but at the same time a strong government can pretty much force through anything it wants now - as we've experienced in the last decade.