UK Internet Filtering Bill Watered Down

superapecommando writes in with news that in the UK, Liberal Democratic peers will soften their filtering amendment to the Digital Economy Bill, to allow those wrongfully accused of illegal filesharing to sue the rightsholders in court. The previous version of the Bill had drawn instant criticism from some of the world's largest technology companies, including eBay, Google, and Yahoo, who signed an open letter against the filtering proposal. Blogger Glyn Moody summed up opposition to the Bill, stating that in its previous form, it was "utterly one-sided, where the only winners are a music recording industry too lazy to change, and the losers are everyone else."

Comments

Story already out-of-date

[PeterBrett]

Unfortunately, this story is already out-of-date. The Government denied the Liberal Democrat peers the ability to amend the amendment, saying that they'd sort it out themselves during "washing-up", the period just before the General Election when ministers and last-term backbenchers rush through last-minute legislation with minimal debate while the majority of MPs return to their constituencies to campaign.

See this Guardian article for more information.

Re:Is the UK broken or something?

[PeterBrett]

What is wrong with the UK? All I ever see are stories about another stupid thing you guys are doing. Not trolling. Think about it. Slashdot is like 7% stories about stupid privacy/internet stories from the UK.

There are a number of reasons for that:

1. The UK is an English-speaking country, which means that there are a large number of UK-based Slashdot readers and submitters.
2. At the moment, the UK government has a hard-on for copyrights. The vast majority of the Slashdot stories you've seen are actually all talking about the same thing: the Digital Economy Bill, a piece of legislation that's been in the works for some time. It started back in 2008, when the Digital Britain report was commissioned. That report was delivered, there was some proposed legislation written up, a consultation was carried out, the consultation results were published, the Digital Economy Bill was introduced in the Queen's Speech, and then the Bill has been working its way through the many stages of the UK's parliamentary legislative process. Slashdot has been reporting on all of those different points in the same process.
3. The UK has several highly Internet-aware groups campaigning against this process, and they've been doing their best to get as much media attention on the Bill -- and its multiple issues -- as possible. That naturally includes getting as much coverage as possible on sites like Slashdot, because Slashdot's target demographic is the same demographic that's likely to be sympathetic to their position!

There are plenty of other countries where privacy/Internet asshattery is going on (such as France), but Slashdot isn't quite such an appropriate forum.

Anyway, all of the above doesn't diminish the fact that the UK government really doesn't have a clue when it comes to the Internet, and doesn't rate privacy very highly on its list of priorities.

Re:What bullshit

[PeterBrett]

Maybe you can inform us of how you 'change' to accomodate [sic] the fact that people are takuing [sic] your output for free and not paying a single penny

Except you're a troll, because:

1. The music industry has seen record profits despite the recession, according to their own figures.
2. People who download media illicitly are the exactly the same people who spend the most money on media, as has been shown repeatedly by studies.

Some good changes that the industry could make would be to, firstly, stop lying, and secondly, to stop trying to criminalise their own best customers

Re:It wouldn't work anyway

[PeterBrett]

Who can afford the lawyers? Now if they really wanted to make this work (don't forget that all parties in england have to pacify the media/content owners. Do you want to upset the content producers and then be ridiculed forever in every piece of content? Go ahead, suggest the BBC should be privatized, see how long your public image survives. Yesterday the BBC aired an entirely self serving copyright program that showed only the content owners point of view. How suprising)

Well, we upset the content producers by our very existence, but we still seem to be getting some media coverage -- indeed, several media organisations have contacted us in the last few hours asking for statements!

We've published a press release about last night's Panorama programme:

The Pirate Party UK has come out as highly critical of the BBC's recent Panorama programme for its disappointing coverage of the Digital Economy Bill.

Although Panorama attempted to give a fair hearing to both sides of the controversy surrounding the bill, it was ultimately considered inadequate. In particular, the BBC was criticised for its failure to get informed commentary from organisations opposed to the bill, such as the Open Rights Group, Coadec and the Pirate Party, meaning that the arguments both for and against the Digital Economy Bill were incomplete, largely misrepresented and often factually inaccurate.

...

Panorama: Separating Fact from Fiction