Thanks for the link. I think I will submit a response. I submitted one to Gowers as well, not that that did us much good as the government quietly reversed their position on things like copyright term extension later despite a very, very clear view from the public submissions that this was not appropriate. Still, at least it is a matter of public record that pretty much everyone except the media did oppose that change.
In this case, I don't have a problem with penalising those who blatantly break the law using P2P. It is, after all, against the law, and the law is not unreasonable in most cases that would be affected. However, when penalising those who break the law, there should be due process and judicial oversight. The idea of giving Big Media direct access to legal resources without such oversight is... well, take a look at what happened in the US, and it's pretty clear that it's a bad idea. Unless, of course, there are statutory provisions entitling me to compensation of £100 per hour plus all other legal fees and consequential losses in the event that I am wrongly accused and have to defend myself.
Every situation you describe is certainly a bad thing, but IMHO the problem is that, for example, an off-duty police officer retains their special privileges when not on duty.
As for shooting people, I can't speak for anywhere else, but any firearms incident involving the police in my country automatically triggers an independent investigation, and the police are no more allowed to carry firearms out of work than any other citizen.
Allowing government workers to retain special privileges at times when they are not working for the government would usually be an example of missing checks and balances to me.
That person made the choice to put themselves and their family in danger by taking such a job.
And exactly how many people do you think will be willing to do dangerous but important jobs if idiots like this blogger woman can arbitrarily make them much more dangerous?
In any case, the family are not the ones doing this job. Only in a really screwed up world is it OK for someone to endanger someone else's family because of the individual's choice of job. The family are people in their own right, you know.
On the contrary. I think government should be entirely open to public scrutiny, with few very exceptions (and with independent oversight even then).
However, I distinguish between government as a collective entity and the individual people who work for the government. The former is a huge, impersonal system that wields power over its citizens because of the vast resources at its disposal. The latter are, in most cases, just doing a job as they would for any other employer, they have little individual power or discretion to apply those vast resources, and I don't see why they should be any less entitled to legal protection of their rights (including privacy) than anyone else.
The problems usually arise when the system as a whole lack effective checks and balances, either by automating something without taking all relevant factors into account, or by giving an individual or small group disproportionate ability to use the resources of government such that they really are in a position to trouble an individual citizen without justification.
If a police officer walking the beat, who doesn't like you because you're black, can arbitrarily detain you without reasonable cause, then that is disproportionate. If some trumped up council worker can order covert surveillance to find out whether you put your bin out ten minutes early, that is disproportionate. If a senior police officer can order the mass detention of hundreds of peaceful protesters, then that is disproportionate. If a senior government minister or head of state wields dictatorial powers, then of course that is disproportionate. So the principle of requiring checks and balances applies at all levels.
But as far as I can see, in the case in question, the police officers affected had done nothing to harm this woman. There hadn't been any terrible abuse of individual authority, or any unjustifiable intrusion into her life. So why should those officers be subject to an obviously dangerous invasion of their and potentially their families' privacy just because this woman doesn't like the police? If they had staked out her house, and put up advertising all over the Internet inviting violent criminals to break in and shoot her and anyone else with her, people would be up in arms!
I'm not advocating hiding government. I'm just applying the same standards to individual government employees that I would apply to any other citizen.
Because COPS ARE PUBLIC FUCKING SERVANTS. Therefore, ANYTHING THEY DO IS OF INTEREST TO THE PUBLIC.
That isn't even close to a logical argument. Public oversight of what an official body is doing on behalf of the people it represents is one thing. Individual details about every individual action of every individual agent working in any capacity within any official body is... well, another thing.
I don't think you'd like the world if everyone who worked for the government was required to live their entire lives completely open to public scrutiny. For one thing, the government would rapidly collapse because hardly anyone would tolerate those conditions. Then again, somehow I get the feeling you'd consider the government collapsing to be a good thing, because they're all evil and out to get us. Am I right?
Im sure the guys who beat up Rodney King would have loved that.
So would the police officers who were beating people up in London recently.
However, they were on duty, acting in an official capacity, in a public place. Under those circumstances, police officers are required to be identifiable, so that if they abuse their positions, they can be dealt with appropriately.
This is not the same as stalking police officers who are not abusing their positions, when they are not on duty, and distributing sensitive personal information about them.
You have a good point when you say that allowing all non-commercial use of copyrighted works is almost the same as abandoning copyright for the masses. And this is what the Pirate Party wants.
So, given that legalising all non-commercial copying would render commercial copyright almost irrelevant, it is very close to saying that the Pirate Party is in favour of abolishing copyright. Other than broadcast rights, what value would commercial copyright still have under such a system, realistically?
If we do not allow non-commercial use, somebody has to check all private communication to check if copyrighted works are infringed.
Nonsense. We have speed limits on our roads, but my car is not physically restricted from exceeding them, nor constantly monitored (though admittedly they're trying on that one). The same is true for other drivers here, yet where speed limits are reasonable, almost all drivers obey them. Where speed limits are not set reasonably, on the other hand, they are widely ignored. Such is the consequence of setting laws out of touch with what the people find reasonable and fair.
The alternative - no monitoring of private communication - is almost as bad. This way people can break the law with no risk.
Well, no. Not monitoring 100% of communication all the time is not the same as not checking anything at all.
For one thing, I suspect that most casual infringement happens via public networks hosted on the Internet, not via private communication between friends. This is certainly where the greatest scope for harm to legitimate copyright holders comes from, because this is how distribution reaches an exponentially increasing number of people in very little time. There is nothing to stop those with an interest from joining such networks to see what's available.
I guess I differ from the authorities in the US on several counts when it comes to what happens next. For one thing, I have no problem with creating an offence of knowingly making available for download a work that you do not have the right to distribute. On the other hand, I think before anyone's identity gets disclosed via any legal mechanism, there has to be real evidence that they were the person responsible, not just some auto-generated nonsense that looked for a filename with a key word in it such as we've seen in some places in the past.
Many people have a strong incentive to break the law here: Free access to cultural content. But if a majority of the citizens regularly break the law, they also loose respect for the law. Lack of respect for the law is extremely dangerous for our society, as it is based on people respecting the law.
I'll agree that any bad laws serves to bring all law into disrepute, but I challenge your implied argument that citizens will regularly break the law if copyright remains. As we have seen from legal download services such as those offered by Apple, a great many people will pay a modest price in return for a modest download. There are also new business models developing where the download itself is free and legal but supported by some form of advertising; even YouTube does this to some extent, and some services are entirely based on it. Again, these services seem quite popular with the general public.
Copyright is mainly infringed through distribution, IME, when material is obviously overpriced for what it is, or comes with silly DRM-like systems that stop people using it in simple, reasonable ways. For the record, I have no problem with repealing laws that make it an offence merely to circumvent technical measures, if the copies made having done so would otherwise be legal. I also have no problem with legalising the private use for any purpose of material that has been lawfully obtained, as long as it does not involve distribution.
In many countries there are equivalents to "fair use", allowing non-commercial use of copyri
You punish the young, the needy, and the discriminated against who would rather have a job so that they can eventually gain the experience and skills they need to get a better job and make enough to easily support themselves by imposing your preference that they have no job at all rather than one where they'd get less than 3 weeks vacation.
So what's supposed to happen in your world? Young kid leaves school at around 15–16, goes to flip burgers and clean toilets at Maccy D's for a while, and then becomes — what? A skilled tradesman? A doctor or dentist? A teacher? A lawyer? Head of the government? Chief executive of his own business?
I know someone who did in fact start his career flipping burgers and went on to become a qualified engineer, but somehow I think the four years of study at university in between had more to do with his career advancement than the burger flipping experience.
You sound like one of those people who condemn companies for paying only a dollar an hour in a third-world country where if they weren't paying a dollar an hour, the people they were paying would be starving on ten cents a day.
And if the cost of living in those countries were the same as in the US, your strawman would be relevant.
You can't have it both ways. Either there is a market for lower-paying jobs and the government is accomplishing something by making it illegal, or else there isn't and the government's regulations on the matter are thus pointless.
This is my point: there isn't very much of a market for substandard jobs. The minimum wage (at least in my country) doesn't affect many people and never has. It just prevents abuse in a small minority of cases. In some industries, the only significant competition for low-paid jobs comes from foreign workers from places like Poland, but that's a separate issue and gets into the EU's madness in expanding as fast as it has to include countries with vastly different economic strength, which doesn't really help anyone in the short term.
As far as the more significant restrictions, such as paid holiday entitlement, are concerned, employees who are well rested rather than overworked are typically more productive overall. There is no rational market at all for jobs with substandard working conditions, because whoever you employ in that role will be more effective with proper rest. The only people who think otherwise are poor managers who equate hours worked with productive activity, and frankly if they can't take the government enforcing common sense on them and preventing them from both screwing employees and doing a disservice to their employers, well, tell them to close the door behind them on the way out.
See http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa106.html or a dozen other references you can google for how things like minimum wage and other employeer-employees regulations affect employment.
You can cite academic theories as much as you like. I'm looking at empirical data from a wide range of countries with a wide range of employment laws. The kind of economic hit you are assuming from these sorts of laws should show up as a correlation between lesser restrictions on employers and greater productivity in some sense, but as far as I can see, that correlation simply isn't there.
As I noted earlier, if you look at basic economic measures like per capita GDP — not to mention quality of life indicators such as general health, life expectancy, and of course work-life balance — the countries that do impose minimum holiday requirements around the 4–5 week level and a minimum wage slightly above the poverty line do at least as well, and often much better, than places like the United States. Any pretense that the latter nation is somehow more productive because of its abusive working conditions, as some people on this forum have argued in the past, has pretty much been shown for the fiction is was by the recent economic crash.
Erm... I don't think you read your sources very carefully. Take another look, and note what the first article says both about graduate-level jobseekers and about the kind of employment the younger demographic had before anyway. And the second just notes that the young are disproportionately unemployed. This is unsurprising regardless of the legal restrictions on employers, because staff with a bit of experience are typically disproportionately productive compared to the additional cost of hiring them.
The problems in each case aren't due to mandated minimum wages or minimum holiday allowances. It's the fact that the economy has slowed so much that entire companies are disappearing, leaving fewer jobs to go around. And for the record, the jobs are disappearing and the economic situation is screwing less employable demographics just as much in countries without the legal restrictions on employers.
An entry level job is better than no job at all.
The thing is, that's where your whole argument falls apart. An entry level job that pays below the poverty line typically isn't better than no job at all, if it means giving up benefits. Most of the countries I mentioned would provide social support to people in that position if they didn't have jobs. And if you consider that to be poor policy and an abuse of taxpayers' money, consider that it costs much more to leave those people on their own and then deal with them when they inevitably wind up in the criminal justice system. Given that in most of those countries, the minimum wage isn't far above the poverty line anyway, I don't know where the market for all these lower-paying jobs you're hypothesizing comes from.
You suggest that your government telling you that you may not contract with an employer for a job for less than three weeks vacation, no matter how much you'd like to do so, makes you more free.
We suggest that when you are told that you aren't allowed to do something that is otherwise legitimate, you have less choice/less options and are thus less free.
Which would be fine, if negotiations were between parties of equal power.
However, the employment market in many industries is close to an oligopsony. Consequently, prospective employers have far more say in contract writing than prospective employees, there is little effective competition between employers to drive working conditions to a reasonable level, and the negotiating power isn't equal.
One of the valuable roles a government can play in maintaining a healthy society is that it can act as an equaliser in such circumstances. If you're going to allow the creation of artificial legal entities (corporations/shareholders) that disrupt the natural financial system (you work, you get paid; you don't pay, no-one works for you) then there has to be a flip side so that individual citizens don't get screwed as a result.
It's just like monopoly abuse/anticompetitive behaviour, but the other way around: while I'm generally not a fan of excessive regulation of businesses, I also recognise that the natural end result of an unbalanced system will be very bad for most people, so I don't mind the balancing provisions.
You may counter that the companies have all the power in the relationship, so you need the government to have the power and protect you instead. Generally, when the government and companies get together, it's not the employees and customers that win as a result. As long as there are plenty of competitors (the government hasn't set up one company as a monopoly nor over-regulated things to prevent competitors from joining the market), you are better off negotiating with several companies that can use your skills, because they have to compete for your labor.
That's a lovely theory that is nothing like practice, for the reasons above.
You are also entitled to start your own company if you think you can do it better.
I did, thanks, and I'm working fewer hours, for more money, and (here's the telling one) making better products with more satisfied clients.
But the amount of paperwork and admin required to do so, not because it's necessary for the job but because it's necessary to deal with all the government-imposed bureaucracy, is staggering. If you're going to argue that there should be more small, independent companies to keep the system honest and the real workers getting the real rewards, I'll be the first to agree with you, but changes would be needed to allow that on a significantly wider scale than today as well.
Do you mentally make any connection between being forced to give 3 weeks vacation minimum (increasing the cost of employees to employers) and a high unemployment rate among the less skilled? Economists do.
Erm... Right. Or we could just compare the notoriously bad working conditions in countries like the US and Japan with the conditions in places like Europe, Scandanavia, Australia and New Zealand. It's a shame I can't post the little chart I just built from a couple of Wikipedia tables showing unemployment rate and statutory minimum holidays by country, but if you're in any doubt, you might like to try the same exercise.
Granted, this is looking at total unemployment and not just the rate among the less skilled, which is what you mentioned. Even so, with such huge variations in total unemployment levels with the same (higher) level of statutory minimum paid time off, I struggle to believe that increasing that statutory minimum would be economically damaging on any level.
As an alternative theory, I suggest to you that people work better when properly rested an
Exactly. Employment is a two-way relationship. You wouldn't expect an employer to go out of their way to hire you (and only you) without even reading your CV. Why would any rational employer expect a skilled worker to seek them out and want to work for them (and only them) without knowing anything about what they were getting in return?
Another good one is when a potential employer is really keen to know your previous salary. How could that possibly be relevant to your new job, if you're being judged on merit and they're willing to make an honest offer based on what they think having you in that role will be worth to them? If they ask about what kind of money/package you're looking for, that's fair enough, but it's a different question. Otherwise, they're just trying to force you to give a number first (which is how you lose any negotiation) and pin you with lying at interview otherwise.
Sometimes, saying something to the effect that your current employer asks everyone to keep those details confidential but it's around the market rate will get you off the hook, and if they challenge it, you can ask if they'd really want to recruit someone who would later betray their own confidential information. If they still won't take the hint at that point, personally, I'm thinking about ending the interview. Of course, if you're not willing to walk away from a bad deal, you're going to lose any negotiation anyway, so you might as well just tell them what they want to know.
Employers whose job offers you shouldn't be sad to lose:
Those who won't tell you straight up about working conditions, contractual details, typical hours, and the like.
Those who will tell you, but when you first heard it you thought they were joking. Real replies from interviewers: "If you want a 9-5 job, don't come here, go work for the civil service; most people here are in by 8 and stay until at least 6-6:30" and "We have a reactive working policy" (which turned out to mean that their planning was almost non-existent, they worked in a perpetual panic, and senior staff were expected to stay arbitrarily late without warning or additional compensation to fix whatever came in that day.)
Those whose employment contracts/practices claim access to your life outside work: restricting you from taking on any other work out-of-hours without their consent, claiming copyright over everything you do on your own time, requiring you to keep pager/phone/etc. accessible 24/7/365 where this is not an inherent part of the job and compensated accordingly, prohibiting travel to certain countries even during your holiday without their consent, etc. Even if some or all of these things are legally unenforceable in your jurisdiction, the fact that they're claimed at all says a lot.
Those who only want to hire someone who really wants to work for them (with the implication that you shouldn't be seriously considering anyone else).
Those whose technical interviewers (or whose code samples you see during interview) don't show good technique themselves.
Those who want to know about details of your past employment that aren't relevant (such as salary/hours or commercially sensitive information).
I like: "What's the staff turnover rate like? How about in the dept I'd be joining?"
Yes, though personally I tend to be more direct than euphemistic: "How many people have left the company/department in the past year? Why did they leave?"
The thing about "dangerous" questions like these, and asking about realistic working hours, and asking about IP clauses in the contract, is that good employers will usually be more than happy to have chance to explain why they're not like the bad employers. Most will enthusiastically tell you that they have low staff turnover. In terms of copyrights, particularly at the young companies looking for good people, I've had a senior interviewer tell me immediately that he himself had got the contract adjusted to clarify that, and it certainly wouldn't be a problem. For working hours, I've had a much wider range of answers, but usually pretty honest.
I have never, to my knowledge, missed out on an offer that I would have accepted because I asked such questions. I may have lost at least two offers, but in both cases I already knew I wouldn't accept anyway after evasive or outright damning answers to the working hours question, so the question served its purpose.
Clearly YMMV, particularly if you're desperate for a job or if you're happy working for corporate behemoths that tend to have less flexibility in their contracts (and whose HR people may black flag anyone who asks too many questions).
The other thing I always like to ask, though it's probably best to leave it until after the first interview, is to see a sample of their code and documentation. Just as they can tell a lot about me from my solution to a coding problem, so I can tell a lot about them by seeing what kind of code they actually write. I have never been refused this request, though most places ask you to wait until the next visit, so it might be worth mentioning it in advance if you're going back for a second interview and know it's likely to be the last one.
My experience is that once you're past any HR goons and you're dealing with techie folks you might actually be working with, good people will be quite enthusiastic to show you something they consider good code and happy to accommodate your request. It puts them on familiar territory, and makes for a more interesting (and memorable) interview for them than the other ten they've done this week. As a convenient side effect, as well as giving you chance to see their code, it also gives them a chance to show off and creates an atmosphere of fellowship and professional respect--a good discussion about their code can make them start to think of you as one of them before you've even left the interview.
Again, I'm not aware that I've ever missed out on an offer I would have accepted because of asking this question, though again there have been a couple of places whose offers I would probably have turned down if I'd received them after seeing the sort of code I'd be working with.
And yet in this case it would be a relatively trivial matter for the defense to parade in front of the jury a set of experts who themselves have cloned these national ID cards, thereby proving that the government's "expert" (who says they're unclonable) is full of crap.
Really? And who is going to provide the money to pay those expert witnesses? Who is going to spend the time to find them? What if the ones you are able to contact aren't available on the date you're in court?
Besides all of that, there is still the problem that you're in court in the first place. Here in the UK, witnesses and jurors typically get a basic allowance to cover the time they have to take off work and/or legal protection that means their employers can't penalise them if they're required to be in court. The defendant, however, gets no automatic compensation for the time they lose, even if they are completely exonerated in court. Their employer (or they personally, for the self-employed, contractors, and those whose employers deduct the loss from salary) are still out some number of days' earnings.
You see, it's all well and good to want mistakes to be quick and easy to resolve. Some of them are. Some of them aren't. The ones that aren't, aren't for a reason.
I'm sorry, but that simply isn't true. The situation the tax system decided I was in was physically impossible on several counts, and would it would have taken 5–10 seconds for a human being looking at a single computer screen to realise this.
It took several months to get to the point where that actually happened. Rather than listening to me for thirty seconds and taking a few more seconds to check whether what I was saying was plausible, I was endlessly redirected to other offices or told they couldn't speak to me because they couldn't confirm my identity. It was only by luck, when I ran into someone who had seen the same problem before, that I got a break and found someone willing to take the time to check the rest of "my" record and realise it couldn't be right.
And it wasn't just "inconvenient" for me: it happened at a vulnerable time shortly after I left university and nearly left me unable to pay the rent. Had it happened even a couple of months earlier, it would have threatened both my home and my job, and although I probably would have been OK thanks to parents and friends helping out, there's no guarantee that someone else in the same trap would have been as lucky.
There is simply no excuse for this. There is no "look at the bigger picture" here. It was just a brain-dead system with no checks and balances whatsoever, yet with the authority to screw up someone's life without notice or recourse. There is absolutely no reason the conversation I eventually had by pure luck could not have happened in five minutes the first time I called the first tax office: neither my situation, nor the identifying information I gave, nor the data on their computer system had changed.
No, you didn't misread that: they really do plan to install 24-hour surveillance in thousands of people's homes, under the guise of "thinking of the children". The joke about thinking 1984 was a reference manual is becoming less funny by the day.
But I entirely agree with you (and TFA): the ID card system is a stalking horse to get a central database of the population in order to keep an eye on everybody.
Yes. There's now been a court ruling against keeping innocent people's DNA on the national DNA database (and the government are still trying to weasel out of that one, outright ignoring it in the meantime). It's odd, then, that they should still be pressing ahead with a "voluntary" (unless you ever need to travel) card that would capture other biometric information about everyone.
I was reassured to hear that the Conservatives have quietly changed their policy at some point: as well as opposing the cards themselves, rumour has it that they now plan to scrap the NIR as well, which previously they had said they would keep. I am unable to find any specific statement either way on their web site at present, though, so I don't know the source for that rumour.
Google "Jeremy Paxman" or "Robin Day" to discover how political interviews should be conducted.
While I agree with you that the BBC make a reasonable effort to be critical of the government when it's justified, I have to challenge the claim that Paxman is a good political interviewer.
Perhaps he once was, and of course his endless repetition of a single question when a government spokesman would not answer is legendary. Today, however, several prominent BBC hosts/interviewers, including Paxman, seem intent on speeding through a long list of loaded questions and not even pretending to offer guests a chance to reply properly.
I actually find it refreshing when a political old hand who is on the show to make a real case cuts the interviewer down rather abruptly by asking to be given a chance to reply (or something a little more pointed than that). To paraphrase a little, I might not agree with what they're going to say, but I still respect their right to say it. Robust questioning is fine, necessary even. Cutting through spin to get to the real details, sure, go ahead. But not giving a guest a chance to reply to the challenges put to them is just a pointless waste of everyone's time.
Getting back to the topic at hand, the whole ID cards issue has been ridiculously mismanaged by much of our media in the UK. There are genuine arguments both ways; indeed, many of the negatives are more about the National Identity Register than the ID cards themselves. But instead of getting proponents in to make a case for real advantages and allowing opponents to talk about the big picture and not just the cards, we get this endless stream of cloned interviews, locking onto the same political spin from several years ago, backing guests from both sides into a corner before they start and not advancing the debate at all.
And the government expert witness, on the goverment's payroll of course, will say the ID is nearly infallible and you'll end up in jail.
I think this is symptomatic of the biggest single problem with so many government powers.
Things will inevitably go wrong in any system as large and complicated as running a national government. This will be true even if everyone tries to be diligent and acts with nothing but good intentions. There is no point either pretending that this won't happen or pretending that it would be better if we dropped all government systems that could possibly cause such problems no matter how much good they might otherwise do.
However, there should always be a system in place that allows mistakes to be detected and put right quickly, and without making things any worse for the unlucky victim. This is particularly true in cases of mistaken identity or other factual errors, where the consequences might be anything from financial loss such as being denied benefits or overtaxed, through loss of reputation and all the damage to relationships and career that might entail, right through to violent arrest and detention (or worse).
As a declaration of interest, I am particularly sceptical about any claims relating to ID, because I was once overtaxed significantly due to a case of mistaken identity at a government tax office. It was bad enough that I was left short of money to pay my rent without warning, but even worse that it took nearly three months and a huge amount of effort on my part to get it put right, and I never received so much as a real apology or full explanation afterwards. I can forgive a data entry error by someone who's probably earning near the minimum wage and typing hundreds or thousands of these numbers every day. I can't forgive a system that damages me for months afterwards because it can't acknowledge that it made a mistake.
If you want to take money from someone, there is an expectation that what you're offering in return is of a reasonable standard. In software, expecting totally bug-free consumer software is not reasonable, but expecting that it doesn't (for example) silently install malware, trash all the other data on your hard drive, or contain known serious security flaws is fair enough. Whether the source for the software happens to be open is, IMHO, irrelevant to this, and Red Hat et al should be held to the same standard when they charge for software as Microsoft, Oracle or $OTHER_BIG_COMMERCIAL_ENTITY.
Bug free software is possible, it's just very very expensive to produce!
It may be possible, but no-one has ever worked out how to do it.
Even the Cleanroom guys have non-zero bug rates. They're very impressive, maybe an order of magnitude or two better than typical consumer products, but there are still bugs.
And to pick everyone's other favourite example, while TeX may now be as close to bug-free as any consumer software ever gets, there are plenty of people with framed cheques from Don Knuth to show that it wasn't always that way.
But why should the clause be necessary at all if the software was free-as-in-beer? If there is no consideration, there should be no obligation either; this is basic contract law.
Attempting to make people who give things away entirely for free liable for the consequences is a very dangerous path to tread.
When you click "Accept" on many EULA's you give up rights to privacy of your data to that company.
And the law in places like Europe really won't care. Any company whose software started uploading personal information behind its users' backs would be in serious trouble. And any user who did know that this was expected and used the software anyway would also be in serious trouble. This is why services like Google Apps are (in very black and white terms) not appropriate for use under the kinds of circumstances we're talking about in this discussion, at least under European law.
I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, but I am a part-time sysadmin for an organisation that handles personal data in the UK, so I have actually read the data protection rules here, which appears to be more than a lot of people here today.
It's like buying a scratched DVD in a second-hand shop.
Not really. I can't speak for everyone, but I'm pretty sure in my jurisdiction buying second-hands goods and/or buying goods from a source other than a professional trader reduces your consumer rights, while you have pretty strong legal rights if you buy new goods from a store. Expectations of reasonable quality and fitness for purpose are definitely part of this.
One big problem at the moment seems to be that because you're not buying physical goods in the case of downloadable music/software, it's not clear whether the same consumer protection laws still apply. IIRC, at least in Europe there are moves to make it explicit that they do, but I'm not aware of any that have reached the legislation stage yet.
If this is what it appears to be, it's a fairly obvious breach of the Data Protection Acts. Indeed, from the TFA:
The Information Commissioner, the data protection watchdog, is monitoring the development of the database. [...] The legality of the database could be put to the test in the coming week. The Information Commissioner's Office said it could not endorse a commercial service or make a ruling on its validity unless someone made a complaint. But the privacy watchdog said it had "provided advice to help the company comply with the principles of the Data Protection Act".
I rather suspect that this advice may have been "Stop. Now.":-)
The database might also fall foul of European human rights legislation that explicitly covers privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link. I think I will submit a response. I submitted one to Gowers as well, not that that did us much good as the government quietly reversed their position on things like copyright term extension later despite a very, very clear view from the public submissions that this was not appropriate. Still, at least it is a matter of public record that pretty much everyone except the media did oppose that change.
In this case, I don't have a problem with penalising those who blatantly break the law using P2P. It is, after all, against the law, and the law is not unreasonable in most cases that would be affected. However, when penalising those who break the law, there should be due process and judicial oversight. The idea of giving Big Media direct access to legal resources without such oversight is... well, take a look at what happened in the US, and it's pretty clear that it's a bad idea. Unless, of course, there are statutory provisions entitling me to compensation of £100 per hour plus all other legal fees and consequential losses in the event that I am wrongly accused and have to defend myself.
Every situation you describe is certainly a bad thing, but IMHO the problem is that, for example, an off-duty police officer retains their special privileges when not on duty.
As for shooting people, I can't speak for anywhere else, but any firearms incident involving the police in my country automatically triggers an independent investigation, and the police are no more allowed to carry firearms out of work than any other citizen.
Allowing government workers to retain special privileges at times when they are not working for the government would usually be an example of missing checks and balances to me.
That person made the choice to put themselves and their family in danger by taking such a job.
And exactly how many people do you think will be willing to do dangerous but important jobs if idiots like this blogger woman can arbitrarily make them much more dangerous?
In any case, the family are not the ones doing this job. Only in a really screwed up world is it OK for someone to endanger someone else's family because of the individual's choice of job. The family are people in their own right, you know.
On the contrary. I think government should be entirely open to public scrutiny, with few very exceptions (and with independent oversight even then).
However, I distinguish between government as a collective entity and the individual people who work for the government. The former is a huge, impersonal system that wields power over its citizens because of the vast resources at its disposal. The latter are, in most cases, just doing a job as they would for any other employer, they have little individual power or discretion to apply those vast resources, and I don't see why they should be any less entitled to legal protection of their rights (including privacy) than anyone else.
The problems usually arise when the system as a whole lack effective checks and balances, either by automating something without taking all relevant factors into account, or by giving an individual or small group disproportionate ability to use the resources of government such that they really are in a position to trouble an individual citizen without justification.
If a police officer walking the beat, who doesn't like you because you're black, can arbitrarily detain you without reasonable cause, then that is disproportionate. If some trumped up council worker can order covert surveillance to find out whether you put your bin out ten minutes early, that is disproportionate. If a senior police officer can order the mass detention of hundreds of peaceful protesters, then that is disproportionate. If a senior government minister or head of state wields dictatorial powers, then of course that is disproportionate. So the principle of requiring checks and balances applies at all levels.
But as far as I can see, in the case in question, the police officers affected had done nothing to harm this woman. There hadn't been any terrible abuse of individual authority, or any unjustifiable intrusion into her life. So why should those officers be subject to an obviously dangerous invasion of their and potentially their families' privacy just because this woman doesn't like the police? If they had staked out her house, and put up advertising all over the Internet inviting violent criminals to break in and shoot her and anyone else with her, people would be up in arms!
I'm not advocating hiding government. I'm just applying the same standards to individual government employees that I would apply to any other citizen.
Because COPS ARE PUBLIC FUCKING SERVANTS. Therefore, ANYTHING THEY DO IS OF INTEREST TO THE PUBLIC.
That isn't even close to a logical argument. Public oversight of what an official body is doing on behalf of the people it represents is one thing. Individual details about every individual action of every individual agent working in any capacity within any official body is... well, another thing.
I don't think you'd like the world if everyone who worked for the government was required to live their entire lives completely open to public scrutiny. For one thing, the government would rapidly collapse because hardly anyone would tolerate those conditions. Then again, somehow I get the feeling you'd consider the government collapsing to be a good thing, because they're all evil and out to get us. Am I right?
So it's OK to put someone's family at risk because of a decision that person made, even if their family didn't?
I don't think I want to live in your world.
Im sure the guys who beat up Rodney King would have loved that.
So would the police officers who were beating people up in London recently.
However, they were on duty, acting in an official capacity, in a public place. Under those circumstances, police officers are required to be identifiable, so that if they abuse their positions, they can be dealt with appropriately.
This is not the same as stalking police officers who are not abusing their positions, when they are not on duty, and distributing sensitive personal information about them.
You have a good point when you say that allowing all non-commercial use of copyrighted works is almost the same as abandoning copyright for the masses. And this is what the Pirate Party wants.
So, given that legalising all non-commercial copying would render commercial copyright almost irrelevant, it is very close to saying that the Pirate Party is in favour of abolishing copyright. Other than broadcast rights, what value would commercial copyright still have under such a system, realistically?
If we do not allow non-commercial use, somebody has to check all private communication to check if copyrighted works are infringed.
Nonsense. We have speed limits on our roads, but my car is not physically restricted from exceeding them, nor constantly monitored (though admittedly they're trying on that one). The same is true for other drivers here, yet where speed limits are reasonable, almost all drivers obey them. Where speed limits are not set reasonably, on the other hand, they are widely ignored. Such is the consequence of setting laws out of touch with what the people find reasonable and fair.
The alternative - no monitoring of private communication - is almost as bad. This way people can break the law with no risk.
Well, no. Not monitoring 100% of communication all the time is not the same as not checking anything at all.
For one thing, I suspect that most casual infringement happens via public networks hosted on the Internet, not via private communication between friends. This is certainly where the greatest scope for harm to legitimate copyright holders comes from, because this is how distribution reaches an exponentially increasing number of people in very little time. There is nothing to stop those with an interest from joining such networks to see what's available.
I guess I differ from the authorities in the US on several counts when it comes to what happens next. For one thing, I have no problem with creating an offence of knowingly making available for download a work that you do not have the right to distribute. On the other hand, I think before anyone's identity gets disclosed via any legal mechanism, there has to be real evidence that they were the person responsible, not just some auto-generated nonsense that looked for a filename with a key word in it such as we've seen in some places in the past.
Many people have a strong incentive to break the law here: Free access to cultural content. But if a majority of the citizens regularly break the law, they also loose respect for the law. Lack of respect for the law is extremely dangerous for our society, as it is based on people respecting the law.
I'll agree that any bad laws serves to bring all law into disrepute, but I challenge your implied argument that citizens will regularly break the law if copyright remains. As we have seen from legal download services such as those offered by Apple, a great many people will pay a modest price in return for a modest download. There are also new business models developing where the download itself is free and legal but supported by some form of advertising; even YouTube does this to some extent, and some services are entirely based on it. Again, these services seem quite popular with the general public.
Copyright is mainly infringed through distribution, IME, when material is obviously overpriced for what it is, or comes with silly DRM-like systems that stop people using it in simple, reasonable ways. For the record, I have no problem with repealing laws that make it an offence merely to circumvent technical measures, if the copies made having done so would otherwise be legal. I also have no problem with legalising the private use for any purpose of material that has been lawfully obtained, as long as it does not involve distribution.
In many countries there are equivalents to "fair use", allowing non-commercial use of copyri
You punish the young, the needy, and the discriminated against who would rather have a job so that they can eventually gain the experience and skills they need to get a better job and make enough to easily support themselves by imposing your preference that they have no job at all rather than one where they'd get less than 3 weeks vacation.
So what's supposed to happen in your world? Young kid leaves school at around 15–16, goes to flip burgers and clean toilets at Maccy D's for a while, and then becomes — what? A skilled tradesman? A doctor or dentist? A teacher? A lawyer? Head of the government? Chief executive of his own business?
I know someone who did in fact start his career flipping burgers and went on to become a qualified engineer, but somehow I think the four years of study at university in between had more to do with his career advancement than the burger flipping experience.
You sound like one of those people who condemn companies for paying only a dollar an hour in a third-world country where if they weren't paying a dollar an hour, the people they were paying would be starving on ten cents a day.
And if the cost of living in those countries were the same as in the US, your strawman would be relevant.
You can't have it both ways. Either there is a market for lower-paying jobs and the government is accomplishing something by making it illegal, or else there isn't and the government's regulations on the matter are thus pointless.
This is my point: there isn't very much of a market for substandard jobs. The minimum wage (at least in my country) doesn't affect many people and never has. It just prevents abuse in a small minority of cases. In some industries, the only significant competition for low-paid jobs comes from foreign workers from places like Poland, but that's a separate issue and gets into the EU's madness in expanding as fast as it has to include countries with vastly different economic strength, which doesn't really help anyone in the short term.
As far as the more significant restrictions, such as paid holiday entitlement, are concerned, employees who are well rested rather than overworked are typically more productive overall. There is no rational market at all for jobs with substandard working conditions, because whoever you employ in that role will be more effective with proper rest. The only people who think otherwise are poor managers who equate hours worked with productive activity, and frankly if they can't take the government enforcing common sense on them and preventing them from both screwing employees and doing a disservice to their employers, well, tell them to close the door behind them on the way out.
See http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa106.html or a dozen other references you can google for how things like minimum wage and other employeer-employees regulations affect employment.
You can cite academic theories as much as you like. I'm looking at empirical data from a wide range of countries with a wide range of employment laws. The kind of economic hit you are assuming from these sorts of laws should show up as a correlation between lesser restrictions on employers and greater productivity in some sense, but as far as I can see, that correlation simply isn't there.
As I noted earlier, if you look at basic economic measures like per capita GDP — not to mention quality of life indicators such as general health, life expectancy, and of course work-life balance — the countries that do impose minimum holiday requirements around the 4–5 week level and a minimum wage slightly above the poverty line do at least as well, and often much better, than places like the United States. Any pretense that the latter nation is somehow more productive because of its abusive working conditions, as some people on this forum have argued in the past, has pretty much been shown for the fiction is was by the recent economic crash.
If you want statistics, see:
Erm... I don't think you read your sources very carefully. Take another look, and note what the first article says both about graduate-level jobseekers and about the kind of employment the younger demographic had before anyway. And the second just notes that the young are disproportionately unemployed. This is unsurprising regardless of the legal restrictions on employers, because staff with a bit of experience are typically disproportionately productive compared to the additional cost of hiring them.
The problems in each case aren't due to mandated minimum wages or minimum holiday allowances. It's the fact that the economy has slowed so much that entire companies are disappearing, leaving fewer jobs to go around. And for the record, the jobs are disappearing and the economic situation is screwing less employable demographics just as much in countries without the legal restrictions on employers.
An entry level job is better than no job at all.
The thing is, that's where your whole argument falls apart. An entry level job that pays below the poverty line typically isn't better than no job at all, if it means giving up benefits. Most of the countries I mentioned would provide social support to people in that position if they didn't have jobs. And if you consider that to be poor policy and an abuse of taxpayers' money, consider that it costs much more to leave those people on their own and then deal with them when they inevitably wind up in the criminal justice system. Given that in most of those countries, the minimum wage isn't far above the poverty line anyway, I don't know where the market for all these lower-paying jobs you're hypothesizing comes from.
You suggest that your government telling you that you may not contract with an employer for a job for less than three weeks vacation, no matter how much you'd like to do so, makes you more free.
We suggest that when you are told that you aren't allowed to do something that is otherwise legitimate, you have less choice/less options and are thus less free.
Which would be fine, if negotiations were between parties of equal power.
However, the employment market in many industries is close to an oligopsony. Consequently, prospective employers have far more say in contract writing than prospective employees, there is little effective competition between employers to drive working conditions to a reasonable level, and the negotiating power isn't equal.
One of the valuable roles a government can play in maintaining a healthy society is that it can act as an equaliser in such circumstances. If you're going to allow the creation of artificial legal entities (corporations/shareholders) that disrupt the natural financial system (you work, you get paid; you don't pay, no-one works for you) then there has to be a flip side so that individual citizens don't get screwed as a result.
It's just like monopoly abuse/anticompetitive behaviour, but the other way around: while I'm generally not a fan of excessive regulation of businesses, I also recognise that the natural end result of an unbalanced system will be very bad for most people, so I don't mind the balancing provisions.
You may counter that the companies have all the power in the relationship, so you need the government to have the power and protect you instead. Generally, when the government and companies get together, it's not the employees and customers that win as a result. As long as there are plenty of competitors (the government hasn't set up one company as a monopoly nor over-regulated things to prevent competitors from joining the market), you are better off negotiating with several companies that can use your skills, because they have to compete for your labor.
That's a lovely theory that is nothing like practice, for the reasons above.
You are also entitled to start your own company if you think you can do it better.
I did, thanks, and I'm working fewer hours, for more money, and (here's the telling one) making better products with more satisfied clients.
But the amount of paperwork and admin required to do so, not because it's necessary for the job but because it's necessary to deal with all the government-imposed bureaucracy, is staggering. If you're going to argue that there should be more small, independent companies to keep the system honest and the real workers getting the real rewards, I'll be the first to agree with you, but changes would be needed to allow that on a significantly wider scale than today as well.
Do you mentally make any connection between being forced to give 3 weeks vacation minimum (increasing the cost of employees to employers) and a high unemployment rate among the less skilled? Economists do.
Erm... Right. Or we could just compare the notoriously bad working conditions in countries like the US and Japan with the conditions in places like Europe, Scandanavia, Australia and New Zealand. It's a shame I can't post the little chart I just built from a couple of Wikipedia tables showing unemployment rate and statutory minimum holidays by country, but if you're in any doubt, you might like to try the same exercise.
Granted, this is looking at total unemployment and not just the rate among the less skilled, which is what you mentioned. Even so, with such huge variations in total unemployment levels with the same (higher) level of statutory minimum paid time off, I struggle to believe that increasing that statutory minimum would be economically damaging on any level.
As an alternative theory, I suggest to you that people work better when properly rested an
Exactly. Employment is a two-way relationship. You wouldn't expect an employer to go out of their way to hire you (and only you) without even reading your CV. Why would any rational employer expect a skilled worker to seek them out and want to work for them (and only them) without knowing anything about what they were getting in return?
Another good one is when a potential employer is really keen to know your previous salary. How could that possibly be relevant to your new job, if you're being judged on merit and they're willing to make an honest offer based on what they think having you in that role will be worth to them? If they ask about what kind of money/package you're looking for, that's fair enough, but it's a different question. Otherwise, they're just trying to force you to give a number first (which is how you lose any negotiation) and pin you with lying at interview otherwise.
Sometimes, saying something to the effect that your current employer asks everyone to keep those details confidential but it's around the market rate will get you off the hook, and if they challenge it, you can ask if they'd really want to recruit someone who would later betray their own confidential information. If they still won't take the hint at that point, personally, I'm thinking about ending the interview. Of course, if you're not willing to walk away from a bad deal, you're going to lose any negotiation anyway, so you might as well just tell them what they want to know.
Employers whose job offers you shouldn't be sad to lose:
I like: "What's the staff turnover rate like? How about in the dept I'd be joining?"
Yes, though personally I tend to be more direct than euphemistic: "How many people have left the company/department in the past year? Why did they leave?"
The thing about "dangerous" questions like these, and asking about realistic working hours, and asking about IP clauses in the contract, is that good employers will usually be more than happy to have chance to explain why they're not like the bad employers. Most will enthusiastically tell you that they have low staff turnover. In terms of copyrights, particularly at the young companies looking for good people, I've had a senior interviewer tell me immediately that he himself had got the contract adjusted to clarify that, and it certainly wouldn't be a problem. For working hours, I've had a much wider range of answers, but usually pretty honest.
I have never, to my knowledge, missed out on an offer that I would have accepted because I asked such questions. I may have lost at least two offers, but in both cases I already knew I wouldn't accept anyway after evasive or outright damning answers to the working hours question, so the question served its purpose.
Clearly YMMV, particularly if you're desperate for a job or if you're happy working for corporate behemoths that tend to have less flexibility in their contracts (and whose HR people may black flag anyone who asks too many questions).
The other thing I always like to ask, though it's probably best to leave it until after the first interview, is to see a sample of their code and documentation. Just as they can tell a lot about me from my solution to a coding problem, so I can tell a lot about them by seeing what kind of code they actually write. I have never been refused this request, though most places ask you to wait until the next visit, so it might be worth mentioning it in advance if you're going back for a second interview and know it's likely to be the last one.
My experience is that once you're past any HR goons and you're dealing with techie folks you might actually be working with, good people will be quite enthusiastic to show you something they consider good code and happy to accommodate your request. It puts them on familiar territory, and makes for a more interesting (and memorable) interview for them than the other ten they've done this week. As a convenient side effect, as well as giving you chance to see their code, it also gives them a chance to show off and creates an atmosphere of fellowship and professional respect--a good discussion about their code can make them start to think of you as one of them before you've even left the interview.
Again, I'm not aware that I've ever missed out on an offer I would have accepted because of asking this question, though again there have been a couple of places whose offers I would probably have turned down if I'd received them after seeing the sort of code I'd be working with.
And yet in this case it would be a relatively trivial matter for the defense to parade in front of the jury a set of experts who themselves have cloned these national ID cards, thereby proving that the government's "expert" (who says they're unclonable) is full of crap.
Really? And who is going to provide the money to pay those expert witnesses? Who is going to spend the time to find them? What if the ones you are able to contact aren't available on the date you're in court?
Besides all of that, there is still the problem that you're in court in the first place. Here in the UK, witnesses and jurors typically get a basic allowance to cover the time they have to take off work and/or legal protection that means their employers can't penalise them if they're required to be in court. The defendant, however, gets no automatic compensation for the time they lose, even if they are completely exonerated in court. Their employer (or they personally, for the self-employed, contractors, and those whose employers deduct the loss from salary) are still out some number of days' earnings.
You see, it's all well and good to want mistakes to be quick and easy to resolve. Some of them are. Some of them aren't. The ones that aren't, aren't for a reason.
I'm sorry, but that simply isn't true. The situation the tax system decided I was in was physically impossible on several counts, and would it would have taken 5–10 seconds for a human being looking at a single computer screen to realise this.
It took several months to get to the point where that actually happened. Rather than listening to me for thirty seconds and taking a few more seconds to check whether what I was saying was plausible, I was endlessly redirected to other offices or told they couldn't speak to me because they couldn't confirm my identity. It was only by luck, when I ran into someone who had seen the same problem before, that I got a break and found someone willing to take the time to check the rest of "my" record and realise it couldn't be right.
And it wasn't just "inconvenient" for me: it happened at a vulnerable time shortly after I left university and nearly left me unable to pay the rent. Had it happened even a couple of months earlier, it would have threatened both my home and my job, and although I probably would have been OK thanks to parents and friends helping out, there's no guarantee that someone else in the same trap would have been as lucky.
There is simply no excuse for this. There is no "look at the bigger picture" here. It was just a brain-dead system with no checks and balances whatsoever, yet with the authority to screw up someone's life without notice or recourse. There is absolutely no reason the conversation I eventually had by pure luck could not have happened in five minutes the first time I called the first tax office: neither my situation, nor the identifying information I gave, nor the data on their computer system had changed.
It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you.
No, you didn't misread that: they really do plan to install 24-hour surveillance in thousands of people's homes, under the guise of "thinking of the children". The joke about thinking 1984 was a reference manual is becoming less funny by the day.
But I entirely agree with you (and TFA): the ID card system is a stalking horse to get a central database of the population in order to keep an eye on everybody.
Yes. There's now been a court ruling against keeping innocent people's DNA on the national DNA database (and the government are still trying to weasel out of that one, outright ignoring it in the meantime). It's odd, then, that they should still be pressing ahead with a "voluntary" (unless you ever need to travel) card that would capture other biometric information about everyone.
I was reassured to hear that the Conservatives have quietly changed their policy at some point: as well as opposing the cards themselves, rumour has it that they now plan to scrap the NIR as well, which previously they had said they would keep. I am unable to find any specific statement either way on their web site at present, though, so I don't know the source for that rumour.
Google "Jeremy Paxman" or "Robin Day" to discover how political interviews should be conducted.
While I agree with you that the BBC make a reasonable effort to be critical of the government when it's justified, I have to challenge the claim that Paxman is a good political interviewer.
Perhaps he once was, and of course his endless repetition of a single question when a government spokesman would not answer is legendary. Today, however, several prominent BBC hosts/interviewers, including Paxman, seem intent on speeding through a long list of loaded questions and not even pretending to offer guests a chance to reply properly.
I actually find it refreshing when a political old hand who is on the show to make a real case cuts the interviewer down rather abruptly by asking to be given a chance to reply (or something a little more pointed than that). To paraphrase a little, I might not agree with what they're going to say, but I still respect their right to say it. Robust questioning is fine, necessary even. Cutting through spin to get to the real details, sure, go ahead. But not giving a guest a chance to reply to the challenges put to them is just a pointless waste of everyone's time.
Getting back to the topic at hand, the whole ID cards issue has been ridiculously mismanaged by much of our media in the UK. There are genuine arguments both ways; indeed, many of the negatives are more about the National Identity Register than the ID cards themselves. But instead of getting proponents in to make a case for real advantages and allowing opponents to talk about the big picture and not just the cards, we get this endless stream of cloned interviews, locking onto the same political spin from several years ago, backing guests from both sides into a corner before they start and not advancing the debate at all.
And the government expert witness, on the goverment's payroll of course, will say the ID is nearly infallible and you'll end up in jail.
I think this is symptomatic of the biggest single problem with so many government powers.
Things will inevitably go wrong in any system as large and complicated as running a national government. This will be true even if everyone tries to be diligent and acts with nothing but good intentions. There is no point either pretending that this won't happen or pretending that it would be better if we dropped all government systems that could possibly cause such problems no matter how much good they might otherwise do.
However, there should always be a system in place that allows mistakes to be detected and put right quickly, and without making things any worse for the unlucky victim. This is particularly true in cases of mistaken identity or other factual errors, where the consequences might be anything from financial loss such as being denied benefits or overtaxed, through loss of reputation and all the damage to relationships and career that might entail, right through to violent arrest and detention (or worse).
As a declaration of interest, I am particularly sceptical about any claims relating to ID, because I was once overtaxed significantly due to a case of mistaken identity at a government tax office. It was bad enough that I was left short of money to pay my rent without warning, but even worse that it took nearly three months and a huge amount of effort on my part to get it put right, and I never received so much as a real apology or full explanation afterwards. I can forgive a data entry error by someone who's probably earning near the minimum wage and typing hundreds or thousands of these numbers every day. I can't forgive a system that damages me for months afterwards because it can't acknowledge that it made a mistake.
That's why I said free-as-in-beer.
If you want to take money from someone, there is an expectation that what you're offering in return is of a reasonable standard. In software, expecting totally bug-free consumer software is not reasonable, but expecting that it doesn't (for example) silently install malware, trash all the other data on your hard drive, or contain known serious security flaws is fair enough. Whether the source for the software happens to be open is, IMHO, irrelevant to this, and Red Hat et al should be held to the same standard when they charge for software as Microsoft, Oracle or $OTHER_BIG_COMMERCIAL_ENTITY.
Bug free software is possible, it's just very very expensive to produce!
It may be possible, but no-one has ever worked out how to do it.
Even the Cleanroom guys have non-zero bug rates. They're very impressive, maybe an order of magnitude or two better than typical consumer products, but there are still bugs.
And to pick everyone's other favourite example, while TeX may now be as close to bug-free as any consumer software ever gets, there are plenty of people with framed cheques from Don Knuth to show that it wasn't always that way.
But why should the clause be necessary at all if the software was free-as-in-beer? If there is no consideration, there should be no obligation either; this is basic contract law.
Attempting to make people who give things away entirely for free liable for the consequences is a very dangerous path to tread.
When you click "Accept" on many EULA's you give up rights to privacy of your data to that company.
And the law in places like Europe really won't care. Any company whose software started uploading personal information behind its users' backs would be in serious trouble. And any user who did know that this was expected and used the software anyway would also be in serious trouble. This is why services like Google Apps are (in very black and white terms) not appropriate for use under the kinds of circumstances we're talking about in this discussion, at least under European law.
I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, but I am a part-time sysadmin for an organisation that handles personal data in the UK, so I have actually read the data protection rules here, which appears to be more than a lot of people here today.
It's like buying a scratched DVD in a second-hand shop.
Not really. I can't speak for everyone, but I'm pretty sure in my jurisdiction buying second-hands goods and/or buying goods from a source other than a professional trader reduces your consumer rights, while you have pretty strong legal rights if you buy new goods from a store. Expectations of reasonable quality and fitness for purpose are definitely part of this.
One big problem at the moment seems to be that because you're not buying physical goods in the case of downloadable music/software, it's not clear whether the same consumer protection laws still apply. IIRC, at least in Europe there are moves to make it explicit that they do, but I'm not aware of any that have reached the legislation stage yet.
I know there are no privacy laws in Britain
Erm... Yes, there are.
If this is what it appears to be, it's a fairly obvious breach of the Data Protection Acts. Indeed, from the TFA:
The Information Commissioner, the data protection watchdog, is monitoring the development of the database. [...] The legality of the database could be put to the test in the coming week. The Information Commissioner's Office said it could not endorse a commercial service or make a ruling on its validity unless someone made a complaint. But the privacy watchdog said it had "provided advice to help the company comply with the principles of the Data Protection Act".
I rather suspect that this advice may have been "Stop. Now." :-)
The database might also fall foul of European human rights legislation that explicitly covers privacy.