Some of the details of the Bill started back with the Gowers Review in 2005-06. This contained some quite interesting recommendations including:
not extending copyright (and in particular, not altered retrospectively),
a review of the TRIPS agreement (to make the importation of drugs cheaper and easier, among other things),
allow libraries to format shift their content for archival purposes,
relax copyright laws (and add more 'fair use' exemptions),
look into requiring warnings on products with DRM (and making it easier to complain about it),
not extending patent laws (in particular, to cover software),
a huge review of the patent system (including ways to encourage competition),
match penalties for offline and online copyright infringement (the MAFIAA took this to mean that downloading a CD should be as bad as shoplifting one, but it actually only refers to commercial infringement),
look into legislating against pirates if the situation is bad after 2007.
Somehow, the only one of these that seemed to actually get anywhere was the last... The full text is here.
Interestingly, it included a "scorecard" of how different areas of 'intellectual property' work right now (page 44); out of Copyright, Designs, Patents and Trade Marks, three received "high performance" scores for being balanced, coherent and flexible (as far as the legislation). Copyright, however, got a medium score for balance and low for flexible.
The best outcome might be if this bill pass as it is right now. Then the UK Pirate Party would get some more voters love!
We can hope so. More likely the majority of the population will be happy reading about a bill aimed at "cutting off those evil illegal downloaders clogging up the intertubes" and vote Labour or Conservative (or even Lib Dem) just because they did last time.
Still, the Pirate movement is growing, both in the UK and the rest of the world; maybe things will start to change. [Disclaimer: Yes, I am a member of PPUK and currently work for Pirate Parties International.]
I can't believe governments are spending so much time and effort going after file sharing. The types of punishment being proposed are also completely out of proportion. Why not spend this much effort going after other widespread crimes such as rape and human trafficking? Also, shouldn't the government be spending a lot more time worrying about environmental damage and climate change? Our futures are at stake, yet the biggest problem seems to be people exchanging bits on the Internet.
What is also particularly impressive about this legislation is that it is entitled the "Digital Economy Bill" and followed on from the Digital Britain report. The original idea behind this process was to put into place any laws that would help boost the UK's digital sectors and make sure the country was at least 'up to date' with the rest of the western world if not ahead. However, rather than pushing for high-speed broadband, establishing tax incentives for tech firms or anything else that might actually help the UK economy, we have this badly-written piece of legislation.
The Bill itself contains 44 main clauses of legislation, of which the first 17 are just about online copyright infringement. The government didn't even attempt to hide their (controversial and most likely pointless) anti-file sharing policies behind anything that might help the economy. While there is a section in the middle about TV and radio broadcasting rights (i.e. the government wants to push digital radio so it can sell off the rest of the radio spectrum), it then returns to Video Game censorship/classification (essentially out-sourcing it to PEGI) which adds an extra burden on video game producers.
Then there is a fun section where the government helpfully demonstrates that it doesn't care at all about the "artist" or "content creator" (neither of which appear anywhere in the draft text). Clause 42 effectively creates a public licensing body for orphan work - which itself is quite a good idea (although a better way to make orphan works more available might be to reduce the duration of copyright) - but then they tag on an extra section that allows the body to
to grant copyright licences in respect of works in which copyright is not owned by the body or a person on whose behalf the body acts. - Clause 42, 116B, (1)
It seems that it is OK to take powers away from artists provided it is some large organisation (such as the RIAA-controlled PRS) that is benefiting (the PRS kept a "small administration/commission fee" of £67m in 2007 or about 12% of their revenue) rather than the general public.
This Bill works out as a bad deal for internet users, content creators and even radio station operators. The bulk of the bill concerns adding further restrictions and costs on the digital sector; rather than helping the UK's "Digital Economy" this Bill seems to be doing all it can to hinder it. I guess that's what we should expect from an out-of-touch government and parliament full of politicians who care more about winning votes rather than doing the country any good.
After the attempt on his parliament, Charles II's popularity shot through the roof and the 5th of November celebrates that he was caught. You don't burn effigies of people you are celebrating.
While the basic message of the parent post is correct, it seems to fail somewhat in the details. For starters, it was James I not Charles II. Charles II was James I's grandson and Charles I was in between (along with that unpleasant interregnum period).
While religion was the "excuse" for the plot, it was mainly down to a group of nobles who were unhappy at their lack of power and wanted to take over. Blowing up the British Parliament (King, royal family and Lords, some of whom were Catholic) was a good way of getting everyone more powerful than them out of the way. There was no "for the people" element to the plot.
Guy Fawkes was a soldier/mercenary. He was a junior member of the conspiracy but due to his experience he was put in charge of setting up the explosives etc.. He became the most famous person involved because he was caught leaving the cellar which was full of gunpowder and so was the first caught. [After the failed attack, the main conspirators openly declared themselves and tried to raise an army to march on London. Unfortunately for them, no one cared enough to join them and they were hunted down.]
The Gunpowder Plot was little more than a power struggle between nobles and Guy Fawkes was the mercenary foolish enough to get caught planting the explosives.
We French have a law (roughly called "IT and privacy) that guarantees us the right to see and amend any data about us retained in computer form. I'm of half a mind to request my file from Google, for curiosity's sake.
(a) to be informed by any data controller whether personal data of which that individual is the data subject are being processed by or on behalf of that data controller,
(b) if that is the case, to be given by the data controller a description of—
(i) the personal data of which that individual is the data subject....
(c) to have communicated to him in an intelligible form—
(i) the information constituting any personal data of which that individual is the data subject, and
(ii) any information available to the data controller as to the source of those data,
Effectively this means that any individual is able to have any data on them disclosed to them and there are further provisions for having the data corrected if it is inaccurate. However, the data controller responsible is entitled to charge for providing the data, (possibly planning to prevent mass-spamming of requests). All data controllers are required to be registered with the Information Commissioner's Office which has a database of all the data controllers (that is publicly searchable). That's also the reason why, at least in the UK, if somewhere as CCTV cameras they are legally obliged to have a large sign saying so and making it clear who has all the recordings etc.. The Data Protection Act is an impressively complicated piece of legislation, though, so there are lots of other requirements and get-outs (it consists of 8 pages of raw law and 12 pages of schedules).
Mod me troll, but this sort of thing really annoys me
The golden ratio is found everywhere in nature even to the quantum level. It is also the most pleasing ratio to the human eye.
It would be highly improbable for a random universe to create this sort of symmetry.
To believe in a random universe requires a lot more mental gymnastics to reconcile the observed universe with that world view.
Or it could just be that the ratio comes from a very simple geometrical idea and a pretty basic equation.
Next you'll be suggesting that the fact that so many things in the universe seem to be approximately spherical is evidence of a divine being.
Oh, and just because something is improbable, doesn't mean that it can't happen. As for it being "most pleasing to the human eye", personally, I prefer the 1:1 ratio; squares have more symmetry than rectangles. Does that make me inhuman? The golden ratio looks quite nice, and is mathematically a bit interesting, but that doesn't make it magical.
How do you stop being a mathematician? (you don't seem to have stopped).
By being forced to graduate from university and getting caught up in politics and law. It must be at least 3 months since I did any proper maths (and the stuff above doesn't count - any suitably well-taught 8 year-old should be able to derive the answer; and it is all on Wikipedia anyway). But still, I guess one never quite recovers from spending 5+ years almost entirely devoted to the subject...
...the golden ratio famous from art and architecture...
As a (former) mathematician, I would like to point out that the ratio really comes from elementary (pun intended; read on to find out more) geometry. The ancient Greeks played around with it quite a lot and Euclid mentioned it (more or less) in his Elements. The Greeks weren't interested in this because of art or how pretty it was, but because they were particularly crazy about geometry (nearly all of their mathematics was derived from it) and some seemed to think that the universe could be understood through geometry alone. Anyway, it is just the fairly simple ratio of lengths of two lines such that the ratio between the larger and the smaller is the same as the ratio of them both added and the larger, or algebraically;
(a + b)/a = a / b = phi
This can then be trivially rearranged into phi^2 - phi - 1 = 0, and then that has the one positive solution; phi = [1 + sqrt(5)]/2 (the negative solution being [1 - sqrt(5)]/2 = - 0.618... but negative lengths and ratios tend to prove problematic). As usual, Wikipedia has more information.
While it is quite interesting to see it appear in a quantum mechanical setting, it isn't particularly shocking (to me). The number is the result of a fairly simple equation (as shown above) which is why it seems to appear so frequently in nature. While I didn't get this far in my studies of quantum theories, it wouldn't surprise me if, once the mathematicians have a chance to look into this, the reason behind this appearance of phi is found to be rather trivial.
However, I am not a physicist, or an expert in this field, so I may be completely wrong.
...I would have had infinite respect for a politician who responded to a terrorist attack by shrugging...
While I can't comment on most of her policies (being only a few years old when she left office), Margaret Thatcher's reaction to the Brighton Hotel bombing has certainly earned her my admiration. In the face of what was (unlike the current situation in the USA and UK) a real and serious terrorist attack - part of a campaign which is arguably still going on - she didn't encourage fear and terror (as seems the popular thing these days) but carried on almost as if nothing had happened. I think our politicians today could learn a lot from her.
Having said that, I was quite impressed (and "proud to be British") when reading and witnessing the reaction to the London bombings in 2005; the next day everything carried on as normal (until the government started introducing fun new laws) with the main worry of Londoners being the disruption to their morning commute due to the closed stations.
As for blaming the politicians and public, I think that it is foolish to overlook the media's role. Nothing seems to sell papers better than a healthy dose of impending doom.
The LHC is only rated for operation at 14TeV (1.4e13), while the highest energy cosmic rays recorded are on the order of 100EeV (1e20)....
To put this in perspective, the highest energy collisions will be 14TeV (7TeV per particle involved) which is about 2.2e-6 Joules. 1TeV is approximately the energy of a flying mosquito and the energy of 1 second of moonlight on the human face (a nice, standardised measurement) comes to around 200TeV. Don't let the "tera" part fool you into thinking these are large quantities of energy. What's significant about the LHC is that the energy is focused in a particularly small volume.
As with black holes in general, the mass (or energy, the two being roughly equivalent) involved isn't remotely important - what is important is the density.
For those few who haven't properly read through the article, here are the main numbers (skip to the end for a summary);
The government estimates that the initial cost of the "letter-writing" stage (i.e. "some evil corporate lawyer has got some very weak evidence that someone on your connection may be pirating; stop now or we'll cut you off") will be £1.40 ($2.25) per subscriber. This is the administrative cost to the ISP which they will have to pass on to their customers.
The report estimates that this minor increase will be enough to force 40,000 households (not people) to cancel their internet connection. So much for encouraging the uptake of broadband. None of this money will go to the music or film industry (although the Royal Mail might to well out of it).
The ISPs have estimated that the cost of implementing all the measures will be roughly £25 ($40) a year to broadband subscribers. This is where the £500m figure comes from, assuming 20,000 households with broadband. This money will not be going to the music or film industry (or book, magazine, porn, or similar creative industries, never mind individual content creators) but will presumably cover part of the administrative costs of the system as well as making up for the 40,000 lost subscriptions mentioned above. Note that if ministers expect an increase of £1.40 a year to lead to 40,000 cancelled subscriptions, when you also add on this £25 (plus the £6/yr broadband tax introduced last month) that number may go up dramatically.
Finally, ministers have estimated the benefit of this law. They estimate that it will lead to £1.7bn in "extra sale" revenue to the music and film industry over the next 10 years. Now, I'm fairly certain that most people on/. will happily shred the above concept, but for now, let us assume the figure (which is mysteriously close to the £180m/year losses the BPI claimed recently). From this, the government estimates that it will gain an extra £350m in tax revenue (about $560m). Now, I make that about 20%, which seems a little high to me, (VAT being 17.5% iirc, and with most of the industry being based abroad and knowing how to use a tax haven), but again, let us assume this figure.
So, in summary, the following are the initial effects of the Digital Economy Bill (ignoring rights issues, assuming government figures etc.):
Over 40,000 households will cancel their broadband subscription.
The cost to the general public will be £500m a year ($800m).
The net gain to the film and music industry in the form of "extra sales" will be £170m a year ($270m),
The gain to the UK government in the form of additional tax revenue will be £35m a year ($56m).
Am I the only one who can see a slight discrepancy here? There are many reasons I am supporting the UK's Pirate Party, thank you, Lord Mandelson, for helping our cause so much.
For the record, this clause didn't go completely unnoticed; it was spotted by the UK Pirate Party in their draft analysis (disclaimer: yes, I wrote most of that).
(1) The Secretary of State may at any time by order impose a technical obligation on internet service providers if the Secretary of State considers it appropriate in view of—
(a) an assessment carried out or steps taken by OFCOM under section 124G; or
(b) any other consideration.
(2) An order under this section must specify the date from which the technical obligation is to have effect, or provide for it to be specified.
(3) The order may also specify—
(a) the criteria for taking the technical measure concerned against a subscriber;
(b) the steps to be taken as part of the measure and when they are to be taken.”
A "technical obligation" is defined in the previous clause as an obligation on an ISP to impose a "technical measure" on a subscriber. The "technical measures" are also defined as something that limits the speed, blocks content, disconnects the user completely or "limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way". So yes, this clause would give a Secretary of State complete power over any internet connection in the UK.
This clause is probably the worst in the entire bill, and considering some of the other parts, that's saying something
Personally, I think that we have a problem with a word having two possible meanings. Atheism, to most people, describes one of two stances:
a) I do not believe (whichever) god exists.
b) I believe (whichever) god does not exist.
Those two statements are subtly, but significantly different. b) is a religious belief. a) is not. b) requires a leap of faith to connect the observable evidence and logical deductions to the conclusion, a) does not as it does not state the existence of any beliefs.
On the subject of the Digital Britain report, the UK pirate party has already released a response to the report that, rather than making the broad statements various officials did (the BPI claiming it wasn't enough, the Tories saying it was a "colossal disappointment" - you wonder if either had actually read the report) it includes a section on each of the main points of the report relevant to the PPUK's views. The response can be found here.
As a UKer who refused to buy either Mass Effect or Spore (and was slightly disappointed about it) after the SecuRom controversy (I had enough trouble with the "removed" drm on Bioshock) I was rather excited about this press release and immediately bounded over to Steam to see how much they were going for. However, having read the press release on Steam it appears that these EA games are only available to "North American" customers. The rest of the world is (as always) overlooked.
Also, prices for UK customers are in £s (pound sterling) rather than euro (â) - from what I remember of the prices before, they may have changed them, but - well, the pound is doing so badly at the moment it probably does not matter all that much. All the same, it looks like we'll be forced to go back to the whole "region-encoding" price-fixing scam again, it was nice to escape it for a while.
This is why I shudder every time there is mention of dismantling the Lords. It seems to be a very effective barrier (in theory) between the newspapers and the law. i.e:
(1) The newspapers run a story about how such a thing is terrible and the government should do somehting about it,
(2) The commons think that this means the people care about this and so (worried that it will lose them their seats in the next election) quickly write a bill to cover this which is rushed and so full of holes. And then in an ideal world, you get;
(3) The Lords point out the holes, do not have to worry about "public opinion" and so can throw out the ridiculous law.
Perhaps it is the House of Commons that needs replacing/an overhaul.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the details of the Bill started back with the Gowers Review in 2005-06. This contained some quite interesting recommendations including:
Somehow, the only one of these that seemed to actually get anywhere was the last... The full text is here.
Interestingly, it included a "scorecard" of how different areas of 'intellectual property' work right now (page 44); out of Copyright, Designs, Patents and Trade Marks, three received "high performance" scores for being balanced, coherent and flexible (as far as the legislation). Copyright, however, got a medium score for balance and low for flexible.
The best outcome might be if this bill pass as it is right now. Then the UK Pirate Party would get some more voters love!
We can hope so. More likely the majority of the population will be happy reading about a bill aimed at "cutting off those evil illegal downloaders clogging up the intertubes" and vote Labour or Conservative (or even Lib Dem) just because they did last time.
Still, the Pirate movement is growing, both in the UK and the rest of the world; maybe things will start to change. [Disclaimer: Yes, I am a member of PPUK and currently work for Pirate Parties International.]
I can't believe governments are spending so much time and effort going after file sharing. The types of punishment being proposed are also completely out of proportion. Why not spend this much effort going after other widespread crimes such as rape and human trafficking? Also, shouldn't the government be spending a lot more time worrying about environmental damage and climate change? Our futures are at stake, yet the biggest problem seems to be people exchanging bits on the Internet.
What is also particularly impressive about this legislation is that it is entitled the "Digital Economy Bill" and followed on from the Digital Britain report. The original idea behind this process was to put into place any laws that would help boost the UK's digital sectors and make sure the country was at least 'up to date' with the rest of the western world if not ahead. However, rather than pushing for high-speed broadband, establishing tax incentives for tech firms or anything else that might actually help the UK economy, we have this badly-written piece of legislation.
The Bill itself contains 44 main clauses of legislation, of which the first 17 are just about online copyright infringement. The government didn't even attempt to hide their (controversial and most likely pointless) anti-file sharing policies behind anything that might help the economy. While there is a section in the middle about TV and radio broadcasting rights (i.e. the government wants to push digital radio so it can sell off the rest of the radio spectrum), it then returns to Video Game censorship/classification (essentially out-sourcing it to PEGI) which adds an extra burden on video game producers.
Then there is a fun section where the government helpfully demonstrates that it doesn't care at all about the "artist" or "content creator" (neither of which appear anywhere in the draft text). Clause 42 effectively creates a public licensing body for orphan work - which itself is quite a good idea (although a better way to make orphan works more available might be to reduce the duration of copyright) - but then they tag on an extra section that allows the body to
to grant copyright licences in respect of works in which copyright is not owned by the body or a person on whose behalf the body acts. - Clause 42, 116B, (1)
It seems that it is OK to take powers away from artists provided it is some large organisation (such as the RIAA-controlled PRS) that is benefiting (the PRS kept a "small administration/commission fee" of £67m in 2007 or about 12% of their revenue) rather than the general public.
This Bill works out as a bad deal for internet users, content creators and even radio station operators. The bulk of the bill concerns adding further restrictions and costs on the digital sector; rather than helping the UK's "Digital Economy" this Bill seems to be doing all it can to hinder it. I guess that's what we should expect from an out-of-touch government and parliament full of politicians who care more about winning votes rather than doing the country any good.
Why would we want to install a catholic ruler?
After the attempt on his parliament, Charles II's popularity shot through the roof and the 5th of November celebrates that he was caught. You don't burn effigies of people you are celebrating.
While the basic message of the parent post is correct, it seems to fail somewhat in the details. For starters, it was James I not Charles II. Charles II was James I's grandson and Charles I was in between (along with that unpleasant interregnum period).
While religion was the "excuse" for the plot, it was mainly down to a group of nobles who were unhappy at their lack of power and wanted to take over. Blowing up the British Parliament (King, royal family and Lords, some of whom were Catholic) was a good way of getting everyone more powerful than them out of the way. There was no "for the people" element to the plot.
Guy Fawkes was a soldier/mercenary. He was a junior member of the conspiracy but due to his experience he was put in charge of setting up the explosives etc.. He became the most famous person involved because he was caught leaving the cellar which was full of gunpowder and so was the first caught. [After the failed attack, the main conspirators openly declared themselves and tried to raise an army to march on London. Unfortunately for them, no one cared enough to join them and they were hunted down.]
The Gunpowder Plot was little more than a power struggle between nobles and Guy Fawkes was the mercenary foolish enough to get caught planting the explosives.
We French have a law (roughly called "IT and privacy) that guarantees us the right to see and amend any data about us retained in computer form. I'm of half a mind to request my file from Google, for curiosity's sake.
Section 7 of the UK's Data Protection Act covers something similar but for any data - not just that held in digital form:
(1)....an individual is entitled—
Effectively this means that any individual is able to have any data on them disclosed to them and there are further provisions for having the data corrected if it is inaccurate. However, the data controller responsible is entitled to charge for providing the data, (possibly planning to prevent mass-spamming of requests). All data controllers are required to be registered with the Information Commissioner's Office which has a database of all the data controllers (that is publicly searchable). That's also the reason why, at least in the UK, if somewhere as CCTV cameras they are legally obliged to have a large sign saying so and making it clear who has all the recordings etc.. The Data Protection Act is an impressively complicated piece of legislation, though, so there are lots of other requirements and get-outs (it consists of 8 pages of raw law and 12 pages of schedules).
Mod me troll, but this sort of thing really annoys me
The golden ratio is found everywhere in nature even to the quantum level. It is also the most pleasing ratio to the human eye.
It would be highly improbable for a random universe to create this sort of symmetry.
To believe in a random universe requires a lot more mental gymnastics to reconcile the observed universe with that world view.
Or it could just be that the ratio comes from a very simple geometrical idea and a pretty basic equation.
Next you'll be suggesting that the fact that so many things in the universe seem to be approximately spherical is evidence of a divine being.
Oh, and just because something is improbable, doesn't mean that it can't happen. As for it being "most pleasing to the human eye", personally, I prefer the 1:1 ratio; squares have more symmetry than rectangles. Does that make me inhuman? The golden ratio looks quite nice, and is mathematically a bit interesting, but that doesn't make it magical.
How do you stop being a mathematician? (you don't seem to have stopped).
By being forced to graduate from university and getting caught up in politics and law. It must be at least 3 months since I did any proper maths (and the stuff above doesn't count - any suitably well-taught 8 year-old should be able to derive the answer; and it is all on Wikipedia anyway). But still, I guess one never quite recovers from spending 5+ years almost entirely devoted to the subject...
...the golden ratio famous from art and architecture...
As a (former) mathematician, I would like to point out that the ratio really comes from elementary (pun intended; read on to find out more) geometry. The ancient Greeks played around with it quite a lot and Euclid mentioned it (more or less) in his Elements. The Greeks weren't interested in this because of art or how pretty it was, but because they were particularly crazy about geometry (nearly all of their mathematics was derived from it) and some seemed to think that the universe could be understood through geometry alone. Anyway, it is just the fairly simple ratio of lengths of two lines such that the ratio between the larger and the smaller is the same as the ratio of them both added and the larger, or algebraically;
(a + b)/a = a / b = phi
This can then be trivially rearranged into phi^2 - phi - 1 = 0, and then that has the one positive solution; phi = [1 + sqrt(5)]/2 (the negative solution being [1 - sqrt(5)]/2 = - 0.618... but negative lengths and ratios tend to prove problematic). As usual, Wikipedia has more information.
While it is quite interesting to see it appear in a quantum mechanical setting, it isn't particularly shocking (to me). The number is the result of a fairly simple equation (as shown above) which is why it seems to appear so frequently in nature. While I didn't get this far in my studies of quantum theories, it wouldn't surprise me if, once the mathematicians have a chance to look into this, the reason behind this appearance of phi is found to be rather trivial.
However, I am not a physicist, or an expert in this field, so I may be completely wrong.
...I would have had infinite respect for a politician who responded to a terrorist attack by shrugging...
While I can't comment on most of her policies (being only a few years old when she left office), Margaret Thatcher's reaction to the Brighton Hotel bombing has certainly earned her my admiration. In the face of what was (unlike the current situation in the USA and UK) a real and serious terrorist attack - part of a campaign which is arguably still going on - she didn't encourage fear and terror (as seems the popular thing these days) but carried on almost as if nothing had happened. I think our politicians today could learn a lot from her.
Having said that, I was quite impressed (and "proud to be British") when reading and witnessing the reaction to the London bombings in 2005; the next day everything carried on as normal (until the government started introducing fun new laws) with the main worry of Londoners being the disruption to their morning commute due to the closed stations.
As for blaming the politicians and public, I think that it is foolish to overlook the media's role. Nothing seems to sell papers better than a healthy dose of impending doom.
The LHC is only rated for operation at 14TeV (1.4e13), while the highest energy cosmic rays recorded are on the order of 100EeV (1e20). ...
To put this in perspective, the highest energy collisions will be 14TeV (7TeV per particle involved) which is about 2.2e-6 Joules. 1TeV is approximately the energy of a flying mosquito and the energy of 1 second of moonlight on the human face (a nice, standardised measurement) comes to around 200TeV. Don't let the "tera" part fool you into thinking these are large quantities of energy. What's significant about the LHC is that the energy is focused in a particularly small volume.
As with black holes in general, the mass (or energy, the two being roughly equivalent) involved isn't remotely important - what is important is the density.
Orders of magnitude (energy) (yes, it's Wikipedia, but there are only hand-wavy arguments).
For those few who haven't properly read through the article, here are the main numbers (skip to the end for a summary);
The government estimates that the initial cost of the "letter-writing" stage (i.e. "some evil corporate lawyer has got some very weak evidence that someone on your connection may be pirating; stop now or we'll cut you off") will be £1.40 ($2.25) per subscriber. This is the administrative cost to the ISP which they will have to pass on to their customers.
The report estimates that this minor increase will be enough to force 40,000 households (not people) to cancel their internet connection. So much for encouraging the uptake of broadband. None of this money will go to the music or film industry (although the Royal Mail might to well out of it).
The ISPs have estimated that the cost of implementing all the measures will be roughly £25 ($40) a year to broadband subscribers. This is where the £500m figure comes from, assuming 20,000 households with broadband. This money will not be going to the music or film industry (or book, magazine, porn, or similar creative industries, never mind individual content creators) but will presumably cover part of the administrative costs of the system as well as making up for the 40,000 lost subscriptions mentioned above. Note that if ministers expect an increase of £1.40 a year to lead to 40,000 cancelled subscriptions, when you also add on this £25 (plus the £6/yr broadband tax introduced last month) that number may go up dramatically.
Finally, ministers have estimated the benefit of this law. They estimate that it will lead to £1.7bn in "extra sale" revenue to the music and film industry over the next 10 years. Now, I'm fairly certain that most people on /. will happily shred the above concept, but for now, let us assume the figure (which is mysteriously close to the £180m/year losses the BPI claimed recently). From this, the government estimates that it will gain an extra £350m in tax revenue (about $560m). Now, I make that about 20%, which seems a little high to me, (VAT being 17.5% iirc, and with most of the industry being based abroad and knowing how to use a tax haven), but again, let us assume this figure.
So, in summary, the following are the initial effects of the Digital Economy Bill (ignoring rights issues, assuming government figures etc.):
Am I the only one who can see a slight discrepancy here? There are many reasons I am supporting the UK's Pirate Party, thank you, Lord Mandelson, for helping our cause so much.
For the record, this clause didn't go completely unnoticed; it was spotted by the UK Pirate Party in their draft analysis (disclaimer: yes, I wrote most of that).
The entire clause reads:
124H Obligations to limit internet access
(1) The Secretary of State may at any time by order impose a technical obligation on internet service providers if the Secretary of State considers it appropriate in view of—
(a) an assessment carried out or steps taken by OFCOM under section 124G; or
(b) any other consideration.
(2) An order under this section must specify the date from which the technical obligation is to have effect, or provide for it to be specified.
(3) The order may also specify—
(a) the criteria for taking the technical measure concerned against a subscriber;
(b) the steps to be taken as part of the measure and when they are to be taken.”
A "technical obligation" is defined in the previous clause as an obligation on an ISP to impose a "technical measure" on a subscriber. The "technical measures" are also defined as something that limits the speed, blocks content, disconnects the user completely or "limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way". So yes, this clause would give a Secretary of State complete power over any internet connection in the UK.
This clause is probably the worst in the entire bill, and considering some of the other parts, that's saying something
Personally, I think that we have a problem with a word having two possible meanings. Atheism, to most people, describes one of two stances:
a) I do not believe (whichever) god exists.
b) I believe (whichever) god does not exist.
Those two statements are subtly, but significantly different. b) is a religious belief. a) is not. b) requires a leap of faith to connect the observable evidence and logical deductions to the conclusion, a) does not as it does not state the existence of any beliefs.
On the subject of the Digital Britain report, the UK pirate party has already released a response to the report that, rather than making the broad statements various officials did (the BPI claiming it wasn't enough, the Tories saying it was a "colossal disappointment" - you wonder if either had actually read the report) it includes a section on each of the main points of the report relevant to the PPUK's views. The response can be found here.
As a UKer who refused to buy either Mass Effect or Spore (and was slightly disappointed about it) after the SecuRom controversy (I had enough trouble with the "removed" drm on Bioshock) I was rather excited about this press release and immediately bounded over to Steam to see how much they were going for. However, having read the press release on Steam it appears that these EA games are only available to "North American" customers. The rest of the world is (as always) overlooked.
Also, prices for UK customers are in £s (pound sterling) rather than euro (â) - from what I remember of the prices before, they may have changed them, but - well, the pound is doing so badly at the moment it probably does not matter all that much. All the same, it looks like we'll be forced to go back to the whole "region-encoding" price-fixing scam again, it was nice to escape it for a while.
This is why I shudder every time there is mention of dismantling the Lords. It seems to be a very effective barrier (in theory) between the newspapers and the law. i.e: (1) The newspapers run a story about how such a thing is terrible and the government should do somehting about it, (2) The commons think that this means the people care about this and so (worried that it will lose them their seats in the next election) quickly write a bill to cover this which is rushed and so full of holes. And then in an ideal world, you get; (3) The Lords point out the holes, do not have to worry about "public opinion" and so can throw out the ridiculous law. Perhaps it is the House of Commons that needs replacing/an overhaul.