ralpress.org

Cory Doctorow in the Guardian on the three way deal between the government, the music industry and ISPs:

Under the new scheme, the rule of law is replaced by a cosy inter-industry deal. Whereas before, anyone who wanted your ISP to spy on your internet connection would have had to show evidence to a judge and get a court order, now any joker who claims to be an aggrieved copyright holder can do so.

And whereas actual criminals are punished by judges who make rulings that are proportional to the offence, and which are calculated to minimise external harm, the new scheme allows ISPs and their pals in the record industry to randomly shake up your connection like a snow-globe, dropping some or all of your services – whether you’re using your VoIP phone to speak to your dying granny in Australia or downloading the latest hit single from the guy who did the “Crazy Frog Song”.

Then there’s the question of trust:

They claim that the surveillance data will only be used to police copyright and not to spy on every communication you make. But Transport for London claimed that Oyster cards would only be used to simplify paying for travel, and not to bulk-surveil Londoners, and yet here we are. As novelists say, “A gun on the mantle in act one is bound to go off by act three.”

And when it comes to “trust”, let’s not forget the following:

• Voice and data networks were built to help citizens communicate and share, not to provide our government with unprecedentedly powerful means of spying on our most private activities.
• Filesharing is an inherently legal activity; despite this, there is strong evidence that ISPs are interferring with the right of their customers to engage in this activity.
• The Terrorism Act was supposedly drawn up to combat terrorism, not to enable local councils to spy on parents attempting to obtain a place for their child at a particular school
• Roadside CCTV cameras were originally supposed to be used to penalize dangerous driving, not to create a nationwide, automated system for control, punishment and extortion.
• The data within the police DNA database was supposed to be used to fight crime, not sold to  commercial researchers to help the police cover their operational expenses.
• Electoral roll data is entrusted to our local authorities and is supposed to be used to facilitate the functioning of political democracy, not as yet another means for our local authorities to raise extra-taxation revenue.

But we needn’t worry, the ISPs have given us their word that they won’t spy on us or allow our data to be viewed by third parties. With such reassuring pledges, who needs legal or constitutional protection?

One of the great ironies here, is that the ease of data access, copying and manipulation that the recording industry is demanding be curtailed, is the same ease of access, copying and manipulation that has seduced our authorities into thinking that they can control and punish citizens remotely, and earn a quick buck by selling our most sensitive and constitutionally essential data to the highest bidder. Given that the government is siding with the record industry on this matter, it’s not irony, it’s arch hypocrisy. If hypocrisy were the only misdeed, we could just raise our eyes to the heavens and carry on with life, but this hypocrisy is eroding our civil liberties, and it doesn’t get much more serious than that.

Jesus and Mo’s favourite barmaid interviewed by freethinker.co.uk:

FT: Does God hate women?
OB: The God of most of the people who think there is a God certainly hates women. The God of some of them hates women with a weirdly obsessive neurotic hostility - so weird and petty and obsessive that one wonders what this god would make women for if it hates them so much. If it wants them covered up all the time, why didn’t it make them out of a bale of cloth? If it doesn’t want men looking at them, why didn’t it make men without any eyes? These are deep theological questions.

Link: Not much of a believer - a world exclusive interview with Ophelia Benson

Council ban on atheist websites

EDIT: This intolerable nonsense has finally persuaded me to join the National Secular Society. I submitted the membership form this evening.

Measures like the infamous music tax will hopefully never gain serious purchase among copyright lobbyists and those within government (even Feargal Sharkey thinks it’s an unworkable idea). But the increasing efforts of the content industry to capture the internet (or at least take greater control of it) with the help of government, should be viewed with alarm and suspicion, in my view.

I’m reminded of the old joke in which a young man is talking to a friend and says:

“When I was fourteen, I thought the old man was so ignorant I could barely stand to have him around; now I’m twenty-one and I’m amazed at how much he’s learned in the last seven years”.

I’m beginning to feel like this with regard to Richard M Stallman’s views on copyright. When I first read some of RMS’s writings, probably around the turn of the century, I thought that they were ahead of their time at best, extreme at worst. Now though, his views on the destiny of human-kind to use computers to their full potential, on the essential incompatibility of traditional copyright notions and digital technology, on why so much “piracy” is not theft, and his views on the attempts by copyright holders to lobby for enforcement measures that erode our civil liberties and even damage our civic society, no longer seem so far fetched at all. In fact, the last time I read “Why software should not have owners“, an essay the thesis of which I once rejected as too extreme, I just found myself nodding at each claim, as if it were a statement of the obvious and largely a matter of common sense.

With each new copyright-related news story, I’m increasingly coming around to the view that we can have an information society, but not an information economy, at least not where the latter implies the primacy of powerful copyright trolls and enforcers, sitting in glass and steel towers, remotely monitoring the digital equipment in, and data flows to and from, citizens’ homes. Combine this with the increasingly pervasive government surveillance and extortion-masquerading-as-punishment of citizens, those tracking devices in our pockets AKA mobile phones, DNA databases and other Orwellian developments besides, and we’re rapidly creating a society that given the choice, few sensible people would aspire to live within.

I’m beginning to think that the day is not far off when admitting selling digital equipment or services to a government department or to major copyright holders will be about as socially acceptable as admitting to being a developing world arms dealer. Extreme? Check back in seven years and let’s see.

UPDATE: Underscoring the timeliness of this post, here are the latest proposed measures by the UK government in its attempt to introduce the same degree of surveillance of the Web as many other of the UK’s public spaces currently enjoy. Next stop: On-the-spot fines for writing “offensive” blog articles? Freedom of expression was overrated anyway, wasn’t it?

What on earth does the BBC mean by the sentence “Officers are treating the incident as a robbery which went wrong“? What does it take for a robbery to “go wrong”? Here’s my off-the-top-of-my-head list:

• the robbers fail to steal anything of any value.
• the robbers are caught in the act, overpowered and brought to justice.

These would be my key criteria for classing a robbery as one which “went wrong”, but there’s nothing in the report that indicates that either of these conditions were met.

Imagine a situation in which a group of special forces personnel break into a compound to rescue hostages. The captors awake and are shot by the rescuers who then proceed to free the hostages. Would we describe the action as “a hostage rescue which went wrong”. Far from it, it would be one that went very well indeed.

Of course, if the thieves (if indeed, that’s what they were) really did fail to steal anything of any value, then I guess the robbery did go wrong. But I’m willing to bet that that’s not what was implied in this report, or in the innumerable others in which this perverse, trite expression has been used. What the Beeb report seems to be implying, inadvertently or otherwise, is that somehow the intruder or intruders didn’t mean to murder or injure their victims, that their gun or guns weren’t intended to kill or wound, that somehow it was all a tragic mistake and if only Mr and Mrs Mullany had kept out of the way then the robbery would probably have gone on to be a resounding success.

In future, perhaps the BBC and others who regularly use this expression, ought to consider leaving the judgment regarding actions that it implies, to a proper court of law.

I had another read of the Charles Arthur article I referred to yesterday. Charles notes something that creators and users of free (as in freedom) software should do their utmost to prevent. Namely, allowing the term filesharing to become synonymous with the phrase illegal filesharing.

“Why did this strike a chord? Because of all the fuss that’s grown up so quickly around the UK’s biggest record labels, represented by the BPI, over their memorandum of understanding with the six biggest UK ISPs (BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, Carphone Warehouse and BSkyB) as part of an effort to curtail filesharing. Illegal filesharing, I should emphasise, as the chief executive of the BPI Geoff Taylor was careful to do. (I’m pretty sure it’s because he was trying to divide it from the legal variety – such as getting Linux distributions – and not because he was trying to get us forever to associate “filesharing” with “illegal”.)”

(It’s  a rather awkward quote, but I needed the first two sentences to provide the context for what followed). I’ve little doubt that the content companies and major copyright holders would dearly love the activity of filesharing to become something that will earn you a visit from a BPI, BERR or even RIAA-invoked SWAT team. But this kind of insidious conflation is something that really must be prevented if we are to remain within the computing equivalent of a free, democratic society and not an authoritarian state (and no, this is not to condone “software piracy”, as anyone who knows what filesharing actually is will understand).

Awesome picture. Go Obama! (The world’s most popular doughnut ;))

View “Full Screen” for the full effect.

Arthur Charles in the Guardian:

“It’s a sort of capture of the internet industry by the content industry, mediated by government.”

This is surely one of the most ominous sentences imagineable for the free/Free software ecosystem (and for computer users in general)? I say this not because I support people ripping-off copyrighted work against its author’s wishes (I don’t), but because it’s very hard to accept that any such control wouldn’t be used to interfere with the public’s legitimate right to collaboratively create restriction-free software. (UPDATE: Here we go: French record labels sue, um, SourceForge)

Oh boy, this is such an important and involved topic. I really must get my thoughts in order and post a statement of my beliefs, lest I end up accused of unsupportable “freetard” sloganeering and posturing. Tonight maybe, if I have the time, I’ll post my thoughts on why most software should, and for the most part will, end up being made available without license restrictions.