Digital economy

Tom Watson talking about the Digital Economy Act. There has been a lot of kerfuffle about this over the last few weeks, and probably with some justification. The act basically allows Chinese style politically motivated blocking of web sites, and could very easily be used to censor legitimate but embarrassing disclosures, such as documents appearing on Wikileaks. Not only does the act allow government to force ISPs to block access to web sites infringing copyright, but also sites which might infringe copyright at some unspecified point in the future. The worst part which was focussed upon by protesters was the possibility of people being cut off from the internet as a penalty for copyright infringement. It doesn't take a large stretch of imagination to imagine this law being used against bloggers and whistleblowers in order to try to prevent them, perhaps temporarily for a few weeks or months, from getting their messages out into the public domain - or at least make their life harder.



There is also a flip side to rigid enforcement of digital copyrights, and this is the genius of licenses like the GPL or Creative Commons. The more aggressive the copyright regime becomes the more attractive Free/Open Source software and Creative Commons media will become. What the "analogue" industries are really fighting against in something like the Digital Economy Act is human nature and human culture itself - the desire to freely produce and share cultural artefacts.