Richard's Kingdom

The Government may be about to propose some misconceived, illiberal and anti-competitive copyright-enforcement policies in a Communications Bill green paper. The Open Rights Group has a briefing up on the proposals and their concerns about them. In summary the suggestion seems to be that UK web-surfers should be prevented from accessing websites that major corporate [...]

UPDATE 2012-04-05 16:00 BST: I had my legislative proposals confused. Turns out there are two separate sets of measures being proposed at present. This session was on the forthcoming Communications Green Paper not the Communications Capabilities Development Programme. I’ve updated the post title and content accordingly. My thanks to the [org-discuss] mailing-list subscriber who pointed [...]

Despite massive public opposition the Digital Economy Bill was voted into law last night. Here’s how Sheffield MPs behaved: Constituency MP Party At 2nd reading? At 3rd reading? How they voted Attercliffe Clive Betts Labour No No FOR the Bill Brightside David Blunkett Labour No No ABSENT Central Richard Caborn Labour No No FOR the [...]

Content-industry lobbyists know that language is important. That’s why they use words like ‘theft’ and ‘piracy’ to refer to copyright infringement. Despite the current trendiness of the P-word, lamented recently by one industry insider, conflating these terms with illicit downloading has allowed organisations like the BPI and the Federation Against Copyright Theft (which abbreviates to [...]

The Gagged Geeks protest against the Digital Economy Bill in Sheffield yesterday exceeded all my expectations. Around thirty protesters handed out 300 leaflets – our entire stock – in less than 20 minutes. We were joined by Paul Scriven, leader of Sheffield Council and Lib Dem PPC for Sheffield Central, who handed out leaflets and [...]