I’ve written to my MP today to ask for his position on the issues raised by the green paper. I’ve also asked that he challenge Ed Vaizey and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to open up their opaque round-table discussions on the Bill, which have thus far excluded all but one set of stakeholders. The government is making choices behind closed doors that will effectively carve up digital power between private interests. Citizens and human rights lack representation in this policy-making process yet if we act quickly we can change the direction of this legislation before any politicians have to make a “U-turn”. Why not write to your MP today and make your own views known?

In my opinion, and that of a great many other technical experts, the proposals are risible and cannot hope to achieve their stated objective of reducing illicit online file-sharing. Meanwhile they will cost billions to implement – costs that will be passed on to householders and businesses – and will reserve to a few corporations monopoly control over our online experience. (I suspect this last point is the real objective of the legislation!) The Government seems to think the world-wide web is a content distribution system, similar to television, whereas in fact it’s a communications network like the Royal Mail or the telephone. It is nonsensical to try to regulate the latter class of systems in the same way as the former. Imagine how daft Ed Vaizey would sound if he proposed steaming open all our letters to check whether we’re sharing photos in violation of copyright law, or tapping everyone’s phone calls to ensure we’re not using trademarked phrases in a way that might mislead our audiences!

Perhaps the worst effect of these proposals would be the extent to which they would violate our right to privacy and freedom of expression. Automatic censorship requires surveillance, because ISPs and search engines would have to examine every webpage request we make in order to check whether we’d asked for one of the blocked sites, which would be a gross invasion of privacy. Secondly, since filtering systems are notoriously inaccurate, the owners and users of many legitimate websites would have their speech censored arbitrarily. Redress for this might prove difficult to obtain since the proposals include replacing court oversight and due process with industry-led self-regulation.

The Open Rights Group have been trying to participate in the round-table discussions being held by DCMS yet it seems their views are not welcome there. I understand they were involved initially but have been excluded subsequently. In order that we can all trust and rely on the resulting legislation the DCMS must commit to a more open and transparent process from now on. How does Mr. Vaizey intend to ensure public confidence in the Government’s copyright enforcement regime? Will he commit to setting out a clear consultation process, being transparent about with whom the DCMS is meeting and in what capacity, and ensuring that all stakeholders receive a fair hearing? Will he end the private round-table discussions that prioritise one set of stakeholders and invite organisations such as ORG to participate again? Will he commit to basing copyright policy on evidence not industry spin? Enquiring netizens need to know!

Speaking as one who lobbies in a volunteer capacity I’m strongly in favour of transparency and I have another axe to grind too: equality of access. It’s much harder for individuals and small groups to get their voices heard at the closed, secretive round-table discussions at which Whitehall policy is often developed.

The consultation details are posted on the Cabinet Office website. If you want to add your voice don’t hang around as the consultation closes on Friday 20 April. If you don’t have time to respond directly there’s a tool at Unlock Democracy you can use to make a quick contribution.

What follows is the essence of my response. The quotes are from the consultation document. I’ve only commented on the bits I think need to change.

How should lobbyists be defined?

Lobbyists should mean those who undertake lobbying activities on behalf of a third party client or whose employees conduct lobbying activities on behalf of a third party client. It may also include certain other categories of person following consultation. It should not mean those who engage in lobbying activities on their own behalf rather than for a client.

This definition is inadequate because it excludes the majority of the industry: lobbyists who lobby full-time on behalf of their employers rather than for third parties. I believe the definition should include all paid lobbyists: those working on behalf of clients as well as those employed by companies, trade bodies, business groups, trade unions and large charities. Staff and firms working on a pro-bono basis should also be included because the aim is to make lobbyist influence transparent, and influence is not necessarily the same as spending.

Information to be included on the register

The information on the register should consist of the company registration details; the names of those persons employed, contracted or otherwise engaged to carry out lobbying and whether that person is a former Minister or senior civil servant. The information should also include a list of clients on whose behalf the lobbyist carries out lobbying activities. The information might also include limited financial information.

The proposed information to appear on the register is insufficient to make it useful. In order to understand how lobbyists influence policy we also need to know the topics on which each lobbyist is making representations, how often they’ve had an audience with the Government on each issue, when those meetings took place and the amount of money being spent by each company (or individual).

[The information on the register] should not include details of meetings with Ministers, which are already made available by each Government Department on www.data.gov.uk.

The Government already publishes quarterly information about Ministers’ meetings. Information about which stakeholders are meeting Ministers to put forward their views on policies is therefore already in the public domain.

This is insufficient without also publishing the details of what those stakeholders discussed with the Ministers. It gives carte blanche to lobbyists working for large organisations, which can have a full range of interests, to lobby opaquely leaving the public to make vague assumptions about what’s going on.

Scope

A register should include those who lobby the UK Government and UK Parliament.

I think local councils should be required to maintain and publish similar registers as much murky influence is wielded by lobbyists at the local government level too.

Other comments

The register is not intended to cover the normal interaction between constituents and their MPs.

I agree with this point however I would prefer the line to be drawn significantly closer to this thin end of the wedge than is currently proposed.

Nor should the essential flow of communication between business leaders and Government, civil figures, community organisations and Government and so on, be included.

There’s no justification given for this decision and I don’t agree with it. If influence is being sought through these channels then it should sought transparently. We must avoid allowing lobbyists to obscure their their operations by fronting them through organisations that are technically outside the register’s scope.

The Government does not wish to create an obstacle to necessary interaction with policy makers or an undue burden on those who work as lobbyists or employ lobbyists.

In my opinion the extensions I’ve suggested would not impose any further obstacle for professional lobbyists than the existing proposals would.

To ensure universal access the register must be published in a machine-readable format compatible with the European Interoperability Framework definition of an Open Standard and licensed under the Open Government License.

In my opinion making lobbyist influence transparent is only half the battle towards an evidence-based policy-making framework in which all stakeholders are represented equally. The other half of the job is to ensure robust and meaningful public-interest representation during the legislative process. Lobbyists and commercial interests should no longer be allowed to hold opaque round-table discussions with minsters without seats at the table being made available to relevant public and consumer-interest groups too.

The first obvious step in lobbying your MP is to find out who they are and how to contact them. Thanks to the wonderful folk at mysociety this can be done simply by visiting write to them and typing in your postcode.

Write To Them publishes the voting record of each MP along with various statistics about their activity in the House of Commons. For effective lobbying, though, this isn’t particularly useful. What you really want to know is their position on your issue, how they relate to their party on the subject, and why they have been voting a particular way.

Two ports of call you should make are to Ask Aristotle, which lists biographical and constituency information for every MP, and They Work For You (another mysociety site), which records the questions MPs have asked and the speeches they have given in the House of Commons. Bear in mind that your MP may have been approached already by a group with views that oppose your own and this may have informed their thinking or behaviour. Think also about their level of knowledge about your topic. Your lobbying efforts will start from a different place if they’re experts than if they’re laypeople. Last, find out your MP’s “hot buttons” – the topics they talk about frequently and keep coming back to. If you can draw parallels between your aims and these issues your MP is likely to sit up and listen!

Once you’ve armed yourself with as much information as you can gather it’s time to start lobbying your MP. Letters and emails are a good start however it’s much more effective to meet them in person. There are several reasons for this: they’re more likely to remember you, and your message, if they’ve met you; they’ll give your points greater weight and your issue greater consideration since you’ve put more effort into representing your concerns to them; you can gauge their level of understanding more effectively by looking them in the eye than you can by reading their written response; you’ll receive immediate information and feedback; and you can cover a lot more ground during a 15 minute surgery appointment than you can by exchanging written correspondance.

Some tips on how to prepare for the meeting:

• You should always be speaking about something that you have a genuine concern about, and if possible, you should relate it to your personal experience (even if that’s of just a very small part of the issue at hand.)
• Avoid getting too emotional or angry. A positive and constructive approach will work better than crazy ranting!
• Prepare what you are going to say in advance. You can even send your notes to your MP two or three days before you meet them, which allows them to read what you’re going to say and prepare their response, but won’t give them much time to go and look up their party line on the topic. You want to establish their individual position not their party’s.
• Have a clear objective. It could be as simple as establishing their position and putting it on the record, or you might want to get them to ask a question in parliament, speak to a minister, sign an Early Day Motion or take other action to move the debate in your desired direction.

Lobbying is most effective at the earliest legislative stages. In fact putting your points to your MP before they’ve ever opened their mouth on a subject is the best way of influencing both what they say and how they think about an issue. Once they’ve said something you don’t like, you’re facing an uphill struggle to get them to change direction, as their political opponents are likely to denounce any variance in their stated position as “flip flopping” or “U-turning”. Having said that it’s never too late to start building a relationship with your MP.

If objectionable legislation is already at an advanced stage, or if your MP isn’t responding as you’d wish, you may need to bring to bear other pressures besides lobbying. MPs pay attention to what’s going on in their constituency so indirect efforts can be effective. Is this an issue that throws up a hook for a letter to the local press? Letters pages are very well read! You can also engage with affected social and business groups in the area. Invite these to join you at a subsequent meeting with your MP or to join your campaign in other ways. Petitions and demonstrations can martial the numbers required to effect change even during the latter stages of a bill’s passage through Parliament. Contacting the local council and other political parties in the area can widen the scope of your efforts considerably if they take an interest. Lastly, since Lords are not elected, you can lobby any of them directly. Cross-bench peers are independent of party influences, and if enough can be persuaded to your side of a particular argument, this can be an effective approach. Don’t forget to do your homework, though, in the same way as you did before contacting your MP.

There’s a balance to be struck between impressing your point on your MP, and being so verbose that they start ignoring you. Three or four meetings a year is a good rate to start with, and interspersing these with a couple of letters or emails will help keep you and your issues in your MP’s mind. There are some tips on how to write to your MP on the Open Rights Group wiki.

Lastly, if your MP does what you’ve asked of them, do write and thank them. It keeps the conversation going and tells them you appreciate their efforts too.

This session was on the Communications Capabilities Development Programme Green Paper. At the time this was due to be published imminently however nobody had yet seen the details. The Government had held discussions with various stakeholders, though, and some information had begun to emerge – not all of it good!

On Sunday 1 April the Government released further details of their plans to the press (and our suspicions that they’re not good were confirmed!). I’ve posted a round-up of relevant links on my delicious account.

The panel consisted of Pete Bradwell (campaigner at the Open Rights Group), Jeff Lynn (chair of COADEC) and Theo Bertram (UK policy manager at Google UK). The session was chaired by Alec Muffett.

Theo Bertram’s introduction

Jeremy Hunt recently gave a speech in which he identified “four pillars” (presumably in the fight against illicit sharing of copyright material without a license): payment processes, advertising revenues, ISP blocking and removing sites from search indexes.

In addition rightsholders have proposed a search-engine code of conduct. There are three main areas with which Google has issues. These can be summarised by the phrase “legal sites first.”

Legal: The government thinks Google is the internet and is magical. They think that binary instructions can decide whether something is legal or illegal in a nanosecond. This whole language about “legal” and “illegal” websites is already worrying. There is only copying that infringes copyright and copying that does not. Even if Google can recognise copyrighted material it can’t tell whether a copy of a piece of content is licensed. In fact judges often find this a difficult determination to make. Google can’t be a judge.

Sites: at the moment Google removes URLs from its index if they contain infringing content. The DMCA means rightsholders can remove, in theory, every page from the net as long as every page contains infringing content. What the government wants is for Google to remove whole sites – not just pages. Necessarily this means they want to remove non-infringing content! If site-level blocking is required surely there must be judicial oversight?

First: rightsholders would like their sites to appear at the top of search results for terms associated with their content. They want Google to push the “good” sites up and the “bad” ones down. This just isn’t possible. Google can’t identify good and bad. Also, if we’d had only a small cabal of approved sites listed in search rankings four years ago, YouTube would never have made it up the rankings. There would never be a British iTunes. It would be totally anticompetitive. We would also never have another artist become successful by being spotted from a pool of unauthorised talent – successful acts could only come from within the club not without.

We need to pick our moment and be careful of crying wolf – if we say this is the next SOPA, and it turns out not to be, we’ll lose credibility.

Jeff Lynn’s introduction

I’m the chair of the coalition for a digital economy. We represent the tech city, silicon roundabout startups. We help to support conditions for the creation of the next big internet properties.

The UK is a great place to grow a business. Great things will happen here so long as the Government doesn’t stop them. The government must understand the conditions that are required for success.

The fact that we don’t have the green paper in front of us today is an encouraging and interesting sign. It’s been expected since December and it’s slipped a lot. It was supposed to come out alongside the budget but there’s a view that now the local elections are coming up we won’t see it until May. What seems to have happened is that the government has listened to a few prominent campaigners. They don’t want a SOPA like situation – which activists were threatening based on an early draft.

The mood two years ago was that the government wasn’t listening to us. The fact that Number 10 is now paying attention is encouraging however we haven’t won yet and we’re nowhere near winning the understanding of government or rightsholders.

Talent moves – if the UK gets it wrong business will move.

We’re happy with the current direction of travel but there’s still a long way to go.

Pete Bradwell’s introduction

ORG has been campaigning for about a year against the closed round-table discussions being chaired by DCMS. We’re concerned about the lack of open policy-making and evidence based policy.

The government is making choices behind closed doors that are effectively carving up digital power between private interests. Citizens and human rights lack representation in this policy-making process.

This situation risks conflating good policy with the needs of the private interests in the room. It’s also anticompetitive. It hands decisions about what we’re allowed to do online to business. It also risks endemic censorship, adding a hidden layer of for-profit power betweeen citizens and the state, undermining what’s so promising about the open potential of the net.

What sort of due process should be involved when rightsholders make an accusation? What redress do site owners have when their sites are blocked or if they’re told to take down content?

It’s critical to keep making arguments about why these loose and vague discussions, and these secret meetings, are bad.

Questions

• The main issue is cooperation between ISPs and content industries. Google and other companies are already going in this direction. If there is no intent to profit then sharing shouldn’t be illegal. When will Google step up and say this?

  Content ID is softwhere on YouTube that automatically recognises that a piece of uploaded content is music or video and allows rightsholders to notify Google that this is their content and it should be taken down. It still follows the process laid down in law – it’s just more automated. Rightsholders don’t complain about YouTube any more because in some cases it makes them more money than iTunes!

  Key is for rightsholders to monetise distribution streams not stop them!

  Google supports all of the exceptions in Hargreaves.

  Tactics need to be considered – we’ve made lots of progress through level-headed and calm education. There’s not nearly as much opposition in government as COADEC expected. It’s a process of informing and explaining and reasoning with legislators. Ideological approaches don’t help our cause as much.

  Consumer focus have created the rights alliance to try to find middle ground between consumers and artists.

• Judicial involvement is easy to demand however if nobody is nobody paid to defend the public interest in an aversarial hearing then not all the arguments will come out in court and decisions won’t be balanced. In Newzbin, BT have been penalised for pressing too hard against the case for blocking, and have been slapped with a large costs order. Is there not a case for a statutory tribunal rather than judiciary?

  One of the frustrations with not being involved in the discussions, which are closed, is that those sorts of perspectives can’t be expressed and considered by legislators.

  No assurances received that “streamlined process” != “kangaroo court”.

• There is clear support for the idea that all non-commercial copying should be legal. Isn’t it the case that the vast majority of copying objected to by rightsholders is non-commercial? Surely this would be a thumping great exception rather than a small issue.

  Difference is whether it displaces consumer activity.

• What can we and ORG do to ensure ORG is in the room when these decisions are made?

  Talk to MPs. Try to convince them that the things we’re saying aren’t anti-copyright or in Google’s pocket etc. Explain the truth.

  Continue to press the case that this needs to be evidence based, open and transparent. Ensure the whole process is transparent. We need to open up the process so that other people can contribute.

• If a court decides that a URL links to tortuous or infringing material, do we think removing its URL is a proportionate response?

  Google already does this and it’s automatic. Applies by country on the appropriate services according to local laws. There is nothing magical about the Internet when it comes to Law. Concerns come when people say the Internet needs to be treated differently.

  Not a good idea in principal to solve a problem by reducing its visibility.

If I can do this in a week you can do it in your area too. If you’re into digital rights, and you want to meet up with others to discuss the pressing issues of the day, why not start your own branch of the Open Rights Group?

Here’s what we did:

• Choose how to communicate. We took ORG’s advice and set up shop on meetup.com, which is a paid-for service but with the advantage of being an integrated solution, however there are many other tools you can use to organise yourselves. The trick is to pick one and stick with it.
• Promote the group. We did this before deciding on topics or scheduling our first meeting so that people could express general interest without committing to anything. This encouraged participation. We started off with a post to the org-discuss mailing list and by spreading the word on Twitter, IndyMedia and Postcode Gazette.
• Gather your group’s preferences. We asked everyone two questions when they signed up: when can you meet and what would you like to discuss?
• Arrange a venue. We chose a dedicated community meeting-space rather than a pub, as this allows us access to wifi, a projector and a bit of quiet in which to hold our discussions. It’s also more inclusive of people who don’t drink alcohol. We won’t be forgetting the social side though – there’s a good pub close by and I’m sure the discussion will spill out into it afterwards!
• Meet! Our first meeting will be an opportunity to meet each other, discuss what we consider to be on topic, share the issues we’re passionate about and sort out the arrangements for subsequent meetings.

For future meet-ups the plan is to take what’s worked well for the London group and mix that up with the GIST foundation‘s wealth of experience running myriad special-interest tech-groups in Sheffield.

Each meeting will have a specific topic. One of us will present a short introduction and the rest of the time will then be given over to discussion. We’ll also be mixing in some practical sessions and we’ll invite local experts to give talks whenever we can.

We’re getting some support from ORG too. They’ll be promoting our group to local sympathisers using their mailing lists and they may also be able to send us interesting speakers occasionally.

During each meeting we’ll aim to come up with a list of practical actions for people to take afterwards (if they want to) such as signing a petition, writing to their MP or attending a protest. We’ll be reporting back to the community after every session so that others can read about what we think and share their own views. When other groups get going nearby we’ll go to their meetings and invite them to ours.

If you’re one of the many ORG supporters who wishes they’d get out of London and do more in your area what better way to make this happen than to kick off a local group? It’s really easy and you could find there’s a community of like-minded activists right on your doorstep. So what are you waiting for?

If you want to start up a local group feel free to ask questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to be useful. If you run a similar group already feel free to share your advice and experience!