LibDem Lords seek to ban web-lockers YouSendIt, etc in the UK – Boing Boing

the UK is on the eve of turning into a facist digital wasteland. Where the fuck do i live, china?

I just got done using a web-locker yesterday to recieve a bunch of a friend’s music for a future post. Music he made AND OWNS.

I guess there will always be FTP but have you ever tried explaining FTP to non-computer minded people?

I mean, i don’t want to say that all politicians should be taken out onto the tundra and shot, but…

From Cory on BoingBoing:

The idea that web-lockers should be blocked nationwide by court order is a bad idea:

1. Web-lockers are useful for more than piracy. I routinely use web-lockers for my own business and personal affairs. When I need to send a large video of my daughter playing to my parents, a web-locker is the simplest way of doing this. Web-lockers are also a vital part of how I produce my audiobooks and podcasts, since they allow me to privately share large pre-release audio-files with readers, editors and publishers. Web-lockers are also how I communicate with my attorneys and accountants for transmission of sensitive documents, such as scans of my passport and bills.

2. The reason web-lockers are useful for piracy is because they support privacy. The entertainment industry’s principle objection to web-lockers is that their contents are private, and cannot be readily survielled by copyright enforcement tools. When I send a video of my daughter in the bath to her grandparents, the only people who can download that video are the people who have access to the private URL for the locker. This is the same mechanism that infringers use to avoid detection: upload an infringing file and share the URL with friends. You can’t fix the web-locker problem without attacking the right of Internet users to privately share large files with one another.

3. The establishment of a national blocklist is itself a bad idea. Creating a facility whereby ISPs can be compelled to block entire websites is a bad idea on its face. The security problems raised by such a facility are grave (a hijacker could use it to block the BBC, or Parliament, or Google), and the temptation to extend this facility for use in other civil actions, (say, libel) will be great. Also, as my friend Lilian Edwards has pointed out, the LibDem proposal does not stipulate how long sites must be blocked for, nor what the procedure is for unblocking them.

4. There is no evidence that this will work. Dedicated infringers have shown a willingness and capability to use technologies such as proxies to evade firewalls. These proxies — many of them legitimate businesses at home and abroad — are cheap and easy to use, and make it trivial to evade ISP-level filtering. However, “good guys” (small traders, individuals wishing to share private material with friends and family) should not have to bear the expense and difficulty of evading the Great Firewall of Britain to do legitimate business on the net.

5. This is bad for the nation. The only country to enact anti-web-locker legislation to date is South Korea, which brought in a similar measure to the LibDem proposal as a condition of its Free Trade Agreement with the USA, whose IP chapter focused largely on locking down the Korean Internet. In the time since the US-Korea FTA, Korea has slipped badly in the global league tables for ICT competitiveness, going from being a worldwide leader in technology to an also-ran.

I have sent a version of these comments to both of the LibDem peers using ORG’s Write to Them links. I hope you’ll get in touch with them, too. This is a grave blunder for the supposed “party of liberty,” especially on the eve of a national election.

LibDem Lords seek to ban web-lockers YouSendIt, etc in the UK – Boing Boing.

UK Digital Economy Bill will wipe out indie WiFi hotspots in libraries, unis, cafes Boing Boing

GlennF sez, “The Digital Economy Bill in the UK that Cory has written about has a new, horrible portion that could cause many (most?) public hotspots to shut down unless run by companies large enough to handle the recordkeeping requirements. This ZDNet UK article cites legal experts who say that the penalties associated with failure to comply will make small businesses turn off hotspots. Universities and libraries may face huge liability as well.”

…

The Digital Economy Bill is being sold to us on the grounds that copyright infringement harms the British economy because of the importance of our entertainment industry. But while the measures in the DEB won’t stop copyright infringement (copying isn’t going to slow down — as computers and the technology they enable gets cheaper and more widely distributed, copying will continue to speed up, just as it has done since the dawn of the computer industry), they will harm British business and British families, by making the Internet generally less useful and more difficult and more expensive for honest people to use.

In other words, the Digital Economy Bill will do no good for the analogue economy industries, and will weaken the digital economy.

ZDnet article

via Boing Boing.

Offline Book “Lending” Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion

Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly that “publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy” comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were “loaned” last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself.

From what we’ve been able to piece together, the book “lending” takes place in “libraries”. On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange for a “card”. But there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of other patrons. Although there’s no admission charge and it doesn’t cost anything to borrow a book, there’s always the threat of an onerous overdue bill for the hapless borrower who forgets to continue the cycle of not paying for copyrighted material.

To get to the bottom of this story, Go To Hellman has dispatched its Senior Piracy Analyst (me) to Boston, where a mass meeting of alleged book traffickers is to take place. Over 10,000 are expected at the “ALA Midwinter” event. Even at the Amtrak station in New York City this morning, at the very the heart of the US publishing industry, book trafficking culture was evident, with many travelers brazenly displaying the totebags used to transport printed contraband.

As soon as I got off the train, I was surrounded by even more of this crowd. Calling themselves “Librarians”, they talk about promoting literacy, education, culture and economic development, which are, of course, code words for the use and dispersal of intellectual property. They readily admit to their activities, and rationalize them because they’re perfectly legal in the US, at least for now.

Go to the full article of more of this scathing satirical scribbling!

Go To Hellman: Offline Book “Lending” Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion.

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