A Farewell To The Future
The internet is by far mankind’s single greatest achievement. It has changed the way we do pretty much everything, and will continue to change things in ways we still can’t imagine. The future for man kind looked promising, until last night when the British government, in it’s infinite arrogance, greed and stupidity passed the digital economy bill.
For those of you who don’t know that the digital economy bill is; at it’s core it’s the Music and Film industries wish list for how the internet should be censored for their benefit. At the helm is Britain’s dirtiest bottom feeding political scum bag, Peter Mandleson. The upshot of this is, if an organization thinks a website or individual has infringed their copyright, the site can be shut down and the individual disconnected form the internet.
In my opinion, copyright owners should have a legal framework with which to protect their intellectual property. Up until now, the old framework seemed to be working pretty well, but this new legislation is too one sided, to broad in its scope and the people behind it are utterly untrustworthy.
What needed to happen was for the government to sit back and do nothing, thus forcing business models to change and adapt to the way the internet has changed things. Instead, UK politicians have filled their pockets with cash, shafted the british public (again), and scuppered any incentive for companies to change and innovate. The bill will result in a decline in innovation cross the board. It is hard to imagine a company like Spotify having the motive and opportunity to exist under this new legislation. Would Wikipedia, if it started today, survive under these conditions? I doubt it, and who’s to say what will happen to it in the coming weeks, months and years. After all, what is copyright infringement? It’s a difficult question to answer when you take things like satire, parody and journalism into account. It’s a question that deserves due process and thorough examination in most cases. Sadly though, not anymore.
What really gets under my skin however, is the way the UK government, and governments around the world think they have any authority to police the internet. They didn’t create it, we did. They don’t own it, we do. I think we’ve done a sterling job of building and policing the internet on our own so far. We should all be proud of what we’ve accomplished.
However, the wording of the bill’s title puts the governments real intentions front and center; “Digital Economy.” There is no Digital Economy, there’s just the economy. The internet was not created to be an economic platform. E-commerce represents an insignificantly small part of all the activity on the web, but as is too often the case in life these days, the needs of the minority will supersede the needs of the majority.
Above all though, the governments wish to police and control the internet might be a little easier to swallow if we had any faith that the people behind all this had even the slightest clue about what they’re talking about. Instead, we’re left with brain donors like Digital Britain Minister Stephen Timms who thinks “IP Address” stands for “Intellectual Property Address.”
Un-fucking-believable.
