Harry Metcalfe

Don’t let the Government zap your internet connection

The government have just announced that they do intend to introduce technical measures to reduce illicit file-sharing after all, and have tacked some extra questions onto an existing consultation file-sharing consultation. You need to write to your MP. Yes! You!

Among the points you could make:

This regulation is unnecessary

File-sharing is on the wane. Legal services like Spotify and last.fm are extremely popular, and heavily used. Spotify have been gaining 40,000 new users per day. The market is solving this problem. Heavy-handed regulation is not necessary.

These measures are disproportionate

The Government intends to introduce measures that would allow Ofcom to strip people of their internet connection. This is an extremely severe measure. The Internet is not a luxury that can reasonably withdrawn on a whim. It is a crucial part of modern life. Increasingly it is the medium by which we interact with the state, with each other, and with the banks, energy companies and merchants that are intricately woven into our lives.

To suggest that the Internet is something that can be withdrawn from a person on the say-so of rightsholders is as if we gave private companies the power to crush our cars for speeding in their car parks. It’s grotesquely disproportionate.

These measures will cause collateral damage

There is little or no way to gather evidence that ties illicit filesharing to a person. It can often be tied to an ISP account, and sometimes to a computer, but that’s about it. These measures would affect all users of an internet connection alike. What happens to people in houses of multiple occupation? Home businesses? Public wifi hotspots?

Is it right for all the users of an internet connection to be punished because of the actions of one person?

Unaccountable and Illiberal

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these measures are almost completely unaccountable. The Secretary of State is empowered to decide when technical measures are necessary. A private body collects evidence and supplies it to another private body, which supplies that evidence to a Quango who are empowered to remove people from the internet. Where are the courts? Who evaluates the evidence? Where is my right to confront my accusers? Where is the due process?

Why do we keep letting the executive pass laws which bypass the courts and place judicial powers in the hands of ministers? It makes me so angry I could spit.

What you should do

• Write to your MP. Now. Go! Draw this consultation to their attention. Ask them to do all they can to oppose these measures.
• Respond to the consultation
• Join the Open Rights Group, who fight against this stuff every day.
• Spread the word: blog this, tweet about it, post stuff on facebook. Tell your friends. Put it in your email signature. Make sure people notice.

Photo by DeaPeaJay

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Ernest Marples: the first month

Well, it’s nearly been a month since Richard Pope and I launched ErnestMarples.com at OpenTech 2009.

The site offers a free API to convert postcodes into latitude and longitude coordinates. This is an important thing to be able to do: the postcode is a de facto standard for specifying locations on the web. Any site that needs to know your location will ask for your postcode — from mapping, to political engagement, to useful local services.

Unfortunately, the Royal Mail owns the postcode database, and maintains a stranglehold on it. They won’t let you use it for a website unless you pay them exorbitant fees (£1000+). This might be ok if you’re a big company, but lots of the most useful services aren’t. Those people have no choice but to use whatever data they can find on the web — something which, among other things, is very inconvenient. We decided to make it easier, and take that step out of the process. We do the tricky bit — sniffing the data out from the corners of the web — and pass it back to as structured information that developers can use to create sites that make people’s lives easier and better.

The site’s been up for nearly a month, and it’s been busy. Already, three libraries have been donated by volunteers — with no prompting — that make it much easier to submit requests using PHP, Perl or Ruby.  Scores of people have sent us messages of support. I’ve even been hugged. We’ve been written about by Guardian Tech and FreeOurData. The site has served lots and lots of requests to people doing useful things.

We’re delighted that it’s going so well, but we have big ambitions — so please help spread the word. We’d love to see lots of useful services using the site. The more people who do, the more irrefutable our argument will be when it comes time to persuade Government and the Royal Mail that the status quo just won’t do.

So please, blog about ErnestMarples.com. Tell your friends, colleagues, cats and dogs. Send tweets pinging round the world. We need all the help we can get.

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Should there be copyright in NPG’s photos?

There’s a pretty good chance that there is copyright in the National Portrait Gallery’s photographs of paintings, which are currently the subject of a legal spat between NPG and a volunteer for the The Wikimedia Foundation. Intuitively, that seems like a bad thing — but is it? And if so, what does it mean for the future of digitisation?

Others have done a much better job of explaining the legal situation than I could, so I won’t talk about that. I’m more interested in the policy position that we should be adopting than the one we’ve found ourselves in.

Intuitively, I feel that there shouldn’t be copyright in the images that Wikimedia are using. That their importance trumps NPG’s desire to exploit them commercially: these paintings are an important and unique part of our culture’s history. This isn’t just academic: it has real impact.

All that said, a policy position that there isn’t copyright in these images might do more harm than good.

There are a huge number of historic works in the world. Digitising them is important: both to make them more widely available and for their preservation. Unfortunately, it’s expensive to do, especially when the works are old and fragile.

It’s appealing to say that digitisation should be funded from general taxation and the works placed in the public domain for all, but I think that the cost is probably significant — certainly enough to make it politically untenable.

The usual solution is a compromise between public ownership and private investment. A company invests in digitising a set of works in return for the exclusive right to distribute their digital copies for a limited period — say twenty years — after which the works return to the public domain*. Of course, this approach relies on copyright.

It’s hard to create a system of copyright that caters well for both approaches. If there is copyright in an exact copy, there will forever be people who aggressively defend those rights in order to protect their revenue — and frankly, when £1m has been spent producing the copies, that’s not unreasonable.

Without copyright, there’d be much less  incentive for anyone other than Government to digitise anything. It’s almost certain that most historic archives would never become available to the public.

Copyright exists to provide an incentive to create things. It’s a monopoly right created by Government for a specific purpose, designed to ensure that works eventually return to the public domain, as these paintings have. My gut says there shouldn’t be copyright in these images, that these exact copies are substantively identical to the original public domain works, and should therefore be public domain themselves.

My brain says that’s completely illogical — and that in fact, a copy of a work is by definition a different work, and should therefore be protected by copyright. That in fact, copyright is doing the exact job that it was created for: providing a incentive for these images to have been made in the first place.

If there was no copyright in these images, would NPG still have spent £1m digitising them? I doubt it.  And perhaps therein lies the rub.

* Disclaimer: this was the impression that I got from a long chat with David Thomas, of the National Archive — but that was years ago and I wasn’t entirely sober.

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The International

Just got home from seeing The International at the Odeon in Holloway, London.

I was impressed — solid story, nice ending and a completely spectacular gunfight set across several levels of the Guggenheim in New York. Despite the seedy halls, sticky floor, patronising copyright messages and grotesque expense of — well, everything — I had a good time.

I haven’t seen a decent thriller in ages, and it delievered.

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