Oh dear, Peers, two Peers and a webstorm

 Oh dear!  Two Lib Dem peers, Tim Clement-Jones and Tim Razzall, have caused an almighty ruccus across the internet over an amendment they have tabled to the Digital Economy Bill that could, according to various opinions, end up seeing ISPs effectively told to block access to major "user contributed" web services, such as YouTube or FlickR if a copyright holder accuses those sites of hosting "substantial" amounts of copyrighted material.  

There's lots more to it, in particular that their amendment is itself almost certainly far better than what was originally in the bill giving the Secretary of State god-like powers over the internet and for changing copyright law without legislation, but this adds to an awful bill that would allow "collective punishment" by cutting off an ISP's account holder for sharing or downloading copyrighted material even if it was not them doing so but someone else using their account, and potentially put the blockers on open access Wi-Fi such as you find when you are getting your coffee in Starbucks or wherever.

Is it a misguided and probably quite naive attempt to clean up an even more nasty in intention piece of the bill, or have they been nobbled by the rights "industry" like Mandelson has before them?  Time will tell.  

But what it highlights, to my mind are several things...

The Lib Dems, despite many IT savvy members crying out for it, have not really got a policy on IT as a whole and the internet specifically.  For all the bluster over the years about being the most internet enabled party (a claim which is undoubtedly untrue), many of us have called for a proper policy debate on intellectual property, policy supporting open source software, and internet policy.  It has never happened.

The "Establishment" are shit scared of the internet.  Either they have not actually for the most part grasped its potential as an epoch changing medium of global interpersonal communications that has huge ramifications for democracy, government, blurring the often arbitrary lines drawn on maps to designate "countries" and potentially heralding an era of much heightened innovation and collaboration between people all over the planet and have fallen for the siren calls of rights owners without realising the other consequences, or they have realised it and, like the Ancien Regime, are determined to maintain control of it.

The real debate we should be having is about the very nature of and justification for intellectual property at all.  Let's face it, rights holders know the potential for the internet having to change the way they work, the way they, we make a living out of ideas, creations and innovations, and both here, with the Digital Economy Bill, earlier in the US with things like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and in Europe over the issue of software patents, have rallied their troops and arguments to capture our legislators.  This entire Bill needs to be thrown out and a proper debate framed around what are the legitimate, if any, bounds to intellectual property before you can create legislation, if any is needed, to support innovators and creators.

The one solace I take is that the internet works like a self-healing organism in many ways.  Whatever obstacles states try to put in its way, clever brains will eventually find a way around, I am sure.  But at what risk?  We already have grown used the notion that sharing songs is the linguistic equivalent of Blue Beard and his army of killer ocean going pirates.  How long before people who try to break such controls are branded "electronic terrorists" or some such?

The protectionism of intellectual property laws is an artificial intervention in the free market caused and maintained by the state.  It creates artificial scarcity that costs us billions as consumers and most of the time does very little for the actual creatives it ostensibly tries to protect, and these rich pickings are greedily snapped up by "IP farming" by giant corporations, some of whom now make more money out of enforcing IP rights against little people than they do out of the "innovations" they are supposed to be manufacturing and selling.

Intellectual Property was one of the four great evil state created monopolies that the Individualist Anarchists and Mutualists railed against as one of the ways in which the state assisted in the exploitation of labour by capital owners.  It is thoroughly illiberal in principle and it is illiberal to be supporting this bill in any shape or form until we have had this Brave New World debate about IP itself and the role of the internet more generally.  It needs killing off and starting again.