Chris Young

There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

For those of you who missed it, on 8 April 2010 the Digital Economy Bill received Royal Assent to become the Digital Economy Act. Unfortunately, most of the MPs and peers who were there, and voted it through, missed it too. They missed lots of awkward detail. They missed meaningful scrutiny. They missed the clamour of alarm and dissent from IT professionals. They missed even the basics of understanding of how the Internet actually works in practice. That was because Labour rushed through the Bill in the end-of-term “wash up”, supported by the Conservatives!

I would really like to explain why this Act is wrong-headed in many specifics, but frankly, that level of detail is outwith the scope of this brief posting. This legislation was voted on in error. There were fundamental misunderstandings about what an IP address is, as if somehow an individual person could be identified by some digital signature. Not so; an IP (Internet Protocol) address is simply a way of one computer declaring to the rest of the Internet where information should be sent and where it is being sent from. But, for those in the know, that address can be changed as easily as a drug dealer’s mobile phone number. An IP address can also be used – wittingly or unwittingly – by others, e.g. through Wi-Fi or any other network, not to mention shared computers.

Make no mistake: speaking personally, I do not condone intellectual property theft. But “theft” in that context has a very specialised definition, in that it is unauthorised usage, rather than deprivation, which is the nature of the mischief. Any commercial profit arising from unlicensed reproduction is unequivocally illegal and many sites have been forced to close or chosen to self-regulate as closely as the technology will allow. As a writer and performer, I have great sympathy with fellow creative types who find it increasingly difficult to harvest the fruits of their endeavour. As Lady Gaga has pointed out, lots of people don’t seem to think that music is something you pay for. But that does not mean that the music and entertainment industry should get the run of the blunt instrument that the Digital Economy Act promises to be, potentially depriving innocent people of Internet access on the basis of suspicion.

The mainstream entertainment industry is in no small part responsible for the phenomenon of illegal file-sharing: keeping download costs in many cases higher than those of CDs and trying to keep all the manufacture and distribution savings as profit. It seems to me that if the industry had “kept it real” 15 years ago, people would not have got into the habit of illegal downloading to anything like the current extent.

But we are where we are. If we want the Internet, and we want to live in a free society, I believe we have to accept that there are limits to Internet policing.

There is a strong case for the overhaul of intellectual property law to accommodate new realities. There is a challenge to find new models of profitability for creative industries – without which, we will all be impoverished. But crucially, this has to be done with adequate consultation and scrutiny and, perhaps even more crucially, in an international context. Ill-considered, unilateral laws from the UK are going to achieve nothing positive.

This time ten years ago, I was coming to the end of a Postgraduate Certificate in Vocational Training in Information Technology. This time last year, I was studying Intellectual Property Law to supplement my law degree. If elected to Parliament, I think I could do quite a good job of understanding the issues concerned and thrashing out the legislative details.

For the record, all Liberal Democrat MPs and peers present voted against the Bill at its third reading. Nearly all Labour and Conservative representatives voted for the measures, along with the only SNP MP present. Details here and here.