Stop the Digital Economy Bill

[NickB]

(Apologies for lifting this wholesale from our local news website - ForArgyll.com - but I saw no point in me re-hashing a well-written article)

A high profile campaign has been launched with an open letter to the Government objecting to the Digital Economy Bill presently passing through parliament. This bill, sponsored by Lord Mandelsohn has hit the headlines for all sorts of reasons, not least because it seems one of its most controversial clauses has been sponsored by the BPI.

This clause, which has been somewhat watered down in its passage through the House of Lords by the Liberals, will mean that any website reported for copyright infringement can be taken down until the case has been examined in a court of law. That’s any website: we’re not just talking about YouTube.com hitting the buffers and being sent down for videos uploaded by its users (at a rate of 200 hours per second), we’re talking about your business website, we’re talking about community websites, we’re talking about this website.

Imagine the scenario if this bill gets passed into law where this website carries a story which takes a national business to task for not taking its social responsibilities to the local community seriously. Does that corporation have to engage in dialogue? Does it have to take the article seriously? Does it have to watch while the debate rages in the comments area under the article? No. All it has to do is report us to the authorities for copyright infringement. Under this law we’d be taken down. We could appeal in court of course, but as a small organisation we have no budget for that kind of thing. We would be sunk. And the irony would be that this site never uses pictures or material on which copyright hasn’t been cleared: our pictures are hosted at Flickr.com and our videos on YouTube.com.

This bill though is more pernicious that that. This bill means that the broadband connection you depend upon for your business, your social life, your shopping life, can be suspended indefinitely. Why? Well, if you are suspected of file-sharing, or if someone in your household, business, area, who has wireless access to your broadband connection uses your connection for file-sharing your provider will have an obligation under law to disconnect you.

While this clause has been tempered somewhat by the Lords, we are still looking at a situation where users are guilty before being proven innocent. Imagine the horrors that your local library, or internet cafe, or community centre will go through if a user gets caught using their connection.

If bill this comes onto the statute book before the election (in what is known as the Wash Up) it means that:

» risk averse community and charity organisations are going to simply close the doors on providing free broadband access to their communities;
» thousands of websites will become prey to malicious reports of copyright infringement;
» individuals may lose their internet connections without proper recourse, and without an assumption of innocence;
» large websites might get taken down in the UK while still operating abroad;

And it is not just the small guys who are objecting to this bill, BT, Yahoo, Talk Talk and other major service providers have all weighed in. This is not to say you should not make your views known. So what to do? This website gives you more background, and a direct link to your MP with a tool to send him an email. Use it and object to Mandelsohn’s piece of pernicious nonsense.

[barky]

I would hope some sort of disclaimer could get around these new rules -- "to the best of our knowledge no copyrighted material is on this website, in the unlikely event you find any please report to site owner" -- or something?

So they are going to try to rush through this digital economy bill (with parts still unwritten right up to last minute) without proper consideration -- and decided by people who (probably) rarely use the internet
Could it end up unenforceable I wonder due to amount of content out there & presumably what they are really wanting controlled are the torrent sites?

[Pentlandpirate]

You are responsible for whatever is on YOUR website. Even if you didn’t put it there.

Do not allow any photos to be put on your website unless you can prove you own them or are licenced to use them. Be particularly careful of using a web designer who may ‘fill out’ your site with a few small images taken from a disc supplied to your web designer by a photo library. The web designer can use the images free……but you can’t.

What typically happens is that small to medium businesses decide they have to have a website to be credible in today’s business world. They hire a web designer who unwittingly adds some images off this free disc a colour library kindly sent him for free. The finished article looks great and the customer is well pleased with his new professional image.

That’s until two big fat letters addressed to “The Legal Department” fall through his letterbox one day. Inside is a demand for immediate payment of around £ 1500.00. It explains that you are showing images on your website for which you have no licence. It demands immediate payment in full (no ‘Cease and Desist’ option) or the full weight and might of this companies considerable legal organization will be brought down upon you in Court where they will seek damages and considerable costs. The letter explains why you are responsible for the content of your site, not a web designer if you used one. It also explains there are no ‘let outs’ just because you didn’t know, or that you checked to the best of your ability. Ignorance is no defence.

How did this photo library know you had their images on your site? Well they spend billions buying up the rights to as many photos as possible. They then digitally encode every picture. Then they use a company to search out its images 24/7, wherever they may appear on the internet worldwide, so that they can hit them with a demand for payment of its fees. Is it a scam? Some think so, setting up web designers to use the photos so that the photo library can extort money from the poor small to medium businesses who end up with the images on their website.

SuziJane........nope; it's the owner of the website's responsibility. But there are thousands falling prey to this. Just look at a few samples:

http://www.extortionletterinfo.com

http://www.zyra.info/getstu.htm

http://internetmadness.blogspot.com/sea ... l/Internet

http://www.ripoffreport.com./internet-s ... -dj29j.htm

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthr ... 902&page=4

[NickB]

You are responsible for whatever is on YOUR website. Even if you didn’t put it there.

Do not allow any photos to be put on your website unless you can prove you own them or are licenced to use them. Be particularly careful of using a web designer who may ‘fill out’ your site with a few small images taken from a disc supplied to your web designer by a photo library. The web designer can use the images free……but you can’t.

What typically happens is that small to medium businesses decide they have to have a website to be credible in today’s business world. They hire a web designer who unwittingly adds some images off this free disc a colour library kindly sent him for free. The finished article looks great and the customer is well pleased with his new professional image.

That’s until two big fat letters addressed to “The Legal Department” fall through his letterbox one day. Inside is a demand for immediate payment of around £ 1500.00. It explains that you are showing images on your website for which you have no licence. It demands immediate payment in full (no ‘Cease and Desist’ option) or the full weight and might of this companies considerable legal organization will be brought down upon you in Court where they will seek damages and considerable costs. The letter explains why you are responsible for the content of your site, not a web designer if you used one. It also explains there are no ‘let outs’ just because you didn’t know, or that you checked to the best of your ability. Ignorance is no defence.

How did this photo library know you had their images on your site? Well they spend billions buying up the rights to as many photos as possible. They then digitally encode every picture. Then they use a company to search out its images 24/7, wherever they may appear on the internet worldwide, so that they can hit them with a demand for payment of its fees. Is it a scam? Some think so, setting up web designers to use the photos so that the photo library can extort money from the poor small to medium businesses who end up with the images on their website.

SuziJane........nope; it's the owner of the website's responsibility. But there are thousands falling prey to this. Just look at a few samples:

http://www.extortionletterinfo.com

http://www.zyra.info/getstu.htm

http://internetmadness.blogspot.com/sea ... l/Internet

http://www.ripoffreport.com./internet-s ... -dj29j.htm

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthr ... 902&page=4

You sound very knowledgeable PP - has this happpened to you?

A friend who runs a web design office 'back east' recently had to pay £400 to avoid legal action for a thumbnail sized and thoroughly unremarkable picture that a client had supplied to them when they originally built the site. This sort of thing is indeed alive and well. The Digital Economy Bill is likely to make life even easier for these scamsters - but it could be your business website that is affected, so email your MP. To me the big joy of the web is the way it empowers individuals and small businesses - it is a great leveller, and there are many out there who resent this.

In case any of our clients are concerned - when we supply images they are either our own or sourced from Dreamstime.com, a remarkably good stock photoservice.

[barky]

yep, have to be careful with photos & images - all too often there's small print that states it's for personal use only on 1 computer, only for non commercial /'not for profit' use .. check ze licence carefully ... likes of creative commons licenced pics are usually OK I think, just give a photo credit.
Best policy - use your own pics

[NickB]

yep, have to be careful with photos & images - all too often there's small print that states it's for personal use only on 1 computer, only for non commercial /'not for profit' use .. check ze licence carefully ... likes of creative commons licenced pics are usually OK I think, just give a photo credit.
Best policy - use your own pics

A lot of creative commons licenses - eg as applied to a lot of pix on Wikipedia - are Creative Commons Attribution licenses, which means you must aknowledge the author of the work - and usually in text, with hyperlink, rather than just with a 'alt' ot 'title'tag, which a lot of people assume is enough.

Stock photo libraries like Dreamstime offer high quality images for as little as one dollar per picture and the T&C of use are clearly stated. Usually attribution is not required for these. Photographers can also contribute to this type of photo library and maybe make a little money.

[NickB]

.
I got a thoughtful reply from Alan Reid today indicating that he is very concerned about this bill as well and has tried to prevent it being rushed through. However, he is of the opinion that it will probably be pushed through before the election. One telling comment:

I am afraid that our present constitution gives a Prime Minister too much power. If the Government choose to rush this Bill through, there's nothing that can be done to stop them.

[Peter Connelly]

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/p ... htm#hddr_2

This is a link to Hansard, giving the list of MPs who voted for and against the D.E.B.

[Peter Connelly]

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/p ... 4088001556