Britons' love for filesharing is here to stay – and Peter Mandelson had better get used to it

• Cory Doctorow
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 November 2009 17.54 GMT
• Article history

Stop that copying! Peter Mandelson wants us to believe that a 70% reduction in illicit filesharing is a reasonable goal. Photograph: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images

There's a lot to hate about Peter Mandelson's controversial Digital Economy Bill, but there's one provision that perfectly captures the absolute, reality-denying absurdity of the whole enterprise. That titbit is the provision that holds the Bill's most drastic measures in reserve, only to be used if Britain's illegal filesharing doesn't drop off by 70% within a year of the main part of the Bill coming into force.

The idea that, at some time in the future, the volume of unauthorised copying will somehow drop off at all (let alone by an astounding 70%), is, frankly, barking. For that to happen, Britain's general capacity for copying would have to decline faster than the increase in the British desire to make unauthorised copies.

Where does Britain's capacity to copy spring from?

First, from the increase in the speed of computers: faster computers can copy faster and better. They have faster busses, can access faster drives, and can undertake complex copying tasks (synchronising or partially synchronising two drives over a bus or network, encrypting files, downloading the same file from many sources at once).

Second, from the increase in the speed and capacity of storage media.

Storage media is increasing in density and speed and declining in price at an astonishing clip, and shows no sign of slowing. In 1994, I had the job of setting up a 9GB storage array for a pre-press shop. This array weighed about 70kg, cost $250,000, and took a skilled technician a whole day to set up and another day to correctly install.

I just counted up the SD, micro-SD, mini-SD and USB thumbs in the coffee-cup on my desk into which I throw such media when I receive it with new phones, cameras, etc, and discovered that I have about 700GB worth of storage that barely comes a third of the way up the cup. This media is so cheap that I literally don't know what it cost, because it was thrown in for free with my various devices. My postal scales tell me that it weighs 221g, all told.

And when it comes to high-speed, "bulky" storage (like the 500GB hard drive I bought on Amazon when I got my latest laptop), you get half a terabyte crammed into 100g for £54. If you've still got a desktop PC, you can get a larger, cheaper 500GB drive weighing 710g for £44, a 7200RPM model that can transfer 65MBps.

Third, an increase in the speed and availability of networks. The number of places we can expect to connect devices to the internet is going up very fast – though not as fast as storage or processor speed. There are tens of thousands of cafes, restaurants, hotels, airport lounges, and offices that offer connectivity to all comers.

Fourth, an increase in the versatility of networks and network tools.

Filesharing tools have gone from the primitive, easily monitored and abstruse (IRC or the early Napster) to a very easy, attack-resistant architecture that was built in response to entertainment industry attacks. What was once relatively benign – it would have been trivial to charge for access to Napster and audit what was downloaded to pay rightsholders – has become utterly virulent. The entertainment industry's reliance on the courts for a cheap and dirty fix to all its problems has mutated filesharing into a strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that has no one to sue except for individual filesharers (and the most avid music filesharers are also the most avid music everything – CD buyers, concertgoers, bootleg collectors … When you live your life for music, you do everything musical in spades).

Fifth, an increase in the general technical competence of Britons. It's easy to see that the younger you are, the easier you find networks to negotiate and use. A generation has already come of age with the net all around them all the time, and there's a half a generation above them (myself included) who were early adopters. But now that everything is better with the net — from paying your gas bill to getting permission from the council to build a shed — everyone is learning. Libraries teach OAPs everything they need to know to type "Batman Returns download" into Google.

Peter Mandelson wants us to believe that a 70% reduction in illicit filesharing is a reasonable goal, but for any reduction to occur in filesharing, all the above factors will have to fall faster than Britons' desire to fileshare grows. It's not enough to take out the networks – just ask my old students at the University of Southern California, whose weekend hard-drive parties featured singing, guitar-playing, beer-drinking, and the synchronisation of terabytes' worth of data on the drives they brought over to their mates' houses.

When solid state hard-drives capacious enough to hold every song ever recorded can be had for a fiver at the corner shop (a mere few years from now), spying on networks will simply not suffice as a means of containing copying. When every OAP has been taught to use the net, when every homeless person has a scavenged netbook, when protocols have mutated again to hide their users' transactions with state-of-the-art cryptography, there will be no penalty harsh enough to make the tiniest dent in filesharing.

Mandelson argues that Britain's Digital Economy will be based on the contrafactual premise of a steady decrease in computer speed, drive capacity, technical competence, network versatility and network ubiquity. Of course, the real digital economy is in those British companies that figure out how to thrive whether or not copying occurs – companies that use networks to reduce their costs, reach larger customer bases, and provide services whose demand and profitability grow with network use, companies such as Last.fm or Moo.com.

These companies' businesses are inconceivable without the net, but they also risk being collateral damage in Mandelson's war on the British internet. Just increasing the liability for copyright infringement (and creating a duty to police user-submitted files for infringement) could bankrupt either company overnight. How would Moo sell business cards with your personal photos on them if they could be sued into oblivion should those photos turn out to infringe copyright?

Mandelson is standing up for the Analogue Economy, the economy premised on the no-longer-technically-true idea that copying is hard. Companies based on the outdated notion of inherent difficulty of copying must change or they will die. Because copying isn't hard. Copying isn't going to get harder. This moment, right now, 2009, this is as hard as copying will be for the rest of recorded history. Next year, copying will be easier. And the year after that. And the year after that.

And don't suppose for a moment that other countries are in the dark about this. Right now, the future of the world's economies hangs on each government's ability to ignore the Analogue Economy's pleading.

Countries that declare war on copying – and on all those businesses that are born digital – are yielding their economic futures to countries that embrace it, creating a regime that nurtures the net and those who use it.

If Mandelson wants to provide a subsidy to the Analogue Economy, he could order them to license their works to ISPs at a fixed fee, so that ISPs could opt in to offer Big Content's copyrights to their users and pay a fair price. There are many difficulties and headaches with this approach, but it has the advantage of having a hope in hell of succeeding (blanket licensing is already used to manage copyright in radio broadcast, live performance, sound recordings and other technologies); that is quite a big lead over the mad idea that somehow British copying will fall off by 70% (or fall off at all) in the next 12-18 months.

• The Guardian, Wednesday 25 November 2009
• Article history

Laws primarily work by consent, common sense and persuasion. Peter Mandelson's attempts to shock and scare internet users into obeying copyright laws will backfire, and meanwhile undermine rights we all hold dear – including the right to be presumed innocent (Editorial, 23 November).

My European parliamentary colleagues recently stood up for these rights in the new telecoms package. We firmly believe that Mandelson's proposals do not fit with the new law's statement that "measures may only be taken with due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy. A prior fair and impartial procedure shall be guaranteed, including the right to be heard of the person or persons concerned."

Lacklustre "appeal" mechanisms and punishments based on uncertain evidence do not, in our view, fit with this article. We, therefore, welcome the Guardian's justified outrage, and that of the 11,000 individuals who have signed the petition against these proposals on the Downing Street website.

Caroline Lucas MEP

In the UK Lily Allen joined calls for a crackdown on file-sharing

The European Parliament has approved a major overhaul of telecoms law across Europe.

The package includes a provision for "internet freedom" - the first time it has been referred to in law as fundamental right says the EU.

Member states have until May 24 2011 to include the legislation in their own rules.

It comes amid controversial laws being introduced in France and the UK to cut off persistent illegal downloaders.

Protecting internet access and users' rights was a high priority for MEPs hammering out the Telecoms Package.

Many critics say the eventual compromise solution is too weak and will not prevent disconnections.

Other measures in the telecoms package include an aim to harmonise the way mobile broadband is rolled out across the EU, which would help in the push to achieve 100% broadband coverage in Europe by 2013.

It also seeks to improve co-operation between member states' telecoms regulators and make it easier for incumbent operators to both provide and buy network services.

A law on citizens' rights aims to improve how quickly customers can change their mobile telephone number and strengthen personal data and privacy protection by, for example, allowing users to opt in to the use of cookies.

Fair hearing

Perhaps the most scrutinised part of the package is that which relates to file-sharing.

It comes as individual member states introduce tough penalties for those who download content illegally.

France has introduced a "three strikes" policy for those who share illegal content. If letters fail to stop them, illegal file-sharers risk being disconnected.

And the UK's Digital Economy Bill also seeks to impose technical restrictions, including disconnection, on persistent pirates.

Earlier this month, MEPs agreed on a compromise solution to protect user's rights which read: "A user's internet access may be restricted, if necessary and proportionate, only after a fair and impartial procedure including the user's right to be heard."

What the fair and impartial procedure will mean in practice is, as yet, unclear.

MEPs also agreed that restrictions on a user's internet access can only be taken "with due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy".

But an earlier amendment which ruled that any application for cutting off internet access must go through a judge was rejected.

Some critics say the compromise is too weak while some lawyers argue that it could put the UK's newly introduced Digital Economy bill at odds with the Telecoms Package.

Meanwhile protests over the UK bill have grown, with 11,000 signing an e-petition against it while others predicted "civil unrest" as a result of the bill.

• The Guardian, Monday 23 November 2009
• Article history

The digital economy bill is misnamed. A more honest title for the legislation, recently introduced in the Lords, would be the copyright protection and punishment bill. It is less about creating the digital businesses of the 21st century than protecting the particular 20th century business models used in music and film.

The bill is narrow in vision but dangerously broad in creating sweeping ministerial powers to punish digital pirates. It boils Digital Britain down to three Ms – media, music and movies – myopically ignoring the pioneers of new technology, and showing a blind spot for all creativity outside the so-called creative industries. Digital Britain is much more than digital media – there are the start-ups of London's Silicon Roundabout, the great success story of Cambridge chip designer ARM and the small businesses all over the land using the net to open up opportunities. Instead of empowering digital Britons, the bill follows the lead of music and movie corporations, who already apply a presumption of guilt to their customers. Instead of treating the web as a platform of possibilities, it recasts it as a tool for mass theft.

The only digital thing about this bill is the cut-and-paste facility it grants the secretary of state to redefine the copyright laws and increase maximum penalties. The government may argue, with some force, that it needs flexibility to ensure the rules keep pace with technology. But granting this administration – or any future one – such latitude to rewrite crucial laws on the fly, with only the merest figleaf of parliamentary oversight, is a dangerous precedent, and one sure to inspire future abuses – of democratic as well as digital rights.

Vague laws create opportunities for unintended consequences and offer an open invitation for aggressive lobbying. If it is understood that the secretary of state has it within his gift to change the rules on a whim, then Rupert Murdoch, for instance, could soon be advancing his war against Google in Whitehall.

While Finland enshrines web access as a human right, this bill legislates plans to deprive users of access. It will force internet service providers to become copyright police, obliging them to provide lists of violations to copyright owners. After warnings, violators will have their service crippled, or even cut off. All this will drive up the costs of web access, by piling duties on providers. Add the more defensible surcharges to pay for next generation services, and Digital Britain risks becoming a land beset by an even deeper digital divide. Instead of building on a positive vision of Digital Britain, the government has capitulated to the fears of music and movie moguls struggling to defend their multimillion-pound businesses.

A source close to the British Labour Government has just given me reliable information about the most radical copyright proposal I've ever seen.

Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson -- or his successor in the next government) the power to make "secondary legislation" (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).

What that means is that an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright. Mandelson elaborates on this, giving three reasons for his proposal:

1. The Secretary of State would get the power to create new remedies for online infringements (for example, he could create jail terms for file-sharing, or create a "three-strikes" plan that costs entire families their internet access if any member stands accused of infringement)

2. The Secretary of State would get the power to create procedures to "confer rights" for the purposes of protecting rightsholders from online infringement. (for example, record labels and movie studios can be given investigative and enforcement powers that allow them to compel ISPs, libraries, companies and schools to turn over personal information about Internet users, and to order those companies to disconnect users, remove websites, block URLs, etc)

3. The Secretary of State would get the power to "impose such duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified in connection with facilitating online infringement" (for example, ISPs could be forced to spy on their users, or to have copyright lawyers examine every piece of user-generated content before it goes live; also, copyright "militias" can be formed with the power to police copyright on the web)

Mandelson is also gunning for sites like YouSendIt and other services that allow you to easily transfer large files back and forth privately (I use YouSendIt to send podcasts back and forth to my sound-editor during production). Like Viacom, he's hoping to force them to turn off any feature that allows users to keep their uploads private, since privacy flags can be used to keep infringing files out of sight of copyright enforcers.

This is as bad as I've ever seen, folks. It's a declaration of war by the entertainment industry and their captured regulators against the principles of free speech, privacy, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence, and competition.

This proposal creates the office of Pirate-Finder General, with unlimited power to appoint militias who are above the law, who can pry into every corner of your life, who can disconnect you from your family, job, education and government, who can fine you or put you in jail.

More to follow, I'm sure, once Open Rights Group and other activist organizations get working on this. In the meantime, tell every Briton you know. If we can't stop this, it's beginning of the end for the net in Britain.

Cory Doctorow

POSTED AT 7:06 AM November 1, 2009

A new British independent poll conducted by Ipsos Mori concluded that the people who do the most illegal downloading also buy the most music. This is in line with many other studies elsewhere and is easy to understand: people who are music superfans do more of everything to do with music: they see more live shows, listen to more radio, buy more CDs, buy more botlegs of live shows, buy more t-shirts, talk about music more, do more downloading -- all of it.

And of course, these are the people the music industry's supergeniuses have set their sights upon for bizarre enforcement regimes like the one that British Business Secretary Peter Mandelson has promised: anyone who lives in a house that generates three or more copyright infringement notices will be barred from Internet access.

"The latest approach from the Government will not help prop up an ailing music industry. Politicians and music companies need to recognise that the nature of music consumption has changed, and consumers are demanding lower prices and easier access," said Peter Bradwell, from the think-tank Demos, which commissioned the new poll conducted by Ipsos Mori.

However, music industry figures insist the figures offer a skewed picture. The poll suggested the Government's plan to disconnect illegal downloaders if they ignore official warning letters could deter people from internet piracy, with 61 per cent of illegal downloaders surveyed admitting they would be put off downloading music illegally by the threat of having their internet service cut off for a month.

"The people who file-share are the ones who are interested in music," said Mark Mulligan of Forrester Research. "They use file-sharing as a discovery mechanism. We have a generation of young people who don't have any concept of music as a paid-for commodity," he continued. "You need to have it at a price point you won't notice."

Illegal downloaders 'spend the most on music', says poll (Thanks, Libbi!)

Submitted by Andy_R on 31 October 2009

Recently we've seen a wide array of campaigns and discussion forums about pirate politics. Billy Bragg has started a discussion blog, the Open Rights Group have done a lot of good work to raise awareness and talk sense about disconnection, and of course they have been a lot of petitions set up on the Number 10 website aimed at pointing out how wrong the government are to wage war on their own citizens over file sharing.

Now, a new player has entered the field of pirate politics, with a campaign against disconnection. Andrew Heany's petition against disconnections is different in one major way from all the others because it has the backing of the company he works for. Since he's Executive Director of strategy and Regulation at Talk Talk, this means we now have one of Britain's biggest ISPs actively supporting pirate policies.

Talk Talk sponsors the X factor, with an ad campaign of shapes drawn with light ("brightdancing") starting and finishing every ad break. Regardless of your opinion of the show, I'm sure you'll agree it's a memorable big budget campaign that reaches millions of people. The adverts have concentrated on happy smiling faces and funny images until now, but the latest variation on the advert shows something more sinister, the lights draw a wire and a pair of scissors poised to cut it, representing Lord Mandelson's plan to cut off internet access to whole families on the basis of unproven accusations.

The Pirate Party UK approves of the Dont Disconnect Us campaign, and as party leader, I urge you all to sign their petition. Not because it's the best, or the first, or the most radical, but because it's backed by big business, and we all know that while Lord Mandelson seems happy to blindly to ignore the Police, MI5 and 70% of the UK population when they call for an end to 3 strikes and disconnection, he does actually listen to big businesses.

Technology is making file sharing easier and easier. It will take more than unfair laws and harsh punishments to stop it

Cory Doctorow

Peter Mandelson’s proposal to disconnect the families of internet users who have been accused of file sharing will do great violence to British justice without delivering any reduction in copyright infringement. We’ve had 15 years of dotty entertainment industry proposals designed to make computers worse at copying. It’s time that we stopped listening to big content and started listening to reason.

Since 1995 — the year of the WIPO copyright treaties — the entertainment industry has won extrajudicial powers to enforce its rights without the need to prove a case in court. “Notice and takedown”, as the system was called, was supposed to stop copyright infringement on the web. It gave rights holders the power to compel internet service providers to take down material simply by stating that it infringed their rights, and obliged those providers to act or face liability.

A decade and a half later there is no indication that this has reduced copyright infringement online (certainly there is more today than there was in 1995). And, predictably, a system that allows for legalised censorship without penalties for abuse has itself been abused.

Rights holders big and small, from the Church of Scientology to Uri Geller, who tried to use takedown notices to make YouTube remove a video that showed the trickery behind his “psychic” stunts, have successfully silenced their critics. So small is the value of each individual customer that it doesn’t justify even their first call to a lawyer.

So big rights holders have signed up sloppy hired guns to send takedown notices to universities who host MP3 recordings of faculty lectures (because the faculty member shares a name with a pop musician). They hire them to accuse a mother of infringement for uploading a short clip of her toddler dancing in the kitchen because a few seconds of Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy can be heard in the background.

Fifteen years of draconian copyright regimes show that when you create powerful enforcement tools without any consequence for misuse, they get misused. And half a century’s worth of evidence on digital technology shows that no amount of enforcement will make computers and the internet worse at copying. Hard drives won’t get magically bulkier and more expensive. Networks won’t get less accessible, slower and harder to use. General technological literacy won’t decline. If you want copying to stop, physics is not on your side.

The takedown policy hasn’t reversed physics, so now we have new proposals. Viacom, the media company, has accused YouTube of facilitating infringement by allowing users to flag their videos as private, visible only to friends and families (and invisible to Viacom’s enforcement tools). Under Viacom’s theory, I shouldn’t be allowed to upload videos of my one-year-old for my parents — and only my parents — to see. My rights take a back seat to Viacom’s power to bulk-mail threatening letters to possible infringers.

Even more radical is the Mandelson proposal to disconnect entire families from the internet if a single member — or a neighbour who uses their internet connection — is accused, without proof, of violating copyright. Leave aside the fundamental injustice of collective punishment, a practice so abhorrent that it is outlawed in the Geneva Convention; think instead of the utter disproportionality of this.

The internet is an integral part of our children’s education; it’s critical to our employment; it’s how we stay in touch with distant relatives. It’s how we engage with government. It’s the single wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. It isn’t just a conduit for getting a few naughty free movies, it is the circulatory system of the information age.

To understand just how disproportionate this is, consider the corollary: what if Peter Mandelson proposed a rule to terminate the internet access of any movie studio or record company accused of three baseless copyright claims against the public? We could go down to all Universal offices and data centres with a huge pair of boltcutters and snip its net wires at the junction box.

It would be a corporate death penalty. Families that receive this penalty — without a judge or trial — will face a similar terminal fate, cut off from the system that connects them to life and livelihood.

The net is full of artists thriving on copies. My latest novel, Makers, came out this week from HarperVoyager, and is also available as a free, freely copyable download (as was my last book, Little Brother, which also sold well). Musicians such as Madonna are moving from record labels (who lose money on uncontrolled copying) to concert promoters (who make more money when copies drive up the price of tickets). It is not the job of government to guarantee that the business model enabled by last year’s technology will go on for ever. If it were, we would have outlawed radio to save vaudeville.

Proposing to terminate your access to the information society because you share living quarters with an accused copyright infringer is madness. The entertainment industry has mistaken the net for an apocalyptically uncontrolled entertainment medium. It wants to take charge of it so that it can be made into a medium more hospitable to its interests.