Over at her work blog, Patroclus explains why, quite apart from its many other failings, the rushed-through Digital Economy bill is likely to spell disaster for local (in this case Cornish) buinesses such as B&B's or web cafes who thoughtlessly provide free wi fi for their customers.
One of the least-encouraging moments of the parliamentary debate: Labour MP Derek Wyatt, not appearing to know the difference between email and the internet. Still, at least he voted against the bill, unlike my Lib Dem MP, Julia Goldsworthy, who sent us a letter telling us of her concern about the bill, but failed to vote for or against it.
5 comments:
The Digital Economy Bill affects a lot of people in a lot of ways, but my own personal worry is that it will stop places like hotels, cafés, libraries, schools, etc. from providing public wi-fi.
And thus it will actually set the digital economy *back* by about 10 years, scuppering anyone who relies on public wi-fi for work, study, social contact, attracting customers etc.
It's a rubbish piece of legislation, basically.
And it won't even achieve its main goal of stopping copyright theft, because there's an army of clever people constantly developing tools to help you cover your tracks when downloading pirated material:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
Yes, it's almost as though it was put through by a load of people who know naff-all about the internet.
Quite.
I wrote to my MP, Kate Hoey, and her response matches what she said in Parliament; broadly, pushing this through at short notice is not a good idea:
http://tinyurl.com/yc2nkvu
I, too, wrote a blog post about this. Mainly because the Writers' Guild appeared to support it without really understanding any of the provisions of the Bill (now Act).
It's here: http://nathanieltapley.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/why-my-union-is-wrong/
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