Politicians are becoming increasingly familiar with sudden squalls of email filling up their inboxes, and policy makers with responses to public consultations arriving via a web intermediary. But not surprisingly many of these can be phoney, inflating the true size of what purports to be "grassroots" campaign.

The shortcomings of the web-based approach were illustrated here recently. Photographers on a shoestring budget successfully mobilised against Clause 43 – but internet campaigners concerned about file-sharing who used a site to send 20,000 emails about the Digital Economy Act failed to make an impression, resulting in a triumph for the BPI.

Earlier this month Obama’s internet guru, Harvard academic Cass Sunstein, warned departments that internet opinion shouldn’t be used as an opinion poll or focus group. He advised that:

Agencies exercise good judgment and caution when using rankings, ratings, or tagging. Specifically, agency use of the information generated by these tools should be limited to organizing, ranking, and sorting comments. Because, in general, the results of online rankings, ratings, and tagging (e.g., number of votes or top rank) are not statistically generalizable, they should not be used as the basis for policy or planning.

That’s pretty conclusive. Four years ago, Sunstein published a love letter to Web 2.0 called Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge that praised Wikipedia, blogs and prediction markets. But this is an altogether more sober assessment. He seems to have had second thoughts.

A vivid illustration of how a few single-issue fanatics can skew the results of an opinion poll is currently being digested in Canada. Lawyer Richard Owens has investigated the responses and found something quite interesting.

In response to a copyright form paper, over 8,000 responses were submitted, but 65 per cent of these were an identical form email from one IP address, the "Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights". Owens notes that these:

…Included Submissions in which: no names were used; only first names were used (there were, for example, sixty-eight “Chris” and seventy-two “John” who made Submissions); and, suspect names, such as – “D Man”, “El Qwazo”, “pr0f1t”, “Cereal”, and “Eagle” – were used. Given the ability to submit anonymously or under false identification, is highly probable that there are multiple Submissions from the same persons.

The CCER form letter had been circulated around Bittorrent P2P fan sites. But most of the visitors to these sites aren’t Canadian. Quantity overruled quality.

Observers wondered whether something similar might have happened in the UK. When the Open Rights Group ventured into the real world, the numbers were small: it mustered just over 100 bodies for its main demo, and only single figures for its "flash mobs". The ORG’s "Your Message To Mandelson" campaign launched last year rapidly gathered 300 anonymous messages – but stalled at around the 500 mark.

Such disparities led people to question how representative the online activity really was. "Is this a particularly well-focussed campaign by a relatively small group of activists?", asked the BBC’s Rory Cellan Jones.

Read more at The Register

Back in January, a senior music business figure explained to me that Clause 17, which gave open-ended powers to the Secretary of State, was unlikely to survive the wash-up. But he didn’t much care; the other sections which compelled the ISPs to take action against infringers were good enough. Anything else was a bonus – possibly even a distraction. Yet to the amazement of the music business, web blocking is now legislation.

I think this is a watershed in internet campaigning. It’s not just a tactical defeat, it’s a full-on charge of the light brigade…

Read more at The Register

The segment on Monday’s Simon Mayo drive time heard Madeley, who is filling in for Mayo, say:

“What a pain! I only got computer literate three years ago, just as I get wised up to it, they take it away.”

We don’t yet know how many car accidents were caused by the news of mass confiscations.

Madeley was following a segment of the show about the Digital Economy Bill (now Act). The sole ‘expert’ was Professor Lilian Edwards. Edwards was simply billed as “a Professor of Law” at Sheffield University.

Edwards made some curious statements about “disconnections” (not mentioned in the Act) and how libraries might have to put passwords on their PCs. Libraries already operate a pretty strict lock-down regime: requiring password authentication, firewalls, and prohibiting the installation of Third Party software. But she insisted: “Even if you do password protect it, policing it may get very expensive.”

Even this didn’t raise any suspicions amongst the show’s presenters. But then, why would it – Edwards presented herself an unbiased expert.

Asked why some Twitterers were upset about the Bill, Edwards replied:

“I’ve been thinking about this. It’s a hard thing to say on a music station, but the House of Commons thinks most important thing here is the music industry – which is of course important – but these people think the most important thing is the future of the internet, and I tend to agree with them.”

The problem for Radio 2 is that the show breached the Corporations’ editorial guidelines. Edwards is a member of the Open Rights Group’s Advisory Council, and she relentlessly blogs about the coming armageddon – not always accurately – here. As an ORG advisor her duties include to “Fundraise and/or make fundraising introductions” and “Be available for media contact if required”.

By failing to declare Edwards’ partisan affiliations, the show fell foul of the guideline, which states:

…we should not automatically assume that academics and journalists from other organisations are impartial and make it clear to our audience when contributors are associated with a particular viewpoint

A spokesperson told us on Friday:

“We are aware of the issues you have raised with us and are currently looking into the matter.”

It’s amazing what the title ‘Professor’ can do.

TalkTalk boldly promised today to fight disconnection requests in court, at least until after the election. Carphone Warehouse strategy director Andrew Heaney made the pledge on his blog.

The fact that ISPs don’t get any disconnection requests, and if they did, they would (rightly) throw them in the bin along with other junk mail, isn’t mentioned. Such a request would currently have the legal validity of a request to paint your house pink, scribbled on a fag packet and thrown from a passing car.

Heaney’s pledge is only good until “after the Election”. If account suspensions are eventually approved, it won’t be for a long time.

Maybe Heaney thinks we’re all extremely stupid. Or maybe he’s just found his audience.

“I’m impressed. Well done,” comments Stef Lewandowski, a marketing guru who has advised quango Nesta and the Department of Culture Media and Sport, and is a Cultural Leadership Fellow at the Arts Council-sponsored Clore programme, studying “Accelerated Serendipity“.

“Seven Years of Donations Fighting, Brothers…”

Meanwhile Open Rights Group’s Maximum Leader, Comrade Jim Killock, was crowing about the success of the appeals drive, launched to capitalise on the ORG’s spectacular success (are you sure? – Ed) with the Digital Economy Bill.

The ORG’s entire front page was replaced with a “Fuck You” graphic, soliciting donations. This prompted dismay from supporters, according to emails that fell into our inbox.

“Someone – please – say that the ORG server has been hacked by some script kiddies,” wrote one supporter. “Oh, for heavens sake are we in the school playground? Who are we trying to attract?” asked another. “Yes, we lost a round – there’s no reason to become petulant and offensive.”

Killock eventually obliged, but then noticed something:

“Hum guys, since we took the graphic down, nobody’s joined up (from 16.50 till now) – that’s cost us about £2000* assuming they’re not joining because we’re not pushing them as strongly”

So he put it back up again.

Comrade Jim explained that five people an hour were joining while the front page had displayed the middle finger – which indicates what an impressive mass movement the music industry is up against. That’s almost enough for an ORG Flash Mob. The average pledge was £60, which Jim multiplied over seven years.

(Obviously he expects the ‘copyfight’ to go on… and on… and on.)

“I’m very understanding of the issues people have raised, but a strong reaction – one that will offend some people while making other people agree violently – is required to make people part with their cash.”

That’s the spirit, Jim.

Maybe photographers have a guardian angel, after all. The Stop 43 campaign to throw out the orphan works clause may be the only part of the vast Digital Economy Bill where activists have achieved their goal – rather than made things worse. With the Tories pledging to drop the clause, it’s unlikely to survive the wash-up – although we won’t know for sure until very late tonight.

Eleventh-hour validation for the photographers came thanks to Labour’s obsession with Web 2.0 gimmickry, which delivered them a gift last Friday.

Labour launched a Photoshopped poster of David Cameron as Gene Hunt, which the Guardian soberly reminded us, showed “a recognition that the best ideas do not always belong to ad executives in London”.

Two Milliband brothers were on hand, looking extraordinarily pleased with themselves. Just one problem: they didn’t ask for anyone’s permission. Image rights for Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes belong to the BBC. Cameron’s mugshot is also under copyright.

“It demonstrated every point we had been making,” a Stop43 campaigner told us today.

It’s not the first time Labour has used images to which they have no rights. And to demonstrate that they’re 100 per cent fail-compatible with Labour, the Webtastic Tories followed suit.

It didn’t go unnoticed by MPs.

Yesterday Peter Luff (Con.) pointed out it was a “spectacular demonstration” of Stop43’s points.

Tom Watson MP, currently with Labour but also the First Minister of Freetardia, disagreed. He arose to gave the boilerplate Web2.0rhea perspective:

“That message was mixed by Labour spin doctors, then remixed by Conservative spin doctors. He is proving the point that mixing culture and the power of sharing are new in the internet age”

“That is precisely why the Bill is so incompetent. We are not going to stop people sharing content with each other and using it creatively to create new things. He should be proud that young people are mixing up these images to engage in political debate.”

Maybe.

But the problem with Freetards, even Freetard MPs – is that they don’t just miss the point, they close their eyes and run as fast as they can past it, screaming.

It was left to Luff to apply the lethal injection:

“Ah, that is a very interesting point,” he said. Luff pointed out that a quick search showed how easy it was to find the BBC original and contact the photographer. There was even a telephone number. He continued:

“We should not forget that the BBC, as this blog says, is one of the main proponents of a Bill to allow use of other people’s images in ways they did not envisage without permission or payment, yet it is furious that without permission or payment someone has taken a BBC image and used it in a way that the BBC did not envisage.”

Moral rights, or droit d’auteur, isn’t mentioned very often in Professor Lawrence Lessig’s books. That’s undoubtedly why Watson hasn’t heard of it.

Music House — HQ for a number of the UK music industry’s trade groups — was in a lock-down situation this lunchtime as an Open Rights Group Flash Mob descended, protesting against the Digital Economy Bill.

As many as seven protesters could be seen outside the Berners Street offices, according to staff who phoned us from beneath their desks. This is slightly down on the nine who had pledged their support on Facebook.

Twitter was a hive of activity, too. We’d counted two Tweets on the protest in an hour. Photographic evidence below suggests that after an hour, the number had swelled to almost double figures.

In a simultaneous gesture, over at the BPI’s HQ, three protesters handed in a “disconnection notice” to chief executive Geoff Taylor, who apparently wasn’t in.

Music House, the focus of the main protest, is home to the PRS For Music performing rights society, the Music Publishers Association, the Musicians Union, the Music Managers Forum, the British Academy of Composers Songwriters and Authors, and umbrella trade group UK Music.

The ORG’s FlashMob was trailed as a “Stop Disconnection April Fools Flashmob” with the question “Are we being made fools of?”

But with a turnout of less than a dozen, that’s a question that answers itself, really.

Last week, a much-trumpeted demo in London at Parliament saw around 100 activists leave their garden sheds — although we spotted many journalists and even music business spies in the huddle.

The point is that numbers don’t always matter, though, if the organisers are media savvy. A few protestors can go a long way, if a group’s core communication skills are imaginative enough.

Alas, the Open Rights Group seems completely bereft of these. It timed the event for Budget Day, so there was no coverage in the papers the next day. ORG had made 150 blank placards, and taped up their mouths. Passers by were perplexed: they had no idea what it was about.

High concept, low impact.

More fail is due next week: the ORG has raised some cash to run anti-Mandybill adverts — but wants them to go out on Tuesday. That’s the date of the announcement of the General Election.

Anyone want to guess the media impact that will have?

Maybe you if you think the Mandybill is rubbish, you should consider lending your weight to someone competent: ISPA, for example. Or you could start your own digital rights campaign.

The ORG can’t seem to organise a pissup in a brewery.

A clear winner is emerging from the Digital Economy Bill – and it’s the UK Pirate Party. The penny only really dropped for me yesterday, after the Open Rights Group’s big demonstration at Westminster.

“What was all that about, Andrew?” someone asked me in the pub afterwards. He’d been at the Commons for a meeting, and walked past the demo too. The confusion was understandable: the ORG’s clever wheeze of blank placards and a silent protest meant anyone walking past had no idea what it was about. The glorious exceptions were a beautiful banner and a large flag from the Pirate Party. The logo is very cool, as you know.

As an exercise in communicating, the Pirates were the only success of the event. At least the logo will have got on TV, and made an impression with passers-by.

Nobody particularly likes the Bill, but as long as the sheer joy of filesharing remains an illicit one, and not part of the legitimate music market place, then Piracy will have a lustre, and the Party will be in with a chance. You may find them childish, ignorant and selfish – as I do – but they have a simple message that eludes other digital campaigners. But I think the Pirates may flourish for a few other reasons. I’ll try and explain what they are.

Back in 1992, as the country came blinking into democracy. Polish voters had the luxury of not just one but two Beer Parties. There was a split, you see, into Dark and Light Beer factions. That’s the beauty of party democracy: it’s like web standards – you can’t get enough of them.

Over here, we have an atrophied political system. At least the pirates have organised their own party – or at any rate, pinched the idea from someone else and registered the name first – and are willing to take their ideas to a real ballot box, rather than engaging in backdoor lobbying, or creeping their way up the party hierarchy via career advancement. The traditional parties are unable to see beyond focus groups, and it leaves voters with no real choices on the big issues of the day – such as Europe or the environment. Instead, we have a Tweedledum / Tweedledee distinction between tiny nuances of style, rather than substance.

Two cheers for that. The internet has seen the liberation of what Bernard Levin christened the “Single Issue Fanatic”, or SIF. It doesn’t matter what the issue is, and it may even be fictional, but if you can pursue it relentlessly, you’ll get traction. The Pirate Party captures a popular “cause” – P2P still isn’t legal, and the Pirates declared enemy – record companies and Hollywood – is easily identifiable. SIFs they certainly are. Other policies are conspicuous by their absence. Foreign relations? Education? Defence? Not a word. But I’d like to think that in a Pirate-governed UK, even civilian aircraft would be required to put the slain body of a copyright holder to the nose.

The Pirate Party also offers clear benefits over donating to the Open Rights Group, which is probably the organisation with most to lose from a successful Pirate tilt. (It strengthens the hardliners in the music business, obviously, at the expense of the industry as a whole.) The ORG had similar origins – it began as a meetup in Hyde Park for anti-copyright campaigners. It’s another coalition of people with nothing in common except a heartfelt antipathy towards copyright.

The ORG has run a lacklustre and at times spectacularly incompetent “campaign” against the Digital Economy Bill. Timing the protest to coincide with Budget Day is just one example; being blindsided by the BPI’s alternative Section 17 – which we first revealed back here – is another.Whereas one merely “donates” to the ORG and receives a thank you, the Party offers real “membership”, and with voting rights the opportunity to influence party policy. To a SIF, it’s money well spent.

So does the Manifesto fit in with any tradition? Who will it appeal to and why?

The politics of spite

I think there are two ingredients to the Pirates’ success, and they have little in common.

For any politics watcher, the Manifesto really is a completely fascinating bundle of contradictions. There’s little attempt to disguise its motivation as a Single Issue party, as readers pointed out in comments here – but even there it falls over itself.

For a party of Pirates (yarrr!), you’d expect a minimal manifesto in the great tradition of the crypto anarchists. But in reality, it’s surprisingly authoritarian: the Pirates’ solution to every grievance is a new law or regulation. This is not the recipe for a Temporary Autonomous Zone.

Even the universally hated National Identity Register would be kept on, apparently, but with extra conditions attached to it. Quite a few of you think that’s bonkers. I agree, there’s no other description.

Heroically, there’s no attempt to soften the pill for creators. They’re stuffed. All copyright expires after ten years (five years if you’re not careful, and apply to re-register it) – so anybody can put out IBM’s DB2, Microsoft’s Windows, Martin Amis’ books or the back catalogue of Michael Jackson (compositions and recordings) and not pay the author – pocketing all the proceeds for the “Pirate” version. You have to be extremely limited in your thinking not to see bad consequences from this, but for the Pirates the “benefit” of destroying these businesses outweighs any disadvantages. The Pirates are offering a politics of spite and selfishness.

With a few people, this strikes a chord. We’ll call this the “nasty” brigade – being seen with these chaps does not improve your prospects of a date. But they’re outnumbered by a larger group.

For far more people, the Pirates offer a simple gesture against the political elites. Most wish no ill towards creators, and couldn’t justify them as collateral damage, as the Party does. But a vote (especially an electronic vote) for the Pirates is a snub to a system that people think has failed them.

So the Pirates’ hour may have come. They’ve made a consumer issue into a civil rights issue, and all because of a lack of action from the music industry to exploit the technology available to it. That’s what’s resulted in a Bill that nobody really likes. Yes, there’s a poetic justice (as my companion at the demo pointed out) to suspending somebody who uses the internet too much, and whose inflated sense of entitlement (“rights”) means trampling over other people. It’s cheaper to let them cool off at dial-up speed, than fuelling the quack medical profession and booking them into an “internet addiction” clinic. That’s missing the point.

As I said earlier, file sharing is a real joy – it should be legal, not criminal. We ought to have competing file sharing services available to us, all innovating their file-sharey goodness. Unlike the Pirates, however, I just don’t expect to get this pleasure for nothing. Many parts of the music business recognised the thrill offered by the original Napster a decade ago, and set about trying to convince rightsholders that they’d profit from it. So the argument is really about how to legalise it.

In other words, to get to the “sharing culture” they advocate, no group has to lose out, nobody need get poorer, and certainly, nobody has to have their rights taken away. To argue otherwise is pure, childish spite.

Onwards to a Pirate Future

Today the Parliamentary Pirate candidates say they’re skint, and their ambition is merely to avoid losing their deposits. But that may soon change. Google lurks in the background, and its business strategy aligns perfectly with the destruction of online copyright. While the Pirates say they’re not in hock to lobbyists, I expect that to change too. Google is too clever to fund them directly, but it may wish to launder some money via foundations or quasi-academic quangos.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

In October the same year, Google acquired the video site for $1.65bn. The cynical calculation meant swallowing a few principles.

Google Video business product manager Ethan Anderson wrote to Patrick Walker, a senior Google executive:

“I can’t believe your [sic] recommending buying YouTube. Besides the ridiculous valuation they think they’re entitled to, they’re 80% illegal pirated content.”

To complete the purchase, Google’s definition of evil needed to become as flexible as The Invincibles’ Elastic Girl. David Eun, content manager at Google wrote:

“As Sergey [Brin] pointed out, is changing a policy to increase traffic knowing beforehand that we’ll profit from illegal downloads how we want to conduct our business? Is this Googley?”

In other documents, YouTube’s co-founder Steve Chen declared that YouTube should

“concentrate all our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil”.

And so Google rewarded evil: Chen received Google stock worth $310m from the acquisition. It has since increased in value. YouTube investor Sequoia Capital realised over $500m from a mere $9m investment. If you’re wondering just what technological innovation or original idea Google was supporting – you’ll be scratching your head for a long time. The value of YouTube was its collection of other’s people’s stuff.

The emails are a devastating indictment of Google’s ethics – and the Chocolate Factory must have anticipated the damage the disclosures would cause. Overnight Google launched a spoiler, leaking a batch of emails alleging that Viacom uploaded its own material to the site. It’s embarrassing, for sure, but not in the same ballpark – Viacom’s property is Viacom’s property to do what it likes with.

The work was led by Patrice Geffon, an economist at Paris Dauphine University, for consultants Tera. It uses the WIPO definition of creative industries, including software, databases and printing as core jobs, and support and consultancy for example as non core jobs. It’s likely to strengthen calls for legal measures to deter downloaders, since picking up unlicensed music, movies and software is currently largely pain and risk free.

“Stemming the rising tide of digital piracy should be at the top of the agenda of policy makers,” the authors conclude.

But it’s not going to be without controversy. Debate over such studies focuses on the net substitution effect – the degree to which a digital download substitutes for a genuine purchase, minus any positive effect of spending on a legitimate good which might not otherwise have taken place. This ratio varies significantly across various types of goods.

For digital music, most academic studies put the figure at 1:10: for every ten CD downloads, the consumer typically forgoes one legitimate purchase. This is significantly lower than the 1:1 ratio some music industry figures insist upon. But still it’s a net negative effect.

One well known academic study by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf (2007) calculated a net positive effect, but this is an outlier, and despite its popularity with downloaders (it makes it look like a “victimless crime”) has been contradicted by others. There’s a deeper and more subtle problem with estimates of losses of substitution – I’ll come to that in a moment.

The UK bears the brunt of unlicensed downloads, reckon the academics, because of its high proportion of jobs in creative industries. Tera estimates that 6.2 per cent of UK jobs are in core creative sectors, with a further 3.4 per cent in interdependent and support sectors, such as software consulting for example. The figure includes a slice of telecoms and retail, and comes to 2.7 million workers. The value of the sectors combined amounts to €175bn annually.

The study calculates future trends by multiplying the current substitution estimate for various goods by the future growth rate for IP traffic across the EU.

For music, the academics suggest that “the decline in recorded music sales across the EU is too dramatic to imply a simple coincidence” – a 36 per cent in gross physical sales from 2004 to 2008 was barely compensated by the rise in licensed digital sales, leading to a 26 per cent decline in the retail value of music.

Estimating substitutions in software is harder, and the team use a 50 per cent ratio. Most piracy, they acknowledge, is still “friends and family” sharing an installation CD. A lower amount is 34 per cent is via unlicensed P2P downloads. But is this fair?

One counter example may be the widespread home use of Adobe Photoshop, one of the most popular Bittorrent downloads, and a $500 purchase. If Photoshop wasn’t so easily available, many users may use a cheaper photo editing program. Is it therefore fair to say $500 has been lost?

I said earlier that there’s a bigger, and more subtle problem than squabbling over substitution ratios; it’s that substitution studies tend to be self-fulfilling. They don’t estimate how much a business sector could grow if it engaged with new technologies. The DVD market is a classic example. More recently, games developers have fought an onslaught of piracy by focusing more on social networked games, and closed platforms.

While only a hardcore freetard would dispute that unlicensed downloads hurt (and there are plenty of people for whom this is politics-as-a-hobby) we’re not counting what could be gained. When a business sector commissions one substitution study after another, it’s hard to conclude that its problem is anything except substitution