Parliament’s Business Select Committee heard some interesting news today, as they mulled the Hargreaves Report’s recommendations. Executive director of the Open Rights Group Jim Killock told MPs that the UK’s copyright laws were deterring investors and new businesses. Alas, he could have picked a better example.

Killock said Netflix had looked at the UK market and spurned it for South America instead.

“Our digital market in film is falling behind Colombia,” he told MPs.

This is mystifying, since 10 days ago Netflix revealed its plans for its UK launch – giving analysts and press the full details. The service will launch early next year.

We wondered if it was a slip of the tongue: perhaps he meant Hulu? But for everyone’s benefit, he repeated the claim later on in the session: Netflix isn’t coming to the UK, and copyright law is to blame.

So is the UK months behind the rest of the world? Not really. Netflix entered the Latin American market just seven weeks ago.

Whatever points ORG may have had to make on government digital policy became easy for MPs to dismiss. One member remarked on the “ferocity” of Killock’s contribution, and bluntly told him that the evidence contradicted his statement.

It’s yet more amateurish campaigning from the group. Surely they can afford last week’s papers?

Britain could have invented the iPod – if it wasn’t for a copyright law that everyone ignores. So says the UK government in a remarkable economic justification of the so-called “Google Review”, the Review of IP and Growth led by Ian Hargreaves. The document was written for the government by civil servants at the IPO, part of the business department BIS.
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Lib Dems are appealing to the vital online pirate vote at this year’s party conference, putting the membership on collision course with LibDem ministers in the coalition government. In a new IT policy paper called “Preparing The Ground”, a team of party activists led by Cambridge MP Julian Huppert calls for the Digital Economy Act to be gutted of its copyright measures. It also threatens new legislation to ensure all “traffic flows at the same speed”, and wants the IR35 contractor tax suspended.

Senior party figures speaking on condition of anonymity expressed dismay at the proposals. The LibDems are in government for the first time in 70 years, and have attempted to leave behind the Party’s old “sandal-wearing” image as a haven for single-issue-fanatics.
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Wars over creators’ rights are pretty old – much older than copyright law. In one of the first “copyfights”, in 561AD, about 3,000 people died, writes Robert Levine in his new book Free Ride. St Colmcille and St Finnian clashed over the right to make copies of the Bible, with the King castigating Colmcille for his “fancy new ideas about people’s property”.

Levine’s book is a story of the digital copyright wars.

“I tried to write in an analytical way about something people get very emotional about. I don’t really believe the entertainment industry is good and the technology industry is bad; I just don’t see it as a morality issue. Businesses are in business to make money,” Levine says.

The book details the calamitous decisions made by the music business, particularly in its suing of end users for infringement. “In a few years,” he writes, “the major labels managed to destroy the cultural cachet they had spent decades building.”

The book also follows in detail Google’s “war on copyright” and the academics and activists who benefit from it. It comprehensively demolishes the arguments put by Lawrence Lessig, who helped create the cyberlaw industry. This is a book with masses of solid, meticulously researched detail.

I caught up with Levine in Berlin.

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What do you do when a global corporation pays out millions to the watchdogs that we expect to protect us against it? It’s a fair question to ask in light of the Chocolate Factory’s legal settlement this week, over Google Buzz. The privacy class action suit has landed a windfall of millions of dollars to “privacy” groups – but not a cent to ordinary citizens, users of Google Gmail’s service whose privacy was compromised.
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Read more at The Register.

A potentially incendiary EU report released today recommends making changes to the Berne Convention – and creating several new layers of bureaucracy in order to deal with the digitisation of cultural stuff. Creators would have to “opt-in” to a new database before getting their rights, which have historically been guaranteed by Berne signatories since 1886.

Berne is administered by the UN quango World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and changes are made only every few generations – it was last amended in 1979. Undaunted, a committee of “wise men” (actually, just three people) reporting to the EU’s Information Society initiative i2010 Digital Libraries Initiative has recommended “some form of registration as a precondition for a full exercise of rights” [Our emphasis].

The problem? Berne establishes most parts of copyright as an automatic, global right. Unravelling this would undermine the entire treaty – which isn’t likely.
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“Nyah”

For years, Google has been the Stroppy Teenager Kevin when it comes to copyright – full of attitude, and refusing to tidy up the bedroom. But do yesterday’s concessions make any difference?

No.
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It’s too early to say whether the Times paywall is a success or not. But it’s done wonders for conferences about newspapers.

In place of the usual hand-wringing and Kumbaya pipedreams, we’re getting quite a bit of decent discussion. The Telegraph is next to ask for your dosh – probably with a “metered” model used by the FT, according to… the FT.

No one looked happier than Dominic Young, News International’s director of strategy and product development, after five months behind a paywall. Speaking at a Westminster Media Forum debate on Payment for Content, Young said none of the dire predictions by rivals had come true; and free of the tyranny of SEO, his journalists could write stories for humans again, rather than robots.

“Virtually none of the predictions about would happen have turned out to be correct,” said Young.
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Hollywood is going after advertising companies who help fund pirate websites, and has now won a landmark victory.
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