This may not be what the corporate sponsor Google, which benefits from internet piracy and fights enforcement proposals, had in mind when it funded the research. Google is currently leading the opposition to the new SOPA legislation in the US, which obliges service providers to take greater responsibility.

Perhaps, as in Brecht’s poem, Google wishes “to dissolve the people and elect another”, until they get the answer they want.

Columbia University, who Google funded to conduct the survey, has a very hard time spinning it favourably for their corporate paymasters. They resort to the old trick of rephrasing the question until it got the desired answer. (Statisticians sometimes do something similar: it’s called “torturing the numbers until they confess.”)

Asked if websites should be “censored”, 46 per cent said yes, and 49 per cent said no. Fewer agreed if the question was posed in a way that implied legal content was being accidentally blocked. And asked if “the government” should “censor” websites, the number fell still further, with 36 per cent in favour and 64 per cent disagreeing.

The researchers stopped short of asking whether the public approved of the government unlawfully kidnapping their children while they censored websites and burned the Holy Bible just for fun, which is a pity. But you get the general idea. The answer depends on the question.

Two UK surveys have both shown strong public support for stronger law enforcement for online infringement. Even pirates agreed with the proposition that they were doing something a bit iffy, and would stop.

Which brings us to what wasn’t asked in the survey. There are some serious omissions.

In the UK, a mere 11 per cent disagreed with the statement that: “It is important to protect the creative industries from piracy.” But remember this new study is Google-funded research; they don’t want vital context like that spoiling the numbers. The same UK survey also showed that whacking free-riders is popular; 51 per cent polled in the UK thought serial copyright leechers should be punished more strongly, including many “pirates”. That question wasn’t asked by Columbia, either.

The survey instead asked if people had ever committed online copyright infringement, and the answer tells us something we already know: many people have, and the number rises among under-30s. It doesn’t ask if this is a regular occurrence, and how much is casual and how much is “hardcore”. The survey does ask how much of people’s personal collection is pirated, but what would be more useful is a “flow rate” (like the GDP measure), not the accretion, so we haven’t really learned anything about habits or behaviour.

The researchers instead ask whether the public like any of the punishments on offer, and guess, what? They don’t really like any of them very much.

Early data from France suggests most people stop pirating after just one letter, the number of people who have received two is tiny. Spending money on recorded music is now optional, and the copyright industries hope that people who love music go back to buying more, rather than spending the “saved” cash on beer and other entertainment, as they are free to do now. This is the justification for the legislation.

(Which is clumsy stuff, as your reporter never ceases to point out; there are other ways of discouraging anti-social behaviour than blocking sites).

No industry research into piracy is ever believed by opponents of digital copyright enforcement, the so-called “copyfighters”. This is for two reasons: studies have in the past have notoriously exaggerated the economic impacts of piracy for tactical reasons. Much like alarmist Greens, copyright groups want the threat to be seen as exceptional, requiring exceptional action. But secondly, pirates don’t want to acknowledge that piracy does anyone any harm – so they block their ears.

“What’s that you say? Never paying for anything hurts the creator? That can’t be true. And oh, I can’t hear yoooou!”

In fact, that seems to be exactly what happened here.

Read more at The Register.

What happens when competition watchdogs lose their teeth – and roll over to have their tummies tickled? Via the influential chair of the Commons Culture Media and Sport Select Committee, John Whittingdale MP, comes a very interesting story today. Whittingdale relates a conversation with John Fingleton, the head of the Office of Fair Trading. The MP asked if the agency had looked at the question of Google’s power in the marketplace.

Google has a dominant market share of paid search advertising, effectively setting the price of doing business on the internet for small companies. The conversation took place at around the time it became known that the European Commission began to probe the company, and its customers, in response to a series of complaints. The FTC opened its own investigation this summer.

“The head of the OFT told me that Google was a fantastic organisation, a fast developing company, and should be applauded,” the MP said.

The job of a business regulator, we hardly need point out, is not to swoon like a gushing schoolgirl delighted that a boy band star has swept into town. Fingleton had also offered his views – although a little more circumspectly – to The Guardian newspaper, in November 2009.

“We see a lot of customers benefit from what’s happening in this marketplace from very high innovation – it’s good for the British economy. We don’t want to send a negative signal about that,” said the watchdog boss.

The job of a regulator now includes “sending out signals”.

Google appears grateful for the support: Schmidt quoted Fingleton’s remarks in his MacTaggart lecture to TV executives recently.

The remarks will highlight Google’s close relationships with ministers and the permanent bureaucracy. A recent investigation into intellectual property was launched by Prime Minister David Cameron, citing concerns raised by Google executives, and soon became known as the “Google Review”. Its conclusions advanced copyright measures that could benefit large internet aggregators.

Last week, PR Week reported that a top Cameron strategist is joining Google. The Chocolate Factory lent the Conservatives’ chief strategist Steve Hilton a desk while he was working for the Conservatives, WiReD mag reported last year. Hilton’s wife Rachel Whetstone, formerly political secretary to Cameron’s predecessor as Conservative leader Michael Howard, is Google’s global head of communications and public policy.

Whittingdale was speaking at an iComp seminar; iComp is the group looking to clip Google’s wings. Whittingdate reiterated his personal view that government regulation is harmful. All the same, he said, he found the OFT’s insouciance quite remarkable.

We asked the OFT whether the conversation reflected its current view of Google, but it hadn’t got back to us as of publication.

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.

Two options are proposed for the Digital Economy Act: removing all the copyright legislation from the DEA, or calling for an additional vote on most of it. The second proposal also calls for the repeal of web-blocking powers, but Ministers say they won’t implement them anyway. The Digital Economy Act was passed by 189 votes to 47 last year.

The bearded, bicycling Huppert, a former UN youth organiser, told us he thought copyright legislation that existed prior to the DEA is sufficient for today – and he had never seen an online copyright enforcement measure he liked.

“Nobody has yet suggested one that is workable and proportionate,” he said.

That’s a pretty hard line, and one sure to bring cheers from hardcore downloaders. In the absence of sticks, Huppert told us he wanted education and better services. “There are already laws,” he told us, “people get prosecuted under these existing laws for copyright infringement online.”

The activists also call for the return of Clause 43 orphan works legislation, bringing in extended collective licensing for photographs and illustrations where a publisher can’t be arsed to ask permission can’t find the creator.

One speed for all

Also on the boilerplate list of digital activist grievances is a threat of new controls on network operators (aka “net neutrality”), with the paper insisting that more regulation “is liberal”. TV and video users and producers might be dismayed to read that “it is better to provide a level playing field – where traffic flows at the same speed“.

Video and gaming packets need to travel considerably faster – with lower latency and jitter – than bog-standard web-pages. Surely this was a typo?

“I can see the argument for some kind of traffic-shaping,” Huppert says. “That’s already done. That’s fundamentally different from stuff from the BBC going at a different bitrate.”

But wouldn’t that outlaw me paying for a premium movie service over IP? What harm was a private transaction like this doing to anyone?

That was “less” problematic, he said. “There’s nothing wrong with paying for a faster connection, or Channel 4 charging for movies, or dealing with an ISP to transmit them faster. What I don’t wish to see is Google paying money to an ISP to make Bing run slower.”

Huppert said the precedent was charging road users for premium services – fast lanes. “We don’t have roads you have to pay for,” he told us.

[Actually, we have several.]

But hang on – aren’t toll roads pretty common everywhere in the world already? The justification shifted once again: Facebook shouldn’t be able to withhold its service from an ISP by demanding money. Maybe they should try it, I suggested, as they wouldn’t need to scrape and hoard so much personal information. It almost sounds like an honest business model.

Nevertheless, the paper threatens that “privileging certain types of content or throttling download speeds on certain websites will lead inevitably to regulation”. Perhaps this is somewhat optimistic.

negative effect on creative industries, and proposes a new study to produce the answers desired. A move to allow the free public access to “the BBC archive wherever possible” was dropped from the published draft, El Reg understands.

I asked Huppert if the LibDems had done a costing of the suspension of IR35? “We don’t have the resources,” he said.

“In an ideal system there wouldn’t be such loopholes. I can understand why IR35 was invented. But it clearly doesn’t work very well, causes a large number of problems, and doesn’t collect very much revenue. ”

A bit like the 50p tax, then?

Julian laughed.

The LibDems will vote on a Policy Motion (F28) on Monday, 19 September

[link]

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.

The report by the “Comité des Sages” was welcomed by Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda. The Sages comprising the “high level reflection group” were Maurice Lévy, chairman and CEO of advertising and PR company Publicis, German libraricrat Elisabeth Niggemann, and Belgian playwright Jacques De Decker.

The trio urged states to implement new legislation on collective licensing, obliging commercial copyright holders to donate work which would be made available for free. Rights-holders of in-copyright works would be remunerated “fairly” and would retain the ability to opt-out of the EU-wide database.

While the report encourages “public-private” partnerships there’s little incentive for rights-holders to stump up for the expensive process of digitisation – deals would be non-exclusive and “preferential” terms would expire after seven years. Copies of everything would have to be lodged with Europeana, the EU digital library project estimated to cost €400m when it’s complete.

The strangest recommendations in the Sages’ report are reserved for orphan works. They declare that:

“An orphan work recognised as such in one Member State on the basis of a search in the country of origin, should be recognised as orphan across the EU.” Similarly, “an orphan work that is made accessible online in one Member State should also be made accessible online in all Member States or even globally.”

So expect to see Albania suddenly lose all the metadata it has ever possessed on Norman Wisdom films*.

You can find more high-level reflections from the sages here and download the PDF from here.

Bootnote

* This is, of course, a joke. Albania is not yet an EU member…

SABIP was founded in 2008 in the wake of the Gowers Report, as a quasi think-tank focusing on copyright policy. New technology has allowed many more people to record and distribute material – “everyone’s a creator” – we’re told, and this hasn’t gone unnoticed. From publishers such as News International to giant web data aggregators such as Facebook, the pressure to weaken the individual’s rights remains enormous. All are eager to exploit amateur material, and drive down the cost of professional material.

At once, SABIP began to discuss the removal of copyright as an “automatic” right from creators, something that thanks to international conventions is recognized worldwide. It’s something that benefits individuals and amateurs more than multinationals, and it means that individuals can receive the full protection and moral rights of international copyright law for everything they do – without having to sign-up, click-through or take any action at all.

(For a recent example of commercial land-grabs, see the Daily Mail‘s TwitPic theft.)

SABIP obviously didn’t think so, and proposed to redefine copyright so certain “non-commercial” works were excluded. In its 2008 launch paper, it wrote:

While subject to international variation, the definition of works which attract copyright is very wide and includes much material which is not of commercial value, and arguably may not require copyright protection.

Might there then be advantage in reworking the coverage of copyright to separate the moral rights of creators of all types of material from the economic/commercial rights and to limit the latter only to those outputs that do have an economic value?

SABIP noted several obstacles to this radical redefinition of individual rights. Copyright is automatic by international convention – this would mean the UK ripping up the Berne Convention. Since the UK is one of very few net exporters of “stuff”, this would have had deep repercussions with possibly years of tit-for-tat trade restrictions.

No matter, by this year, the language had morphed again, but this time it duly made its way into Europe as the official position of the UK government. And so earlier this year, the UK proposed to Europe that:

The UK will push at European level for a general non-commercial and pre-commercial use exception to copyright.

And added, for good measure, that it would quite like to outlaw private contracts at will:

The creator contract/bargaining problem may be addressed in the first instance through a working group (perhaps with OFT involvement), looking at acceptable forms of contracting.

When asked what “pre-commercial” meant, civil servants replied that they didn’t know.

Traditionally what decides whether a work is commercial is pretty straightforward – the market. A picture of your toddler eating Alphabet Spaghetti Soup is typically worth nothing – unless somebody decides to stick it on a calendar. The SABIP proposal would have left the photographer with the moral right, but no automatic compensation right. It would also mean – quite strange, this – a bureaucratic apparatus pre-emptively picking what categories of work may benefit from a market, and excluding the rest. You may wonder how this would work – folk music non-commercial, dubstep commercial, perhaps?

SABIP also attempted to make itself busy in other areas outside copyright, gradually turning into a Spartist think-tank. In January for example (minutes), it raised the role of “the regulation of genetic modification (GM) and the appropriation of ‘nature’” and low-carbon technologies. You’ll struggle to find any mention of these in the Gowers Report, and neither has much crossover with copyright.

Photographers welcomed the demise of the quango. Stop43 noted yesterday

“Its reports were vacuous, based on questionable methodology, notably light on meaningful statistics, and in the main simply pleaded for further research to be carried out. A true QUANGO, then, primarily engaged in perpetuating itself and its ‘work’. Stop43 does not mourn its passing.”

Yet pre-commercial use is an IPO-inspired invention, and SABIP merely the ventriloquist’s dummy. The ideas live on.

Calder invites us to have a giggle, but really it’s not a bad list at all, and compared with the (cough) ‘futurists’ who have come and gone since, Calder and the participants did a good job. Alvin Toffler was repackaging these ideas, particularly mass amateurisation, many years later. As are thousands of Web 2.0 consultants today.

Read more at The Register

Actually, that’s how a few bloggers and even professional hacks have portrayed it. But what’s wrong with this picture?

Read more at The Register

The issue was made apparent when a trail of correspondence by administration official Andrew McLaughlin was exposed recently. McLaughlin is Obama’s deputy CTO – a freshly minted post, with CTO meaning either Citizens Twitter Overlord, or Chief Technology Officer – we believe it’s the latter. He was previously Google’s chief lobbyist, or ‘Head of Global Public Policy and Government Affairs’.

McLaughlin’s contacts were also exposed. In an irony to savour, the exposure was by Google itself, as it introduced its privacy-busting Buzz feature in February. As our Cade pointed out, it would be hard to imagine a better Google story.

Now GOP Congressman Darrell Issa, a ranking member of the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has asked why the Deputy CTO is prattling away on Google’s email service. Issa wants to know whether private, non-governmental emails are archived, as they should be.

He also wants to know what the retention policy is for information posted on Twitter and Facebook, who decides these things (pdf). Issa wants answers by 22 April.

As I noted last June, there are interesting parallels with the influence of think tank RAND on US policy in the 1960s – and some interesting differences. RAND was also a Church of the Algorithm, it took mathematical ideas and applied them to social and political problems. RAND’s most famous contribution was developing a nuclear policy based on game theory, developed by Robert McNamara, who went on to apply RAND analysis (disastrously) first to escalate, then to prolong the Vietnam war.

Google is merely a corporation, I noted. Then, the following month, Obama tapped the Berkman Centre, a pretty New Age techno-utopian think tank attached to Harvard Law School, to conduct an “independent” review of broadband deployment and usage. Like Obama, McLaughlin is himself a graduate of Harvard Law – the class of 94. McLaughlin had two senior stints at Berkman, from 1998 to 1999, and once again before joining Google.

Google is a Berkman sponsor.

There’s a broader issue than archiving emails here, and it’s eloquently illustrated by Andrew McLaughlin’s Gmail Buzz contact list. It’s that the range of ideas that Obama can draw upon, via his Googlers, is extremely narrow and ideologically rigid.

The boundaries of what he’s permitted to think are defined by Google. And that’s isn’t really in the best interest of either the President, or the US public.

90 per cent of the UK listens to radio, and 94 per cent of listeners are happy with what they’ve got. The Lords accept most of the points made by critics of DAB and the Digital Switchover, noting: “The gradual rate of take-up of digital radio services does not suggest that consumers are enticed by the reception quality, extra functionality or the digital-only content so far available.”

How about something better, then?

“To go back on this policy now would risk turning confusion into an utter shambles” they write in a new report (pdf).

So the Lordships recommend everyone get on with the Digital Switchover. They advise implementing the Digital Radio Working Group’s (DRWG) recommendation to build out DAB coverage so it reaches 94 per cent of the population, but don’t say who how it should be funded. Both the BBC and the commercial broadcasters want extra cash for this. But the Lords duck this issue.

Punters will be browbeaten into buying a digital set, when an analogue one would do, we’re told:

“The Government must ensure that advice goes to retailers and the public that when purchasing radios, consumers should purchase sets that include a digital tuner.”

That’s the stick. But there may be a carrot. The Lords back a cash-for-trannies scheme, so perfectly good FM radios can be traded in.

“The Government should encourage the industry to devise a sensible scrappage scheme, recognising that the industry, manufacturers and retailers, will benefit heavily from the new sales generated by digital switchover.” They also advise “the Government inform consumers as soon as possible as to how the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) regulations will operate for disposal of analogue radios”.

Another recommendation is for car manufacturers to fit a multistandard chip, ASAP. It isn’t clear whether multistandard chip here means digital and analogue, or the different flavours of digital radio: DAB, DAB+, DVB-T too.

Anyone hoping a timetable for DAB+ implementation would be part of the deal will be disappointed. The Lordships say too much has been invested by the public in DAB, but advise a timetable for multistandard radios to be produced. In other words, the public will have to invest even more in obsolete radios.

It’s everything the DAB lobby could have hoped for – short of a blank cheque.