LEAKED: UK copyright lobby holds closed-door meetings with gov't to discuss national Web-censorship regime

A group of UK copyright lobbyists held confidential, closed-door meetings with Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries to discuss a plan to allow industry groups to censor the Internet in the UK. The proposal has leaked, and it reveals a plan to establish "expert bodies" that would decide which websites British people were allowed to see, to be approved by a judge using a "streamlined" procedure. The procedure will allow for "swift" blocking in order to shut down streaming of live events.

Public interest groups like the Open Rights Group asked to attend the meeting, but were shut out, presaging a regulatory process that's likely to be a lopsided, industry-centric affair that doesn't consider the public. The process is characterised as "voluntary," but the proposal makes reference to the Digital Economy Act, which allows for mandatory web-blocking (thanks to the action of LibDem Lords who submitted a proposal written by a record industry lobbyist as an amendment to the DEA).

The Open Rights Group has a campaign to repeal the DEA that you can sign onto.

We would like confirmation from the government that these are genuine proposals which they are actively considering. We would also like to know what steps they will be taking to consider the views of organisations such as Open Rights Group, and those others who recently wrote to rights holders expressing their concern and requesting such proposals are made public.
So far these discussions have involved only rightsholders and Internet companies, with only in the most recent meeting involving Consumer Focus. (As Jim blogged yesterday, Consumer Focus' response to the proposals they discussed is here). This is a welcome concession. But it is a concession. Open policy making that takes on board the broadest range of views is not something within the gift of politicians but a responsibility they bear.

Premier League joins group lobbying for web blocking, proposing confused "voluntary" scheme - overseen by the courts (James Firth)

Rights holders' proposed voluntary website blocking scheme (Open Rights Group)

Response to 'Addressing websites that are substantially focused on infringement' working paper (Consumer Focus PDF)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: corporatism • deact

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

Anonymous

I as a British person, and this will not wash!
Anonymous

Seeing as a large majority of voters in England keep making the same mistakes and just falling into the traps laid by Labour and the Tories this will most likely be passed using approval from Tory constituencies.

Seeing the Government go after the internet for the sake of big pocketed companies is saddening but also a reality that we have to face everyday.
Nelson.C

It’ll have to be hypersonic, that “streamlined” procedure, to even keep up with site creation, let alone make any inroads on all the already existing sites. How can anyone take this seriously? How could anyone propose it seriously?
Absent

It would be fun to make a script that watched for visits from the IPs of the proposed web police, then if detected automatically mirrored the site somewhere else.
- Gulliver
  
  It would be fun to make a script that watched for visits from the IPs of the proposed web police, then if detected automatically mirrored the site somewhere else.
  
  You don’t think the Ministry of Truth…er, Culture that is…can find their way around a proxy?
  
  Man, I’m ticked and I don’t even live there. Granted it’ll never work as advertised, but what a headache if the courts start slapping folks with ASBOs for not obeying this fiat censorship. Voluntary my ass!
Anonymous

This is one for Antisec. If the UK government tries to censor the Internet in anyway shape or form further than what they are already doing, I for one will riot, and I want stop rioting until I’m dead or imprisoned.
Anonymous

They could end up eventually blocking every ip address in the UK- haha what a complete joke… and what about mistakes – businesses would go under, great for the economy – another great idea by a bunch of totally out of touch idiots.
turn_self_off

What is it with IP that makes people so willing to descend into a police state?
- toyg
  
  Politicians have been told for 20+ years that industry is dead and the future of capitalism is all about “the knowledge economy”.
  To have an economy, you need scarcity — if everyone can have everything without having to fork money for it, it doesn’t really work.
  If you can’t have scarcity (because internet & digital tech result in infinite+instantaneous+ubiquitous goods) you better create one real quick. This is what they’re doing.
  
  Censorship is a red herring. The truth is that enforcing scarcity is the only way for entrenched economic powers to keep running the show.
  - bmcraec
    
    THat’s as crisp and accurate a description of the real issue as I’ve seen. You have hit the proverbial nail on the head.
    
    We’re in a period where the people who think they own the world are watching a bunch of us cheerfully, blissfully sailing over the edge of the flat Earth, while those same expedience-driven Flat Earthers devise giant irons, steered by lawyers and powered by money and “diplomacy by other means”, to re-flatten the amazing 3-D spherical experience that everyone who gets it now enjoy.
    
    We’re dealing with the Rulers of FlatLand trying to get everyone who has escaped into the 3rd dimension to get back to the right and proper universe of only two dimensions.
    
    This is the mother of all paradigm shifts, akin to Galileo being sent to his room for the rest of his life. And we even have the Auto da Fe 2.0, courtesy of an Empire pretending to be a democracy.
    
    This is going to get nastier before it gets better.
Anonymous

nobody has the intention to build a surveillance state!

.~.
justanothercynic

In government where there is money there is a way.
overground

I would say thanks a lot Tories, but there isn’t any meaningful whole party opposition to this in the UK government, which I imagine comes from a complete lack of understanding of the way in which modern media works.
Anonymous

Not standing for this. They’re gonna start a cyber war… Free uncensored access to ALL information is what we want. Not censorship by some posh old people from the ‘old boy network’ who don’t know how to internets. Where is our freedom?
Anonymous

Ok, that does it. I’m voting Pirate Party from now on.
Anonymous

WTF?! Ministry of Dump? It asking for the Cyber World War I
Scurra

I am a rights holder, and I wasn’t invited to or even notified about this meeting. I assume that at some point in the future I will be sent all the details about how I can get sites infringing my copyright instantly blocked. Fantastic.

(This is obviously an incredibly stupid proposal but nothing about modern legislation surprises me any more. Personally I think it’s easy to explain. Once lawyers became the majority, then our laws started to become incredibly complex – verging on incomprehensible – and incredibly packed with loopholes and unclear language, thus creating more work for… lawyers. Quelle surprise.)
Anonymous

This sounds similar to the Australian governments proposed web filter. Hopefully the UK version is as openly criticized as ours was, resulting in the communications minister backing down and the filter hasn’t been brought up in over a year.

It didn’t help that the blacklist included regular adult pornography, euthanasia sites and a website of a perfectly legitimate dentist.

Internet censorship, no matter how wholesome the original intentions may be, is a terrible idea.
Anonymous

Efforts like this will make it easier for the powers that be worldwide to fulfill the promise of my theory that statistically at some future point in time everyone will either be working for the government(s) or end up in jail, where they will probably end up working for the government(s).
- karl_jones
  
  Efforts like this will make it easier for the powers that be worldwide to fulfill the promise of my theory that statistically at some future point in time everyone will either be working for the government(s) or end up in jail, where they will probably end up working for the government(s).
  
  This is Sparta.
Anonymous

quelle fucking surprise
Anonymous

Ha ha. Then they should ‘Expect Us’.
karl_jones

“Streamlined” …? “Swift” …?

Not good enough!

Only by stopping crimes before they are conceived, let alone committed, can we safeguard the profitability of the human race.

Where is the Central Scrutinizer when you need him?
- Gulliver
  
  Help stop precrime.
Anonymous

Thank you for the link to the Open Rights Group. I wrote my MP modifying the suggested letter. The examples of Thailand and Australia, with their secret blacklist and lack of censorship control, and the Netherlands, with their constitutional right for internet access, should be real eye-openers to everybody
Anonymous

so will i have to get written permision from Ed Vaizey to go on any web site?? better start typing letters now then??
Anonymous

What happened to freedom? If this happens i will for sure make a patch to bypass this shit!
Guesty_

At first I was all
“LulzSec you’re a bunch of fagg0ts”

But then I was all
“LulzSec haxx0rz the gov websites plz <3″

What a stupid ass bunch of nutfucks. Censoring the internet is a bad move, and will only cause outbreaks of people protesting against it for a very long time.

The UK government is a total fuck up. And it always will be.
Just putting that out there.

Regards
Guesty_
Anonymous

Britain, take to the streets as Canada did. The internet is the future and this is absolute insanity
Anonymous

this is the same bollocks they r doin in germany already. they used child pornography as an excuse. and instead of goin after the perpetrators they block the sites with a big goofy “stop” sign.
of course on that block list are mostly questionable sites who might have copyright infringing content rather than child pornography.

in addition to that the GEMA NAZIS are doing their best blocking any kind of international content on youtube and other video sites.
the fight is lost on this end. hope the uk wont end up the same.
Anonymous

One wonders whether, like many smart-arses they will know the differecnce between ‘paedofile’ and ‘paediatrician’ given the pathetic standard of education that abounds in certatin areas – you just need to try and read the ‘letters’ you receive from certain establishments to wonder wtf is going on.

Like many governemnt orifices they’d rather spend taxpayers’ dosh on website propaganda and egotistical wars carried out in defiance of the people’s will – “NOT IN MY NAME” should be the cry in answer.

The cancer of perversion, corruption and deceipt needs exceised – do not let them play with your minds – think for yourselves – we were born individuals – let’s not die as clones!
Anonymous

Big Brother MUST soon control all web access and content or (too late) dare shut it down. “Liberty or Death” once was more than just a saying.
Anonymous

is there a reason that the Open Rights Group’s site is said to be hosting malware by google?
Anonymous

By Reading this you accept that you have stolen my Intellectual Property. Your IP address is going to be barred from internet access.

Furthermore any ideas you may have in the future are now derivative works of this comment and the copyright for your neural network encoded copy of this comment which resides in your brain is not licensed and I have contacted the relevant authorities about having your consciousness removed from the Internet entirely.

Seriously though this law is not great. This laissez faire-attitude to intellectual property disgusts me. The whole web should be completely censored by default and only made accessible if a signed license is obtained from the copyright holder and their maternal grandmother and the judge in a streamlined process conducted by fax or letter and then on payment of the appropriate license fee a single use license will be made to stream or scroll the web page or data once.

This bill should also cover knowing intellectual property that you do not own the rights for. Each additional attempt to recall a fact owned by someone else will result in a mandatory license fee and lolcat.

The incredible losses due to unlicensed thoughts could fund several more wars.
bsmsnudge

A couple of things…
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression: this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media, and regardless of frontiers.”
and

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963)
- Anonymous
  
  “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963)
  
  The problem is the robber barons and the omnipotent moral busybodies are now one of the same!
Anonymous

It would be amazing if this were to be passed. If I were in Britain, I’d fight like hell not to allow this. It is akin to Censure-ship from Governments all over the MidEAST.
Anonymous

When they censor the web we’ll have to take to the streets and throw them out. We’ll have no choice?
Anonymous

Always sound good these bright ideas don’t they? But they would be abused by the State, for example, there would be NO discussion of the murder of David Kelly, none, nada. Likewise ‘Industry’ would censor any discussion of illegal chemical dumping and polluting….

The idea is sick, it’s a charter for bad banks and indudtry to cover their dirty deeds realtime.
MattieTK

Has anyone found a link to the actual leaked proposal for scrutiny?
Anonymous

Is “copyright lobby” the best characterisation?

It seems like calling authoritarians a “law enforcement lobby”. Easily misunderstood. “What’s wrong with law enforcement? With copyright?”.

Since it’s the “content hoarding industry”, perhaps “content hoarding lobby?”