The phone lines have been buzzing at ORG headquarters this morning, as the national media have finally wised up to the Government’s plans to compel ISPs to disconnect customers who routinely break their terms of service by sharing copyrighted content online. The Times frontpage kicked it all off, having seen leaked copies of next week’s expected DCMS green paper The World’s Creative Hub, which contained details of proposed legislation.

“Users suspected of wrongly downloading films or music will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their internet contract if caught a third time, under the most likely option to emerge from discussions about the new law.

“Broadband companies who fail to enforce the ‘three-strikes’ regime would be prosecuted and suspected customers’ details could be made available to the courts. The Government has yet to decide if information on offenders should be shared between ISPs.”

The proposals are both disproportionate and doomed to failure. In most families, an internet connection is shared by the entire household - so if Dad gets the connection cut off for sharing movies online, suddenly Mum can’t run her business from home, and the kids can’t get access to the Web to do their homework. The Times estimates that there are 6 million people in the UK who share files illegally on the web. Any serious move towards disconnecting offenders is likely to play havoc with the Government’s ambition to foster an e-enabled society.

What’s more, as soon as law enforcers start snooping for IP addresses to pass on to ISPs for disconnection, hardcore filesharers will simply start using encryption to obfuscate their identities. Then they’ll develop software that makes it easy for non-technical people to do the same. And then industry will be back to square one.

Industry appears to be ignoring this reality, and talks instead of legislation sending out “a strong message” that filesharing is wrong. But driving illicit filesharers further underground isn’t going to earn artists a penny, and will further irritate their fans. Wouldn’t it be better if instead of spending time sending out strong messages, industry started investing in new revenue streams which compensate artists fairly and respond to consumer demand for music “on tap”?

ORG has made two press appearances so far this week. Yesterday, Suw Charman combined her two loves - the Welsh language and protecting your bits - by speaking to BBC Wales about the civil liberties implications of the proposed Welsh smartcard scheme. We’re really proud of Suw for breaking the language barrier to question the benefits of the proposed scheme, all in perfect Welsh. Unfortunately, we’re unable to link to the TV footage of Suw, but here are two follow-on articles for BBC News Online, one in Welsh and the other in English.

Meanwhile, I appeared on BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours programme today to contribute to a discussion about how consumer demand for new ways of distributing content online can lead (slowly) to changes in intellectual property and licensing practices. The debate was sparked by a new “online PVR” service, TVcatchup.com, which launched at the end of last year. You can listen to the debate for the next seven days, on the BBC’s own catchup service.

The Open Rights Group regularly spends time talking to the media and connecting them with experts or giving them an alternate point of view on current issues. We maintain a complete list (thanks, Glyn!) of all ORG press coverage on the wiki.

It’s taken a while to pick apart Neelie Kross’s announcement that Microsoft have accepted the conditions of the European Commission’s 2004 ruling on abuse of market position. The European Commissioner for Competition Policy stated at a press conference on Monday that:

“Put together, these changes in Microsoft’s business practices, in particular towards open source software developers, will profoundly affect the software industry. The repercussions of these changes will start now and will continue for years to come.”

Yet it is not clear whether the news for open source is all that good.

Groklaw rightly points out that the €10,000 one-off fee for secret interoperability information “to be paid by companies that dispute the validity or relevance of Microsoft’s patents” is out of reach of most of the open source community. And the options the European Commission lay out for open source developers implementing patented interoperability information are “design around these patents, challenge their validity or take a patent licence from Microsoft.”, when, as Groklaw points out “The GPL can’t take a license for a patent, period.”

The FFII are one group not happy with the decision. In a statement issued yesterday, Benjamin Henrion, FFII representative in Brussels, accused the commission of misunderstanding the challenges faced by open source:

“The Commission does not understand how open source works. It naively accepted Redmond’s assurances that they will play fair. It is a sham. They have planned for years to control the open source economy through software patents.”

Business Week have a range of reactions from elsewhere in the software community, including the Free Software Foundation Europe and the European Committee for Interoperable Systems. As they put it, “The open-source software sector isn’t popping open champagne bottles just yet.”

This morning, the European Court of First Instance announced that it would uphold the European Commission’s decision that Microsoft has abused its dominant market position.

The Court ruled that Microsoft did this by refusing to supply and authorise the use of interoperability information and by tying together the Windows client PC operating system and Windows Media Player. Although the court essentially upheld the Commission’s decision, it did annul certain parts relating to the appointment of a monitoring trustee, which it say have no legal basis in Community law.

ORG welcomes the Court’s decision, which is good news for consumers and business alike. As ORG advisory council member Ian Brown points out over at Blogzilla:

“The network effects in many digital markets make competition law more vital than ever if we are to see vibrant free markets. A loss today for the Commission’s competition directorate would have been disastrous, forcing them to tread much more carefully in regulating digital monopolists.”

Groklaw has good analysis and pointers to reactions from the Free Software Foundation, Samba and others. Text of the full judgement is available here; initial reactions from Microsoft are available here.

ORG’s Becky Hogge will be on the BBC1’s one o’clock news today discussing the decision with the their technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones.

Yesterday, Sir Alistair Graham, chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, called for the 2007 electoral pilots in the UK to be halted, in a speech to the Association of Electoral Administrators conference. Sir Alistair’s committee has recently published a report on the Electoral Commission calling for major reform of both the commission and our electoral system, particularly with regard to fraud.

Sir Alistair is proving to be a strong, independent new voice in the debate concerning our electoral system. His speech today made every point we would like to make and then some. Even though electoral fraud undermines voter confidence, is the DCA’s and the Electoral Commission’s focus on increasing participation causing them to turn a blind eye to fraud? Given existing problems with fraud and unsatisfactory systems for combating fraud, is it appropriate to rush ahead with pilot schemes?

Sir Alistair also argued that the government had been entirely misleading in their use of statistics from Northern Ireland, which has a much stricter electoral regime than the rest of the UK. Sir Alistair argued that in the long term new measures in Northern Ireland had not been damaging to participation as the DCA had argued, and that we should be replicating those measures across the rest of the UK.

The debate continued on BBC Radio 4’s The World at One where Sir Alistair argued that the DCA’s priorities were wrong, saying that “we should be concentrating on safeguarding the integrity of the current voting system rather than experimenting in remote systems which are bound to carry a high risk”.

In an absurd argument, David Monks, Chief Executive and returning officer for Huntingdonshire, stated that if we don’t pilot new voting technologies the fraudsters will have won by preventing changes which benefit society and meet our new modern lifestyles.

Finally, DCA minister Bridget Prentice MP replied to Sir Alistair by saying that he was “just plain wrong”. She didn’t accept any of his arguments whatsoever. She also ignored the implications of this week’s visit by a Council of Europe delegation assessing whether the UK’s electoral system needs to be monitored for fraud, along with many former Soviet republics.

We briefly met the Council of Europe delegation on Monday, giving them copies of the ORG e-voting briefing pack. They seemed to be deeply concerned by the level of worry about fraud in the UK. Indeed, my analysis of 2006 opinion research for the Electoral Commission shows that the public clearly want secret and secure votes ahead of anything else like convenience. Furthermore, political issues were shown to be the main barriers to turnout and not ease of voting.

As Sir Alistair puts it, “deep-seated voter disengagement will not be solved by tinkering with the mechanics of the electoral system”.

Thanks to everyone who made it along on Monday night. For those who could not attend, and also for reference purposes, you can now download the audio recording - in either MP3 or Ogg Vorbis format - from the link below. Its split into 2 sections, 1 covers the lecture from Jonathan Zittrain, and the other covers the panel discussion.

http://media.ito.com/suw/rtm/

We hope to make an audio-visual record available within a week or so.

Our very own Dr Ian Brown is going to be on BBC Radio 5Live, this Sunday 20 August. The Julian Worricker show will be running a feature on “blagging” personal information. Details are:

10:00 Worricker on Sunday
Spend Sunday mornings with Julian Worricker. Three hours of award-winning investigation, breaking news, politics, and entertainment. Julian and guests will be reviewing all the top stories from the Sunday papers and looking forward to the week ahead. Have your say too - text 85058 [network rates apply].

Including the Five Live Report: Blaggers
Just how safe are our personal details and files? A rape victim tells the Five Live Report of how her attacker - a convicted child rapist - hired a private detective to track her down. The private eye illegally obtained the victim’s bank details, telephone and medical records after her evidence led to the rapist’s conviction and a nine year sentence. Reporter Matthew Chapman examines dozens of cases where so called ‘blaggers’ put individuals at risk by illegally obtaining personal information for a living; and asks why are they receiving such small fines in the courts despite making in some cases over a million pounds a year.

Ian will be on air some time around or after 11am.

Children are being threatened with exclusion from school unless they submit to being fingerprinted, reports Leave Them Kids Alone. This Daily Mirror story illustrates the size of the problem:

FURY erupted yesterday after it emerged an estimated 700,000 children are being fingerprinted at school.

Systems in 3,500 primary school libraries allow pupils to take out books by scanning their thumb prints instead of using a card.

But campaigners warn the technology is a massive invasion of privacy and a step towards a “database state”.

With an average primary school size of 200 pupils, pressure group No2ID says at least 700,000 pupils are regularly having their fingerprints scanned.

Fingerprint scandal of 700,000 kids - The Daily Mirror

For more on children’s rights, visit the ARCH website.

The European Commission has been consulting on the future of Europe’s patent regime and, as always, the FFII have been doing a good job of monitoring their progress. Fears that this was a third attempt to legalise software patents in Europe prompted a large number of SMEs, software developers and bigger IT firms to respond, but it seems that the Commission did not like the answers they got:

The Commission made an undercover move to get more “useful” answers following the 12 April closing date of its Patent Policy consultation. It sought out small firms across Europe who had used the patent system. It then provided these firms with new documentation and specialist assistance to help them write individual answers. None of the firms answering the online consultation got this help. But when the software firms in this new group came to the same conclusions as the FFII, the Commission concluded that these firms were “lacking knowledge about the patent system”.

Commission Cheats European SMEs in Patent Consultation - FFII

The “TV Without Frontiers” directive is a proposed piece of European legislation that would mean that anything that appears to be television and travels over the internet is television, and therefore becomes subject to TV regulations.

The CBI, however, is unimpressed. “The European Commission seems to be ignoring the fact that opposition to the directive has been signed by the business associations of six other countries,” says Jeremy Beales, the CBI’s head of e-business. “The problem with this piece of legislation is that the EC has focused on television because that’s all that they are interested in. Their motivation is to protect public service broadcasters and the TV industry with a catch-all piece of legislation that could affect huge numbers of websites because of a badly phrased piece of legislation.”

It’s TV, but not as we know it - The Guardian