ORG has used this year to build on past campaign successes, as well as focus on new issues. From the Government’s loss of two DVDs containing half the nation’s bank details in November 2007, to widespread concern throughout 2008 over plans to disconnect from the internet people accused of illicitly sharing copyrighted material, this was the year that digital rights went mainstream. ORG was there to inform the debate, providing a calm, technically-informed perspective to the media and policymakers.
Just days after we released our first Review of Activities last year, news broke that the confidential details of 25 million child benefit claimants had been lost by HM Revenue and Customs, on two password-protected DVDs. The news revealed the cavalier attitude of officialdom towards the security of citizens’ personal information, momentarily bringing the long-held data security concerns of digital rights and privacy advocates, including ORG, centre stage.
The news had long-term effects too. Suddenly, every new data loss was headline news, and ORG’s log of UK Privacy Debacles became a focus of activity.
Independent reviews concluded in June 2008 that, given the lax culture over data security at HMRC, further data loss was a distinct possibility, and a separate Police Complaints Commission report found “no visible management of data security at any level”. The lasting effect is that every new proposed government database now has to publicly address fears about data security that previously had only been raised by computer security experts.
Partnering with 01 Zero One, the new media skills and development centre, ORG embarked on a research project examining how the internet enables creative entrepreneurs to develop innovative business practices by being more open with their intellectual property. Creative Business in the Digital Era examined new business models and the wider context in which they sit, culminating in one day-long and two evening courses where creative practitioners were invited to share our research and apply it to their own practice.
Congratulations are due to Suw Charman, ORG’s founding Executive Director, for conceiving, developing and executing the research and training course. In the end, the day course, which included lectures, group exercises, and special Q&A sessions with three exemplary Creative Business projects, was vastly over-subscribed, with the evening courses also featuring lively debate from the dozens of people who participated. Materials, which were developed collaboratively on a special Creative Business wiki, have been made available for remix and reuse under a Creative Commons licence.
ORG continued to fight disproportionate and ineffective sanctions devised by rightsholders to protect their analogue-age business models and punish consumers for sharing media files online. Emboldened by the draconian "Olivennes Agreement", brokered by the Sarkozy administration in France in 2007, UK rightsholders began demanding that British ISPs terminate or filter internet users' connectivity in response to claims of infringement. When the UK Government began to take such requests seriously, and put pressure on internet intermediaries to come to voluntary agreements, ORG joined the debate to argue against such a practice. In our opinion, the "three strikes" model – whereby a simple repeated claim of infringement could lead to innocent users losing internet access – was unjust, disproportionate and fraught with practical problems. Our concerns were widely reported in the national and international media.
When it appeared that the European Parliament was also falling prey to rightsholder lobbying in the Autumn by amending a package of telecoms legislation to include a three strikes regime, ORG urged its supporters to take part in a pan-European letter writing campaign. This eventually led to a new amendment being adopted that would preclude disconnection from the internet without judicial authority.
Although the UK Government now claim to have backed away from mandating this proposed course of action, ORG remains vigilant. We expect the Government to conclude its public consultation on measures to deal with illicit P2P filesharing, to which ORG made a lengthy submission, in the New Year.
From the moment that behavioural advertising company Phorm's plans with British Telecom were made public, ORG and its supporters worked to shine light on the nature and risks of this controversial new ad tracking system. We soon realised that, until detailed specifications were released about the ad system – which dials direct into your ISP’s network and examines the sites you visit online in order to serve you targeted ads – speculation about how it affected user privacy would only continue.
Partnering with the Foundation for Information Policy Research, we visited the Phorm offices to get the low down on their system. What followed was a detailed technical analysis produced by ORG Advisory Council member and FIPR treasurer Dr Richard Clayton. Nicholas Bohm, an internet lawyer who also divides his time advising both ORG and FIPR, then released a partner legal analysis. Together, the two documents made the case against Phorm clear.
During the “Phorm storm”, ORG emerged as a key information hub for activists campaigning against the technology (and seeking justice for the illegal trials conducted by BT in 2006 and 2007) and a clearinghouse for the popular media investigations of and reports about Phorm. BT has now gone ahead with further trials of Webwise, its implementation of Phorm, but we believe our role in raising awareness of the dangers of Phorm has helped nurture a public opinion that is rightly hostile to the technology. And although it has become clear that there is no protection in the UK for citizens and consumers from those who wish to illegally intercept their private communications for financial gain, we are now looking to Europe to enforce the law and protect citizens from intrusion into their digital private lives.
Following on from a successful mission last year, ORG deployed 27 volunteer election observers to monitor e-counting at London’s elections in May. Volunteers were asked to officially accredit themselves with the Electoral Commission as ORG observers and to devote their day to democracy on 2 May, monitoring the counting of over 7 million ballot papers by computer systems in three count centres across London.
Their observations contributed to a detailed report, launched in July 2008, which concluded that there was insufficient evidence to declare confidence in the results of the elections. Transparency around the recording of valid votes was a major issue, leading many of our team to conclude that they were unable to observe votes being counted. And while hundreds of screens set up by vote scanners showed almost meaningless data to observers, London Elects admit that the system was likely to be recording blank ballots as valid votes. System error messages observed on the day raised significant concerns, as did the inability of elections managers London Elects to publish source code audits, citing last minute concerns over the commercial confidentiality of their suppliers.
ORG Advisory Council member Jason Kitcat was invited to give evidence to the Greater London Authority’s elections scrutiny committee based on the report’s findings. A week later, the Electoral Commission released its report into the London elections, echoing many of ORG's findings and calling for the GLA to assume that the next elections for the GLA and London mayor should be counted manually.
Building on our success in 2006 in helping the Government conclude that extension to the term of copyright on sound recordings was not an economically sound proposition, we partnered with EFF Europe to launch a petition against the proposal as it made its way (in the briefcases of record label lobbyists) to Brussels. To date, over 14,000 people have signed the petition asking elected representatives and bureaucrats in Brussels to “keep copyright sound” and reject the bogus proposal to nearly double the term of protection afforded to sound recordings from 50 to 95 years.
ORG is now in the middle of an intense campaign in the European Parliament to reach out to MEPs and convince them to reject the proposal. Thanks to a generous grant of €30,000 from the Open Society Institute, ORG has been able to hire a dedicated part time campaigner for this work, who forms part of a network of European advocates working on this and other intellectual property reform issues. Our submission to the UK Intellectual Property Office, who will lead the UK’s policy on the proposal at the Council of Ministers, showed that ordinary performers are likely to gain as little as 50¢ per year from the change, while record labels pocket millions. Our opposition to the proposal has been strengthened by rejections of it from almost all of Europe’s major IP research institutes, including the Max Planck Institute in Germany and IViR in the Netherlands.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell what digital rights stories will capture the public imagination. So it was when knitter Mazzmatazz contacted ORG for advice on a letter she had received from BBC Worldwide’s brand protection team, telling her to take down from her blog knitting patterns based on popular characters from Doctor Who.
ORG blogged about the case, and by the end of the week, Mazz’s story had spread to all corners of the British press, including The Sun. The coverage caused the BBC to agree to meet with Mazz and turn her knitted designs into exclusive promotional products. Mazz’s other knitting designs have since been featured in The Guardian.
As well as launching Mazz’s career as a guerrilla knitter, the episode served as a useful way to underline the reforms needed to intellectual property law to allow fan fiction and derivative uses of works, and the injustices regularly suffered by fans with less media-friendly stories of faceless corporate copyright takedown notices.
On 11 October, civil society activists around the world held events to celebrate democracy, free speech, human rights and civil liberties and to speak out against increasing levels of surveillance suffered by citizens at the hands of corporations and the state. The international day of action was called “Freedom Not Fear” and ORG and NO2ID contributed for the UK by constructing a piece of community artwork which harnessed the power of online and offline protest to visually stunning effect.
We asked citizens around the country to capture the database state, taking photos of surveillance society ephemera and sending them in to us or uploading them to Flickr. We used these photos to build a giant mosaic depicting Gordon Brown as Big Brother, put together live in Parliament Square on the day. Our message was clear: although as individuals we only see incremental invasions of our privacy, put together these creeping changes constitute a wholesale shift towards a society predicated not on freedom but on fear.
Despite the seriousness of our message, we had a lot of fun delivering it to Parliament, on a beautiful sunny afternoon, with help from the ORG and NO2ID communities, the Godalming Quakers, and a special delegation sent from the under-twos community to speak out against the children’s database, Contact Point.
Part of ORG's mission is to exploit the expert knowledge of our community in order to inform policymakers. As ORG's reputation has grown, invitations to take part in Government initiatives have begun to arrive in our postbag. Because of our limited resources and our desire to remain absolutely independent, we are always careful to balance the work we do on "the inside track" with our grassroots and public engagement work. This year we participated in two Government policy-making and regulatory initiatives.
In September 2007, Dr Tanya Byron conducted a review into the risks to children from exposure to potentially harmful or inappropriate material on the internet. Dr Byron's approach was generally positive, and we felt that she understood the benefits new technology could deliver children, as well as the potential risks that often worried parents. Following our submission to the Byron Review (See Getting voices heard), ORG was asked to join the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS), a body set up as part of the Review's Action Plan. Although we had been opposed to the formation of this council during the review process, suspecting it to be an unnecessary and potentially dangerous distraction from real digital rights issues, we felt that, as the only third sector organisation with a freedom of expression mandate invited to join the council, we needed to be involved. We will keep a watching brief on the actions of the UKCCIS, and get involved in any ORG-specific issues as they arise.
After ORG gave a presentation at the Westminster e-Forum which asked policy-makers to think differently about illicit peer-to-peer filesharing, we were asked to get involved with the Convergence Thinktank, a cross-departmental initiative set up to examine the implications of technological development for the media and communications industries. This opened the door to a series of events held to inform policymakers, with ORG either in the audience or on the stage. Again, we were unsurprised to find that we were often the only organisation representing the digital consumer or citizen. The work of the Convergence Thinktank has now been subsumed by Lord Carter's new "Digital Britain" initiative, which will report in Spring 2009 (see The year ahead).
ORG grew its reputation for putting on excellent, thought-provoking and generally unmissable intellectual knees-ups this year, from our Machinima screening and panel in Autumn 2007, to our debate held at the British Computer Society on the Future of the Internet in Spring 2008. Here's a run down of the highlights:
Bloodspell and the rise of Machinima: In association with London Metropolitan University we presented a screening and panel discussion of the world's first feature-length, machinima animated film.
The Future of the Internet in Focus: Put on in association with the British Computer Society, this sell-out event featured Jonathan Zittrain and Bill Thompson discussing iPhones, computer viruses and how to break the internet.
OpenTech 2008: Put on together with UKUUG, mySociety.org and NO2ID, this informal, low cost one-day conference on technology, society and low-carbon living, was a chance for everyone to meet old and new friends, and for ORG to launch the ORG-GRO campaign.
Piracy vs Obscurity: Neil Gaiman, the illustrious patron of ORG, gave the first public appearance of his Graveyard Book UK tour to ORG, inviting fans and ORG supporters to discuss piracy from the perspective of a creator.
Open Source for Games Developers: In association with Own-It we hosted an event for the London Games Fringe. The panel featured veterans of law, code and business.
Conference stalls: ORG volunteers also manned a number of supporter recruitment and information stalls at technology conferences and community fairs throughout the year, including LUG Radio Live, PyCon and Dulwich Festival Fair. Chances are that if you went to a tech conference this year, you will have been accosted by Glyn Wintle or one of his team of tireless ORG supporter recruiters.
At the beginning of July, we launched ORG-GRO, an initiative to double the amount of financial support we receive from individuals. Thanks to a generous grant of £20,000 plus £10,000 in matched funding from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd, we were able to devote resources to attracting and retaining enough supporters to put ORG on a sustainable financial footing into the future.
ORG-GRO was launched at OpenTech, a grassroots technology conference put on by the UK Unix User Group in association with ORG. It was a fitting place to launch our call to the digital rights community to help us achieve financial sustainability by the end of 2008: ORG had been conceived at OpenTech 2005.
That day we released a "fundometer" widget for members of the community to upload to their website or blog, which updated itself each time we registered new financial support. So far, over 30 different websites are displaying the ORG fundometer, publicising our campaign to raise funds.
The ORG-GRO campaign has several elements. First and foremost it is about encouraging and incentivising existing supporters to recruit their friends or increase what they give to the organisation. To encourage people to recruit friends, a video showing how to do it, that also introduced newcomers to digital rights issues, was produced. Asus provided a prize of an Eee-PC for the supporter who recruited the most new supporters during ORG-GRO, and dozens of people now appear to be actively taking part in this competition, with positive results for ORG's supporter numbers. We encouraged supporters who lived outside of London to set up local meetings about digital rights using Pledgebank (see, eg http://www.pledgebank.com/orgsouthwest), promising to send representatives from the organisation if sufficient numbers were reached. We also held a number of one-off events and giveaways to increase support to ORG.
The ORG-GRO goal of doubling the amount of support we receive from individuals, from the equivalent of 750 fivers / month, to 1500 fivers / month is set for the end of the year. One month after launch, we were receiving 825 fivers. Two months after launch, we are receiving 934. Today, we are receiving 1001 fivers/month. For more information, visit http://www.openrightsgroup.org/org-gro/.
This year we submitted responses to a wide variety of national and regional consultations. We used a special tool adapted and developed by the ORG volunteer community to allow supporters and other interested parties to interact with consultation documents and express their views: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/consult/.
ORG crossed two media Rubicons this year, debating digital rights issues on BBC Radio 4's Today programme and in the pages of The Sun. This, and our consistent presence in a huge range of specialist and general national and international press and broadcast media underlines ORG's reputation as a trusted and informed commentator on the digital issues of the day. A selection of these publications follow – for a more comprehensive list, visit our archive of press coverage:
