The DEBill, and why we’re *really* screwed "What’s just been demonstrated is that with enough money and enough knowledge of how politics work, vested interests can completely capture the legislative process. You can see this by the fact that BOTH sides of the arguments around the DEB got something of what they wanted. The BPI wrote entire chunks of the bill, which must count as a success for them. And the anti-Clause 43 campaign managed to get the orphan works provision jettisoned, which surely counts for a victory of sorts against the corporate interests that were lobbying for it.
So I’ve got no faith at all that our current political process will be able to deliver the changes that are going to be needed, because they’re in lock-step with the vested interests that will be most harmed by those changes. By the time we’ve managed to overcome the inertia that this will cause, it may well be too late. I’m emphatically not saying that the Digital Economy Bill isn’t important. It is, and it’s a very clear proxy measure for the kind of culture and society that we want to be. At the moment it looks like we want to be the kind of society that locks anything and everything of value away – that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. That doesn’t value creativity, or cooperation, or anything that might conceivably not carry a profit motive. That sounds like a pretty bleak kind of place, even if it’s the stuff of a Murdochian wet dream. And it’s not a place I want to be part of." http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2010/04/the-debill-and-why-were-really-screwed.php# _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
