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29th September 2009 11:37 | by Andrew Robinson
When the Pirate Party UK was formally registered, one of the first things we did was ask our members to respond to the government's consultation on P2P file sharing. Since then we've seen a lot of developments, with Lord Mandelson threatening to cut whole families off the net for the actions of just one person, and various lobby groups such as the Featured Artists Coalition coming up with their own, often contradictory statements.
If we don't want these profit-motivated groups to write their own laws, then we need to make our voices heard, and one way to do this iby responding to this consultation document.
We need to tell the government that we reject punishment without trial, that copying isn't stealing, and that independent evidence shows that filesharing is free publicity and leads to increased music sales. We need to let the government know that a £50,000 fine for sharing a file is disproportionate, and that their proposals are wrong, morally repugnant and technically unworkable. The propose site blocking, IP address blocking, protocol blocking, port blocking, content-based censorship, transfer capping, bandwidth shaping and bandwidth capping for net connections for suspected file sharers without a trial or a chance to appeal. We need to say NO!
Normally, consultations like this receive less than 100 responses. If YOU respond to the consultation as a member of the public, then we can outnumber the big businesses that normally respond. Since the results are collated and published, if government decides to go ahead with these proposals, we will be able to show that they are doing so against the wishes of the electorate.
How to respond.
Download the consultation document here:
http://www.berr.gov.uk/
Please remember that your replies will be read and summarised by civil servants who do not necessarily agree or disagree with the polices. Be polite, keep your response reasonably short and to the point, and if at all possible, start with a list of answers to the 20 specific questions that start on page 16 of the consultation document.
We recommend that you do not mention that you are a member of the Pirate Party when responding, and that you do not cut and paste from each other, to ensure that your responses cannot be dismissed as duplicates, or be confused with the official Pirate Party response to the consultation.
9 comments
I suggest that you reply to as many as you can, and say that you are excluded from replying to the others because the questions are unclear.
We may be making a formal complaint about the bias inherent in the questions, the complexity of the questions excluding the general public and the duration of the consultation once the consultation closes.
Will we get to see the official Pirate Party UK response?
Yes, it will be posted as soon as the consultation ends. This is a deliberate tactic to avoid the possible grouping together of all critical responses as copies of ours, we cannot be accused of this if nobody else sees the official response until it's too late to copy it.
Could you please give us a little more warning next time ? Like say a week before the deadline
I've just spent the past three hours reading the 20 questions and responding to them, it's the kind of thing that you need to set aside time to do properly
Thanks for fighting the good fight
I agree, I have only just seen this .... and as you can see from the time stamp, it's too late!
Sorry spikyface, we have been mentioning this consultation quite often, but with new members arriving all the time we haven't always had it on the front page of the blog.
Fair enough, I did only join the other day
I spent about half an hour going through the questions yesterday, but I couldn't figure out how to reply to any of them, even the ones I understood.
I find it laughable that the whole latter part of the document basically says "we can't actually prove that illegal file sharing damages anything at all, but we going along with these made up figures anyway".
Also, I couldn't see anywhere what actually constitutes "evidence". How can the ISP react to evidence from a third party which could be inaccurate, incorrect or just plain made up? If I file share some GPL software under the title "Lily Allen - Fuck You.mp3" and a music label finds it and reports me to the ISP, can they use that as evidence despite it being legal?
I would love to respond to the consultation - but was unable to actually understand many of the questions.