Technobabble
The Times
August 21, 2002
by David Rowan
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-389530,00.html

Britain is set to follow the US in draconian new digital laws. Be afraid

Last week David Bowie declared that copyright will be dead within ten years - the result of a pervasive digital culture that will inevitably kill "all authorship whatsoever" in a torrent of file-swaps and unauthorised downloads. Such a prospect comes as no surprise to the terrified entertainment and software industries, which explains the stream of ever more desperate and ill-thought-out laws being rushed through the US Congress. But what you might not realise is that Britain, too, is about to enact its own highly restrictive new copyright law. It will be our own version of America's notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) - yet, worryingly, barely a word about it has been debated in the UK press.

Maybe the law's name just isn't sexy enough: after all, "EC Directive 2001/29/EC on the Harmonisation of Certain Aspects of Copyright" will hardly get headline-writers excited. But a few days ago the Patent Office and the DTI published a weighty consultation paper stating how the Government believes that this European directive should be incorporated into UK law. Take a look, if you have the patience, at www.patent.gov.uk/about/consultations/eccopyright/index.htm: you have two months to make your views known as the Government intends to rush a new copyright law in place by Christmas.

The law, among other things, will redefine "fair dealing" involving intellectual property - giving copyright owners new powers to limit what can be quoted in academic reviews, and potentially restricting the electronic information the public can access through libraries, and it will let copyright holders track the use of their data online. Some copyright breaches will also now become criminal rather than civil offences - such as any attempts to protect yourself from this third-party surveillance while online.

Although campaigners for digital rights are still examining the proposed law's implications, the early consensus is that it does not go as far as the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under that flawed legislation, researchers have been prevented from publicising flaws in commercial software, and organisations such as the Church of Scientology have forced search engines to remove links to web pages critical of them.

It is too late to influence the European copyright directive itself, but there is still time to encourage the UK's legislators to maximise the exemptions in its interpretation of this worrying law. For as Bowie could attest, even a bad law such as the DMCA has not prevented rising music piracy.

HERE, though, is a great US law that we really should copy. Philip Reed, a New York City politician, has just introduced a Bill to force people to switch off their mobile phones in "places of public performance". Any New Yorker whose phone rings in a cinema, art gallery or auditorium will face an instant fine - an idea that will appeal to anyone who has ever sat through the death scene of la Traviata, only to have it interrupted by a tinny Star Trek theme.

The mobile-phone industry is none too happy, but artistes such as Kevin Spacey should love it. When interrupted during a recent Broadway performance, he turned to the offending member of the audience and shouted: "Tell them you're busy!"

Don't even think about it

WE'VE had the airport scanner that can examine what's under your clothes, and the scanner that can match your face against a database of security risks. But now Nasa is claiming the ultimate weapon in the war against terrorism: a sophisticated sensor that can monitor your thought patterns.

The space agency says that it is developing a "non-invasive neuro-electric sensor" that will sit in airport gates and monitor passengers' brainwaves and heart rhythms. Computers would then use complex algorithms to determine which passengers might pose a threat - on the presumption that genuine baddies would be given away by stress-filled brain patterns. Nice idea, but after a couple of hours at Gatwick you can just see the poor machine exploding.

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