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New government website sees calls for repeal of Digital Economy Act
Monday 05 July 2010 12:09:38 by John Hunt

On Thursday last week the Government launched a new website called "Your Freedom" designed to allow the UK people to put forward ideas about which laws and regulations they feel should be removed. Nick Clegg launched the site with a YouTube video inviting everyone to have their say. After a rocky start due to too many hits on the site, things seem to be running smoothly now.

One of the highest voted for ideas posted to the site is to Repeal the Digital Economy Bill which has had (at time of writing) 1418 votes and nearly three hundred comments. >Of course, the Liberal Democrats said they would repeal the Digital Economy Act (DEA) if they made it in to power but this is probably been laid at the wayside under the coalition government. We encourage all our readers to express their view of the ill thought out act that was rushed through the last parliament without time for proper debate; the government is listening!

[ Topic: Regulation | 11 comments | link to this item ]

Comments

Posted by otester about 1 year ago
If they can pull this off, we've set the ****s back 22 years.

Posted by _TRIaXOR_ about 1 year ago
like that other government website 'petitions.number10.gov.uk' it will be a waste of time.

Posted by mattbibby about 1 year ago
Yeah, yeah!

If they want it in... it'll be in.

Quite alot of expectation management going on here ha!

Posted by RepairExpert about 1 year ago
And now the page says...
"Adding comments has been disabled for this video." So that's a non starter isn't it. Pity.

Posted by DavidfromtheTrust about 1 year ago
It's a shame that steps such as the DEA are needed, however, with so much content from across the creative industries being shared illegally online, the problem of copyright theft has a real impact on the income of those whose hard work and time goes into creating them.

For the Film and TV industry (who I work with) the perception is often that copyright theft doesn't matter because large companies can afford to lose their profits. However, it's an industry all about reinvestment, so all lost money means less money to make future films and therefore fewer jobs for those that make them.

Posted by tommy45 about 1 year ago
Most of the measures put in place by this bill are not needed,and are not in the interest of our freedom on the internet, if your film & music industries paid everyone less money they would be able to charge a lot less for the sales of dvd's/cd's and the cost of going to see a film, cause if everyone else here is expected to take a pay cut then so do these industries too, they are greedy that's another reason piracy feels justified to some

Posted by alewis about 1 year ago
@DavidfromtheTrust... if the entertainment industry had taken the blinkers off 12+ years ago, then the situation would be drastically different today.

But no, they clung to obsolete business models and practices; overpaid 'stars', overstafffed productions, high-margin recording contracts, over-priced and massively over-controlled distribution. Even now, 10+ after the mass-emergence of the Internet, your industry "doesn't get it". You wont give us what we want, in the formats we want it, when we want it. So people obtain it anyway and you lose the revenue stream.

Posted by CARPETBURN about 1 year ago
^^^ Well said..... Digital distribution of products is the future, stores like Blockbuster in the states are good as dead due to things like Netflix and Hulu which the lucky swines have.... Flogging a "disk" is so last century, the entertainment industry still dont get it though and cry about profit daily.

Posted by Somerset about 1 year ago
Do we need to use the resources of the planet to produce paper, card and plastic and waste fuel to end up with what we really want - some wav, mp3 or mpeg files?

Posted by pigfister about 1 year ago
Maybe the industry should stop trying to get legislation into countries laws that secure their mafiaa control of things like global price fixing through region coding and stop us media shifting with DRM and reduce the price to a justifiable level while actually paying the artists and allowing the artists to own their work instead of stealing from them, & revert copywrite back to 15 years instead of the current 175 years, amongst the many anti-consumer things they engage in.

Posted by pigfister about 1 year ago
my worry regarding the Digital Economy Act is that now you are guilty intil proven innocent, you then have to pay for your own defence and not entitled to legal aid against a bunch of "independent" stooges hand picked by the media industry. the result of any complaint will be you are guilty so pay up as this is a very lucrative business model as we have already seen in the UK.

bypassing of the already in place laws to protect copywrite should never have been allowed, but what do you expect when the governments serve the corporations not the people.