ISPolicemen?

John Naughton turns his eye to the latest attempts by the music industry to stop people sending each other stuff on the interweb:

Through a staggering combination of ignorance, inertia, incompetence and paranoia, the record industry missed the significance of the internet for its business. It continued to distribute its product on plastic disks long after the net became widespread, and insisted on selling albums rather than tracks. In other words, it persisted with a comfortable business model long after it became obsolete. This couldn’t last – and it didn’t. Eventually Shawn Fanning came up with the idea of sharing tracks over the internet and Napster was born. The industry refused to offer a legal alternative, and in doing so embossed its own death certificate. The last convulsive jerk of the corpse is the BPI’s attempt to intimidate ISPs and to lobby the government for legislation which would compel ISPs to become data policemen.

Whither e-democracy?

There are some fascinating debates going on at the moment on the Connecting Bristol blog – ones which have a national interest rather than anything specifically Bristolian. It’s all down to the involvement of Professor Stephen Coleman who doesn’t have a blog of his own, as far as I am aware, but on this evidence should.

in What is ICELE For? he writes:

I have been following e-democracy in the UK since its earliest manifestations in the work of UKCOD (UK Citizens e-Democracy), established in 1996. I was commissioned to be one of three evaluators for the Government’s national project for local e-democracy, out of which came the International Centre for Local e-Democracy (ICELE) This new body was well-funded, but seems to have produced conspicuously little. There might be others out there who can tell me that I’ve missed some wonderful outputs. If so, please do.

There are 21 responses already.

In The UK e-democracy debate – getting stale? he picks up on a response from another commenter:

Andy Williamson has suggested that ‘the UK eDemocracy debate is a bit stale, and particularly so around local government.’ It would be interesting to pursue this, not with a view to reflecting upon its staleness, but in the hope of moving the agenda forward.

7 comments so far.

These are interesting and important discussions, not least with regard to local government where so many of the services that people care about are delivered, but which features shockingly low levels of participation and is too often forgotten in all the excitement and glamour of Westminster.

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