When an accident occurred during an F1 Grand Prix, Murray Walker, the motor racing commentator would sometimes tell the audience “we can’t see what’s happened from where we’re sat.” The reason Walker could not tell who came off at turn 11 of the Hungaroring is that he was in a BBC studio in England, watching the same television pictures as everyone else. Therein lies the irony of sports commentary. The purpose is to tell you what is happening. Apart from when listening on the radio, the same goal can be realized by using your own eyes. But watching television sport without commentary is like watching a modern-day movie made in black and white. Some people will never overcome that gnawing feeling that something is missing.

For the most popular sports, commentary has expanded exponentially. The commentator, once the lynchpin of television sports presentation, is now a bit part player. Time was that you used to only hear commentary, talk about events as they happen. Now every major sport is immersed in talk about what will happen before it does, and talk about why it happened after. Commentary is submerged in punditry. When once a retired footballer would buy a pub and serve stale beer to his hangers-on, he now learns to wear a tie with an enormous knot, gets media training, and reinvents himself as a television personality.

As a consequence of the shift from talking about events as they happen, to just talking, the entrance qualifications for talking about sport have changed. It used to be necessary to be good at talking, specifically at continuously something interesting and coherent in response to changing events. Now, the major qualification is to have once been a sportsperson. The idea is that having been a sportsperson, you have some special insight on the events. That may be true to a point, but most sports people are individuals with exceptional gifts of strength, stamina, speed, balance and agility. That does not mean they have two brain cells to rub together, had the foggiest idea what they were doing, why they were good at it, or the least bit of ability to explain it to others. Thanks to this trend, it is not unusual to hear halftime conversations that go something like the following…

Steve: Gary, do you think the blues will be happy coming in one-nil up?

Gary: Yes, Steve. But they’d have been happier to be two-nil up, no doubt about it.

Steve: It’s been one of those halves where the team on top is the one that takes its chances.

Gary: You’ve got to take your chances when you’re playing at this level. Albion didn’t take their chances. The blues did take their chance. The funny thing was that the lad took what was the hardest of the chances he had, after missing three or four easy ones.

Steve: Once again, it all comes down to taking your chances…

Gary: It does, Steve. And not just chances but half-chances. Sometimes you don’t even get a chance, so you’ve got to take your half-chances too.

Steve: And Albion didn’t make many chances.

Gary: No. To make chances you’ve got to take a chance or two. They’re sending in balls from deep and the defenders will gobble them up all day and night. The blues are working hard and they’re making it hard for Albion and that’s what we saw right from the kick-off, right up to when the ref blew his whistle and they came in for halftime. To be fair to Albion, the blues have played with two solid lines of four in defence and midfield, and they’ve not let Albion have a chance in this game.

Steve: Albion have shown they can make chances in their other games.

Gary: They have, and I’m sure that’s what the gaffer is telling the boys right now. The final ball’s let them down, but with the chances they’ve made in other games, you’ve got to back them to score sooner or later. But at this rate, it might not be today. Saying that, we’ve seen games like this turn in an instant and like the great Brian Clough used to say: it only takes a second to score a goal. Another goal, from either side, will definitely change the game.

Steve: What else do you think the manager’s telling Albion in their halftime talk?

Gary: I think he’s probably saying that there’s no need to panic. They’ve got forty-five minutes to come back. They need to be patient and find a way to inject some more urgency in their passing and overall play. They’ve not been the top team so far, but even the bottom team can be the top team on any given day in this league. We’ve seen it many times before, but I’d be surprised if we see it today. The main thing is they need to score first to get back into the game.

Steve: If they go two down, it’ll be a mountain to climb back.

Gary: That’s right Steve. They’ve done well for a newly-promoted team, but they really need to score first to stand a chance in the second half. If they go two down then you’ve got to think they’re out of it. But with the goalscorers they’ve got, they can never be ruled out completely.

Steve: Is it too soon to make a change?

Gary: I don’t think they need to make a change. The young lad on the wing is causing them problems when he runs at his opposite number. He just needs better delivery into the box. The strikers aren’t getting fed and if you don’t feed them they become invisible. There was a ten minute spell when the guys upfront looked bright and seemed to be getting on the front foot but the rest of the time they’ve not got their foot on the ball and that’s why they can’t get a foothold in this game.

Steve: That’s the game of football for you. Now what about the referee - is he having a good game?

Gary: There’s been some tackles flying in which makes it hard but he’s keeping the game flowing which the fans like to see.

Steve: And the penalty shout?

Gary: Definitely not a penalty. He won the ball cleanly and the lad went over too easy for my liking. If you’re going to criticize the ref you have to question why he didn’t give a yellow card for simulation. This ref never tends to hand out many cards unlike other refs, which I like to see, but makes the players very confused. The players are crying out for more consistency. That’s all that anyone can ask from the men in black. If a player falls that dramatically in the box, and it’s not a penalty, you’ve got to card him. We’ve seen them given in other games and it’s the lack of consistency that makes it hard for players to tell what are the rules on pretending to be fouled in the box. They just want to know what the rules are and if they’re allowed to pretend to be fouled in order to win a penalty decision. The refs really need to sit down together and decide what the rule’s supposed to be so players know where they stand when falling over in the penalty area.

Steve: Do you think they might throw on Hobson, who’s not played for six weeks but is fit enough to sit on the bench?

Gary: Hobson gives them something different. The question is his sharpness. Without playing he won’t be sharp but you don’t get sharp unless you’re playing. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t come on until the last ten minutes, especially if they’re still down.

Steve: And what do you think of the blues’ new signing, the lad Kinzamann from Kaiserslautern?

Gary: He came here with a big reputation but I’m disappointed, to be honest. It looks like he’s struggling to keep up with the pace of an English derby game. This isn’t a derby game but it’s as good as a derby game.

Steve: I think the teams are about thirty-five miles apart. It’s not technically a derby game, but I know what you mean. It’s just like a derby game with everyone running around at a hundred miles an hour. And Albion would only have spent a half hour on the team coach, coming down the motorway this morning.

Gary: There’s a lot of huff and puff. There’s a lot of commitment on show. Typical English game with everyone diving in, hard tackles and no time on the ball. It’s what makes our football so entertaining to watch. Some of these new foreign players struggle to adjust to the pace when they first arrive. But the lad Kinzamann had that moment early on when he showed he’s got some silky skills, so I’m hoping he’ll be better in the second half.

Steve: Would either team be satisfied with a draw?

Gary: I don’t think so. This game’s a six-pointer. If it’s a draw, then the teams only get two points between them and that means they’ve both lost a potential four points. Even at this stage of the season, you can’t afford to drop four points in a single game.

Steve: Every game counts.

Gary: It does. There’s thirty-eight games in a season, not ten games or six games or twelve games but thirty-eight games in a season. And that’s not counting cup competitions. I think they’ll both be glad that they’re not in Europe which would mean even more games.

Steve: This league’s a marathon.

Gary: Exactly. These days, football is literally a marathon. That’s what makes the result in every single game so much more important. That’s why they’re playing this league game like it’s a cup game. In the league what matters is how many games you win and how many you draw. You can’t afford too many loses so you’ve got to aim to win every game, especially these games because you can’t expect to win against the top four. But with the blues at home, they know they’ve got to beat a side like Albion to stay up, and so far they are beating them which is all the fans can ask for.

Steve: The game might be unlocked by that little bit of skill or a mistake in the last ten minutes.

Gary: If the game is still one-nil going into the final ten minutes, then what happens in those ten minutes could definitely change the result in a big way. And then there’s stoppage time too.

Steve: So they’ll both be trying to win.

Gary: I’d bet my shirt on it.

Steve: And it looks like an expensive shirt too.

Gary: [Laughs] Thanks Steve.

It is tempting to denigrate the low end of punditry, but the high end of pre and post match analysis is now supported by an extraordinary array of technology. Pundits like Andy Gray of Sky’s Football coverage, and John Madden when talking about American Football, are now supported by gizmos that make even Bill Gates drool with envy. They have chalkboards, replays, hawkeyes, highlighters, snickometers, speed measurers and even computer simulations to help explain such basic things as how one team managed to score despite the best efforts of the other team to stop them. The investment in technology is so impressive, you have to assume there has been a knock-on stimulus to other sectors, in the same way that the space race resulted in teflon pans and pens that write upside down. Right now you imagine there is an American general somewhere in Afghanistan, marking on a touch sensitive screen the plans for how his team of troopers will make a touchdown run into Al Qaeda’s endzone.

Whilst some pundits have masterful analytical skills of a kind that were sorely lacking at Lehmann Brothers, the average pundit has descended to the level of former sports stars who can be trusted to dress smartly, speak coherently and avoid getting drunk until the show has finished. But then, they did let Gazza have a go at it, so even those expectations are not universal. More and more televised football games has created such a vacuum for former footballers that even Stan Collymore gets to share his insights with the rest of us. If even can talk sense about football, perhaps he should have told himself to score more goals during those long years of underachievement out on the pitch.

Journalists have been frozen out and their skills are no longer needed in front of camera, thanks to the seemingly endless rise of the professional sportsperson and amateur personality. The idea that being good at a sport is correlated to being knowledgeable or understanding a sport is laughable, as demonstrated by the modest playing careers of coaches Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho. That makes no difference to the television producers, who want stars with name recognition. Knowing what you are talking about is a secondary consideration. The problem for the stars is that they must eventually wane, and make room for the more recently retired. Only an organization like the BBC has the charity to keep Garth Crooks in work, and former footballer and pundit Gavin Peacock saw the writing on the wall and decided to pursue a higher calling, studying divinity and training for his new vocation with the church. As they get older, the bigger stars realize that anecdotes about their old sport and old chums tend to age as well as George Best’s liver. Lineker had the sense to diversify the range of sports shows he hosted, and Ian Wright diversified into mainstream light entertainment. Amidst all the hard-headed business nous, there is less of the engaging whimsy and eccentricity that makes Peter Alliss the Wogan of golf or made Murray Walker the Norman Wisdom of motorsports.

Occasionally, though, sheer numbers will deliver an unusual new flavour amidst the rotten apples that dominate punditry. When Mark Lawrenson reformed his double act with Alan Hansen, migrated from the centreback pairing of Anfield to the sofa pairing of Match of the Day, he seemed like Hansen-lite in every respect. Most of the time he made crappy self-indulgent chit chat about historical episodes in his life and those of the fellow players around him. Entertaining this may be, but relevant to presenting sporting highlights, it is not. Lawro’s witticisms were reminiscent of Richard Whiteley on a bad day. But as the anecdotes have run out, a new Lawrenson has emerged so seamlessly that it is impossible to identify where the transition began.

I first noticed the new Lawrenson when he was moved from the comfort of the studio settee to being the live commentary sidekick of John Motson. Normally sidekicks are there to pick up the slack with some knowing insights when the principal commenter needs a respite or someone to bounce off, or when the action lulls. They barely need to watch the game, and only need to come out with all those staple clichés that can only be excused because the former player has been there and done that. Lawrenson’s approach was radically different. He watched the game and talked about it. And he really did watch it. Whilst the normal viewer is befuddled why Motson is clueless about the events on the pitch (’the ref’s blown the whistle, I’m not sure what for…’) Lawrenson would know perfectly what was going on (’the ball flicked up off the midfielder’s heel and it struck the right back on the hand’). On top that, after all the lazy self-indulgent matey chat in the studio, putting Lawrenson next to Motson, and making Lawro talk about real events in a crisp manner as they unfold, has revealed a command of language at least the equal of the Scouse defender’s command of the offside trap. Lawro not only knows what the word ‘perfunctory’ means, something that cannot be said of many professional and university-educated people, but he is unafraid to use it. On returning to the sofa, Lawrenson has now cut the smalltalk, let the vocabulary off the leash, and found the way to weld information to entertainment. At one time, Lawrenson made even Ian Wright seem profound. Lawrenson is now the Hemmingway of pundits, except with added quips. Which goes to show that sports punditry, like so many other things, can sometimes be a game of two halves.

Podcast: Play in new window | To download, right-click here and chose save/download link (9.4MB)

Enjoy this blog as a podcast here or at iTunes.

George Orwell wrote about Salvador Dali:

“One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.”

In recent weeks, I have been struck by an analogy. Professional musicians are turning into new miners. I do not mean that they squeeze into dark holes and come out all sweaty and dirty, though I am sure plenty of them do. I mean that they are embarking on a great struggle, but one I think they have no hope of winning.

Twenty-five years ago, the coalminers of Britain’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) went on strike. They fought bitterly and they were desperate, but ultimately the strike ended in shattering defeat. They were not without popular support. Pictures of Police brutally clashing with pickets gained them favour, though this was balanced by stories of the harassment meted out to the strikebreakers who went back to work. In the public consciousness, the miners were defeated by an implacable opponent: Prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In the Ridley Plan, her colleagues had already outlined some of the essential steps to be successful when faced by a national strike by the coalminers. These included building up stocks of coal in advance and contingency planning for the import of coal at short notice. There was no doubt that the easiest way to envision the strike was as a battle of wills between Thatcher and the NUM’s leader, Arthur Scargill. The reality, though, is a little subtler.

Thatcher made vital decisions that allowed her to successfully confront the miners, instead of caving in to their demands for fear of power cuts, but she also had more powerful forces on her side: the tide of economic necessity. Put simply, British coal was more expensive than other fuels available for power generation. Cutting the cost of national subsidies would make it easier for Thatcher to cut taxes. Cutting the cost of electricity bills would reduce the cost of living and hence also buy her support. In a democracy, a major national strike needs to be seen in terms of overall imperatives. A politician that delivers power cuts is unlikely to maintain popular support, but a politician that delivers reduced taxes and reduced household bills is likely to gain support. It is a simple equation, but no less valid for its simplicity. Thatcher made a political calculation, and it paid off for her. In contrast, Scargill made the wrong calculation, and the cost of that error was the subsequently more vicious dismemberment of the British coal industry.

Recording artists are embarking on a similar crusade to that of the miners. Like miners, they have long depended on the state’s institutions. They do not work for a nationalized industry like the coalminers did, but they do rely upon an economic model that needs to be upheld by laws that are especially favourable to them. For most of the population, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that flattery is the only recompense available when the product of your mind is copied by someone else. Most ideas cannot be patented, or copyrighted, or trademarked, or protected in any other way. Though it is called intellectual property, the ‘intellectual’ element of such property is very narrowly defined, so that there can be a useful test and way to enforce laws that control who can exploit it for economic gain. If I copy an exact string of words I infringe copyright, but not if I relay the gist of a story. I break the law if I repeat a song note for note without giving the compensation due to the rights owner, but I do not break the law if I am inspired to write a similar song. This imbalance between the laws that govern exact copies and the absence of laws to govern similarity tends to favour people who already have wealth and power and can therefore have privileged access to distribution networks. The wealth and power of successful recording artists depends on a pillar maintained by the state, the institutions of law and order that govern what we may or may not do. Without copyright law, and the levers of the state necessary to enforce it, there would be no copyright infringement and no way to make money from owning copyright. But like the coalminers, there is an economic threat that musicians now face, and just like the miners, they are unwilling to do so. They have also slipped into the same trap as the miners, insisting that their fight is a moral one, when the truth is that the battleground is the economy.

The law only works if the great majority of people are willing to abide by it. The wonder of democracy is that we can replace governments without bloodletting, but even the worst tyrant can be overthrown. Authority for every law, every institution of the state, depends on the acceptance of the people. The horror of Orwell’s 1984 is that the state might penetrate not just into your home, but into your mind, in order to control you. We expect some things to be inviolable, including our own minds. That there are limits to law is a maxim. Where to draw those limits is a question of practicality as well as morality and economics. Like any other practicality, the answer to the question can change because of new circumstances. We find that through history, it is often morality that changes to suit practicality, and not the other way around. Nuclear stockpiles to kill every human are morally repugnant, but we can expect more and more nations to join the nuclear club for purely practical reasons, and the moral justification is always the same: “if them, why not us?” Cloning, slavery, education and child labour, pensions and the treatment of the elderly, democracy, feudalism, the role of women in the workplace - all have been the subject of moral debates and all of those debates are seen through the prism of what is practical at any given point in time. As practicalities change, so morality changes with it. Slavery for farming would be repugnant now, but is not so obviously repugnant in a time where there are no machines to bear the brunt of farming work. Expecting genteel ladies to work was also repugnant at one time, until the First World War made it essential to utilize every human resource at the nation’s disposal. The same is true of copyright, yet like the coalminers, the musicians are living in denial about the consequences for the economic model that rewards them for their work.

Just like nuclear proliferation, which we can abhor and try to delay but recognize as inevitable just because of the spread of technology, copyright abuse will inevitably increase. When copying involved taking a book and writing it out again in longhand, then there was no need for copyright law. Now that copying has been completely divorced from physicality, and that we live in a world with a globally connected network to share digital content, and there are people in the world with the nous to write software and implement solutions to solve problems they want to solve, copyright abuse is inevitable. Its abuse is inevitable thanks to the glorious hypocrisy in the heart of every human being: the belief that laws are there to protect them from other people, not there to stop them doing things they want to do. Everybody thinks like that, and no end of ‘education’ will stop people ’stealing’ music so long as they feel the cost of music on the free market is too high, and the damage done to the creative artist is little or none. Any very many people do feel like that. So whilst the economic imperatives are different to those that savaged the British coal industry - we are talking about ease of access for a limitless and free ‘black market’ in music, not the relative cost of extraction and the kilojoule content of coal versus gas - the economic imperatives exist and cannot be ignored.

The musicians, like the miners before them, are living in denial about economic change. One can sympathize. Nobody wants to believe that their chosen path has been invalidated by forces outside of their control. If you make a career decision in your teens, it will be painful to recognize that it was based on outdated economic assumptions by the time you reach your late twenties. A retreat to an argument for morality is as misguided as the miners believing they could successfully demand subsidies from the rest of society. In a way, they can, because they can try to make it so difficult to change that people put up with long-run inequity rather than a shorter period of more severe turbulence and trouble. The price of doing so is inequity; musicians are demanding to be raised up and protected by society that does not offer similar protections to everyone else. Plenty of ideas receive no legal protection. Copyright does. This inequity most of us would agree is tolerable. But that this inequity needs to be backed by surveillance is a demand too far. A law that cannot be enforced without spying on people in their homes is a law that belongs in Orwell’s Airstrip One, not a law that belongs in our Britain. And we know that copyright can no longer be effectively enforced without surveillance. That makes it a law that should not be enforced, because the morality of protecting the right of musicians to enjoy the economic benefits of their labour is outweighed by the morality of protecting all citizens from surveillance by authoritarian forces. If anything, the musician has become far more morally reprehensible than the miner ever was. The miner just expected to get paid more than the true value of the coal they produced, and if they do not get it, they would cut everybody’s electricity until the government backed down. Unfortunately for the miner, there were no power cuts and the strike went on far longer than the average miner could afford to live without pay. In contrast the musician expects not just the state, but unrelated businesses to pay the price for the surveillance they demand. And they do expect surveillance of everybody in the UK. Electronically monitoring who does what on a network is surveillance of everyone who uses it, no matter how much ignorance and subterfuge is offered by musicians in order to make it sound more reasonable.

One of the reasons to dislike Arthur Scargill, the leader of the NUM who lead their ill-fated strike, was his authoritarian tendencies. There is little doubt he was loved by many of his union’s members. He was seen as a man who worked hard for the cause of miners, was honest and faithful. But when he called for a national strike by coalminers, the NUM lacked the facility, or interest, to ballot its own members on whether they wanted to strike. Now I see Lily Allen in much the same light as Scargill. She has the same ability to inspire love and devotion in some, but suffers the same deficits when it comes to an excess of pride and a lack of humility. Allen is a would-be leader for the musicians, and for much of the rest of us. In recent weeks, she has been the most outspoken of the increasingly politicized fight to protect the economic interests of recording artists. What Allen lacks is an interest in listening to points of view that are different to her own. I have never met the woman, but I draw inferences from her behaviour. She started a blog to persuade people to her point of view, but tore it down after she received ‘abuse’, by which she means she did not like being pointed out as a hypocrite. Allen then went on a media rampage, threatening to quit music and appearing in The Sun to immodestly explain how she ‘understands the internet’, with the implication presumably being that anyone who disagrees with her must not really understand the internet, although there are many learned individuals from all walks - lawyers, academics and even musicians - who sincerely believe copyright is in desperate need of reform. This media blitz was cleverly and pointedly designed to distract attention from the revelation, made prominent on Michael Masnick’s Techdirt blog only hours earlier, that Allen had infringed the copyright of other musicians herself. When she was unknown and trying to get attention, she made ‘mixtapes’, digital music files that spliced her music with that of other artists, in the hope that they would be downloaded and help her to gain popularity. Embarrassingly for Allen, the mixtapes were still available for download on LilyAllenMusic.com, even whilst Ms. Allen was denouncing the evil of ’stealing’ from recording artists by abusing their copyright. When the hypocrisy was about to get mainstream press attention, the mixtapes were finally pulled from her website and she went into overdrive - talking about anything and everything except her own infringement of copyright laws that she now rather pompously considers to be sacrosanct.

If you want the proof of Lily Allen’s copyright infringement, I downloaded the files from LilyAllenMusic.com to ensure the evidence was never lost to the public domain. If you want, you can listen to Lily Allen’s mixtape1 and mixtape2. I know that by offering these files I am guilty of copyright infringement myself. The funny thing about morality is that sometimes the morally right thing is to break a law in order to highlight a greater moral wrong. I am not deaf to the pleas from celebrities to protect the interests of hard-up old session musicians, but I am cynical about them. And I am not persuaded that heralding an era of unprecedented spying on the private individual is a price worth paying to ensure the poorest musicians earn a little more money. A better solution to the poverty of some who work in the music industry would involve the richest musicians earning a whole lot less, but the music industry has been incapable of finding solutions like that. That makes them as selfish as much of the rest of humanity, including the people who want to download music for free.

To borrow from Orwell, one ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Lily Allen is an attractive artist with a talent for catchy songs, and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a musician is that he or she makes music. If it makes us want to whistle or dance, it is good music, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. Yet even the best celebrity in the world deserves to be pulled down if they use their celebrity to turn the internet into a prison camp. Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

And Lily Allen is wrong about music dying. Music lived before copyright. It will live after copyright. People make music with no profit motive, even in these crazy materialistic times. Take a listen to this sensational song by Dan Bull, which rather amusingly analyses Lily Allen and her arguments…

When the US was a young nation, it was greedy to learn and to grow. A good example is Benjamin Franklin a famous polymath who experimented with electricity amongst other things. Benjamin Franklin was an innovator, but he also engaged in piracy. Franklin, like others, republished the works of 18th century British authors without giving them any reward in exchange for copying their words. As early as 1808, the poet William Wordsworth complained about exploitation and argued for copyright to be extended. The most popular novelist of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens, lobbied Congress during his North American speaking tours, protesting that the copyright of British authors should be recognized in the US. His pleas fell on deaf ears. America needed the wealth of new ideas and lacked libraries. For Americans to benefit from education and entertainment, so the argument went, necessitated cutting costs, and that meant not rewarding the British authors who should be satisfied with the rewards received elsewhere. And was not the success of Dickens’ tours a real demonstration that piracy helped authors, rather than hindering them? The argument went on to assert that Dickens benefited most from the enhancement of his reputation gained by the wide circulation of his work. Whether Dickens thought so or not, the Americans had decided this was worth more than profiting from the sale of fewer books bearing his name. Does that sound familiar? It should, because we hear the same debate today. The difference is that the tables have turned and now the US, like the other countries that have hoarded intellectual wealth, is concerned that its valuable copyrights are exploited by the greedy, growing, countries of the developing world.

Whilst the struggle for copyright is sometimes seen as a battle between nations, it is also a battle of will within national borders. The emergence of a political movement in European countries, the Pirate Party movement, tells us something about the strength of feeling across an increasingly polarized debate. Businesses pursue stringent fines for P2P filesharers. Governments enforce stricter laws to protect copyright. Citizens respond by forming new political parties and canvassing for votes. There is a Pirate Party in the US too, though the nature of American democracy makes it very unlikely they will break through and raise the profile of copyright reform. The frontline of the US copyright debate is the courtroom, not the ballot box. In contrast, the very existence of electoral alternatives has enabled European parties to secure valuable attention in mainstream media. In only the first month since being launched, the Pirate Party UK has secured room for the debate about copyright reform in every quality British newspaper, on television and radio, and of course all over the internet. All of this is encouraging for a party that wants people to freely exchange their thoughts, and is a signal that even in rich countries, many see the appeal of less stringent copyright.

The counterargument to copyright reform is that there will be losers. The losers are supposed to be those who create, or the losers will be all of us. The conclusion is that either the creators receive lesser rewards for their work, and so they will be poorer, or the creators will simply create less and will do other jobs instead, leaving us all poorer. But Dickens did not stop writing because of American exploitation of his words. If anything, he was inspired by it - inspired to respond via Martin Chuzzlewit. The same internet that enables instantaneous and mass duplication of copyright works has transformed many other markets. The internet enables middlemen to be stripped out of supply and distribution, and the benefits are passed on to the consumer through lower costs. Take this to its logical limit and you do end up with an extreme - the same extreme as Benjamin Franklin not sharing the profits from the works he pirated. But far from ending creation, piracy simply changes the market dynamics. One source of revenue is closed, not all sources. Dickens made money by speaking. Musicians can make money from live performances or merchandise. The copyrighted content stops being a marketable product and instead becomes the fulcrum for a kind of marketing. This marketing is all the more powerful because it is spread from individual to individual, and cannot be manipulated by business interests. In other words, people promote the content they like, not the content they are told to like, and all studies show that we trust the recommendations of friends and ordinary folks far more than we trust celebrity endorsements and slick corporate promotion. The evidence is that this peer-to-peer advertising is effective in creating new revenues. This is a threat to the jobs of some middlemen, who are paid to influence the market, but is a boon to consumers and puts market power and intelligence back into the hands of the people who should be dictating what is popular and what is not. The significance of the advertising effect of free content is demonstrated by the observed correlation that the most prolific downloaders of pirated content also spend the most to legitimately buy content.

With a marketplace in rapid transition, it can be hard to identify all the factors that cause it to happen. The digital marketplace for copyrighted content does more than increase the potential to freely copy works that were originally created with profit in mind. It also reduces barriers to entry. It reduces them so far, that, at the extreme, the marketplace collapses. People just give and take freely. This has been observed already with open source software. We see it with the rise in so-called ‘user-generated content’ on sites like YouTube. ‘User-generated’ is a euphemism for ‘not to be taken seriously because it does not have a big budget’. Thanks to the democratizing effect of other technological improvements, married to the free distribution mechanism of the internet, then all it takes to create a popular song is to possess a guitar and a microphone, without the need for a marketing budget. Beneath the veil of piracy, the real factor that drives down prices is the proliferation of competition, from small business, from micro business, from hobbyists and people who create for the pleasure of friends.

Resetting the marketplace so that many can produce for many will diminish some business models. It also creates new ones. If you cannot profit by controlling a much-sought copy of one work, perhaps you can profit by using the work to attract people to other goods and services, or by embedding the work within another product. The music industry has recognized this, and now seeks to make more from new activities like selling t-shirts with lyrics written on them. This is innovation in the true sense - instead of just creating variations on an established theme, the goal is to develop genuinely new kinds of products.

Supply and demand suggests that the money saved on certain kinds of products just gets spent on others. This is the basis of the real value proposition for any economy. Either it remains stagnant, and tries to protect existing business models, or it is open to change and incubates new business models. Copyright was created for an old business model, and not a very good one at that. Technology has moved on from the time when printing presses were expensive and distribution of content was physical. Many of us may love Mickey Mouse, but perpetually extending Disney’s copyright stifles creation instead of encouraging it. Nobody wants to see some poor session musician struggling to fight poverty in his old age, but that is no reason to rewrite the contract he agreed when he first did some work. We would not go back to a plumber, fifty years after he does a job, and agree to pay him more than was originally stipulated for the original job, just because we feel sorry for him. Let charity be charity and business be business, without confusing the two. If we do confuse the two, we are likely to forget that expenditure on entertainment is discretionary, meaning that if more goes to Disney’s millionaire execs, or to some poor old session musician, less will go to anyone new who wants to break into the market.

Governments that try to preserve existing business models by defending copyright are missing the point. Creative people now have few barriers of entry to a huge potential market. Artists will simply short-circuit big businesses, by selling direct to the consumer in the same way that insurance brokers were frozen out by the rise in direct sales of insurance policies. Some will give work away just to get the foothold of recognition. Unhappy that your publisher does not promote your work? Then give it away and bet that the audience will see talent where the publisher does not. Giving his work away made Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho successful. At the same time, discretionary spend on entertainment and education will still be spent on education and entertainment. That means new markets open up as others close. If people can get recorded music for free, then they have more money to spend on live performances. Or if they want something to enjoy at home, consumers will shift their spending from music to other content like video games, and this research suggests that is just what people have been doing. Seen in that context, it makes perfect sense for music businesses to change tack; if they cannot sell direct to the consumer, sell to the people who make games instead. This is innovation, and it is good for customers, even if painful for those businesses that lack the imagination or agility to keep pace with change.

Nations that have been great innovators face a risk. They have built up intangible wealth that will tempt some to simply sit back and exploit, instead of creating anew. To do so would be the worst mistake possible for the economy of not only rich nations, but of the world. Innovation, experimentation, change - these are the ways to keep on creating world-beating formulas. Monopolies of ideas are profitable only for those that control them. That means monopolies should not be allowed to live on longer than fairly required to recoup the initial investment that was needed to turn the idea into a reality. Money spent on enforcing and maintaining those monopolies for longer than needed is money not spent on developing alternative products. New capabilities inevitably give rise to new markets and these are the real and pervasive threat to old monopolies. The iPod allowed people to listen to as much music as they like, wherever they like, but it also gave birth to podcasting and a new world of creative opportunity. Listening to a free podcast means less time to listen to an album of music that you pay for. Sales of volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica collapsed in the face of rivals sold on CD-ROMs, and Wikipedia begs the question of why anyone should pay for reference texts. News services are happy to reuse the amateur’s view of major events, in the form of bystander photographs and videos, tweets and commentary from blogs. Such amateur content squeezes the market for professionals, but that does not mean amateur content should be prohibited or limited, or that the reader or viewer would be better informed by content that only came from professional sources.

Rich countries, like the US, got ahead by creating new ideas, not by just by exploiting them. And every nation has been greedy enough to exploit the ideas of others - when it suited them. Now, more than ever, piracy and the dissolution of barriers to entry mean new ideas have to be imagined and delivered at ever greater speed. You can try to slow the progress of competitors, but if that is all you do, they will still overtake you soon enough. Nations rich in intellectual capital should avoid the temptation to pour more and more resources into protecting its current intellectual assets. Intellectual assets only retain value if rivals lack the imagination to make something better. In a world where ideas are spread ever more easily, the dominance of a good idea will be shorter and shorter. The cleverest nations should stick to what they do best - investing in creating the future. If that means encouraging the next generation of Benjamin Franklins, that can only be a good thing.

Technology is an amazing thing. It makes you think. I do not mean it makes you think about how things work, though it does that too. It makes you think about things you take for granted. It challenges your assumptions about what is in the world, how the world works, and what makes for a good life. Take abortion and care for babies born prematurely. Better technology to sustain young life begs the question of when life begins. Take cloning and human rights. Manufacturing life will challenge our perceptions as to the rights of the individual. Take fertility treatment and increasingly older mothers, or the potential for families where one or other biological parent was never intended to be part of the family unit. This erodes our assumptions about what the family is for. The example I want to talk about today, but is not being looked at clearly, even though it is perhaps the most common example of how technology has outstripped our intellectual and ethical worldviews. Millions of people, all over the world, share digital files that contain copyrighted content. Yet there is no grown-up debate about the fundamental questions about the extent to which this is a good thing, or a bad thing. I will avoid promising to give a definitive answer, but I will outline what the problem is.

Here is the nub of the philosophical problem that underpins filesharing. If I lend a book to a friend, I may be depriving the copyright holder of the potential to make money from selling that book. If I invite a friend to my house, so he can watch a football match on satellite TV, a match he could not watch at home, I may be depriving the owner of the content some potential to make money from selling the broadcast. Every day, for hundreds of years, people have done things that may, potentially, reduce the revenues earned by the owners of content rights. However, we have long considered these actions to be moral and virtuous. When the owners of great houses allowed the local community to use their private libraries, this was considered a civilized act of charity, not an attempt to deprive publishers of income.

We know that technology has changed the potential to share, most importantly because the content is now divorced from any physical medium. The analogy of stealing is false. Thieves do not break into your house and copy your jewellery, leaving the originals behind. They take something from you. Filesharers, on the other hand, do not take. They make a copy. The truth is that now people are prepared to share far more widely, with complete strangers, because it costs them nothing to do so. However, the act of sharing would be identical if it was sharing an entire music library with a complete stranger on the other side of the planet, or sharing a single e-book with a next-door neighbour. The technological and legal aspects are the same. All that differs is the range and scale of the impact. We can understand that we live in a society that thinks it is wrong to share a music library with a complete stranger on the other side of the planet, but believes it is good that we share a book with a neighbour. The polarized debate about right versus wrong simply ignores the fundamental issue: that legislators have proven incapable and unwilling to creative a framework that reconciles and accommodates both extremes. No government anywhere has been able to coherently adjust laws to allow for the act we generally consider virtuous whilst prohibiting those thought to be harmful. The result is a terrible fudge. All sharing is a violation of civil law, including sharing an ebook with a neighbour. However, some actions are ‘decriminalized’ not because of a choice of the state, but by a reliance on the copyright holder’s goodwill and lack of interest in pursuing damages. This leads to a new and intolerable conflict within our legal and ethical outlooks.

This is as a problem for all political parties around the world, because no party has been able to form and articulate a coherent position that explains why denying a copyright holder the potential to earn revenue is considered to be virtuous in some cases, evil in others. Technology has moved the debate forward, but our understanding of how to live in a civil society has not. With an issue like this, there is a natural tendency towards petty party political squabbling and points-scoring. There is a fear of dealing with this issue head-on with the hope of resolving it. Burying the topic in overly simplistic maxims about right versus wrong is much easier than risking the unpopularity that comes with thoughtful attempts to find workable compromises. I believe the popularity of the Pirate Party movement around the world stems from the failure to address the fundamental paradox that we consider sharing to be virtuous whilst denying others an income is wrong. The problem has been there for a long time, and articulating the problem has kindled the interest of many people who were already aware of it in one guise or other. There may never be a perfect solution, but a mature political party that tries to explore workable compromises will be doing everyone a favour, and earning themselves credit in the process.

This week saw the publication of the British Government’s Digital Britain report. Whatever else it told us, it confirmed one thing: we are living in the soundbyte generation. Somebody in Number 10 probably got a pack on the back for all the snappy phrases they packed both into the report and the promotion that surrounded it. The barrage of 21st century cliches only served to show how deeply out of touch they really are. In the end, the report is a squalid mess that would neither get the attention of the disinterested nor appeal to anybody who cares, with one notable exception. The Gordon Brown vision is that next generation Britain will be a high-tech low-carbon super-fast knowledge economy, where we unlock imagination at this vital tipping point. Sexy phrases. But what a load of tosh. Look past the quotes from Clay Shirky and you find an underlying message that is the antithesis of the distributed, fast-moving, creative, and often anarchic world of the internet. Let me spell out Brown’s vision of Digital Britain in one sentence: Digital Britain is a business, run for big business, by big business, with the Government playing a vital part in keeping big business happy and making sure everybody knows their place.

With a bit of luck, the Digital Britain report will soon morph from blueprint of the future into forgotten historical curiosity. Its sponsor, Stephen Carter, is apparently planning to change jobs soon, and the report may get lost down the back of the filing cabinet when he leaves. It is about time Carter moved on. The Communications Minister has a long and impressive CV for a man of only 45. Impressive, until you realize that means he keeps changing job. Impressive, until you realize he keeps changing job because he was never any good at any of them. Before being Communication Minister, Carter was Brown’s chief of strategy. Brown is now the most unpopular British Prime Minister in living memory, less popular even than Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher just polarized opinion. Everybody is agreed on Brown: they all hate him. Even his own party hates him. Brown admitted in a recent interview that strategic planning had been one of his weaknesses. What does that say about Carter, his former strategy chief? Previously, Carter was the boss of Ofcom, taking on the tough task of cutting waste but largely seeing its importance degraded. Much of its importance had been usurped at European level, and even when it came to British standards of taste and decency, it was repeatedly floundering in the wake of events like the Celebrity Big Brother/Jade Goody ‘racism’ outrage. Before Ofcom, Carter was boss of ntl, the cable operator. When George Blumenthal, ntl’s co-founder, left the company, he sent staff an email that openly criticized “the management consultants, the toothpaste marketers and the other Carterets”. He was also unpopular with ntl shareholders, which may have had something to do with him leaving with a £1.7m payoff after steering ntl into bankruptcy. The only jobs that Carter has done well have all been in the advertising industry. That is the key to understanding the Digital Britain report, and the spin around it. It is one big, clever advert, for a rubbish old product and rubbish old ideas. The Digital Britain report is exactly the kind of marketing made by advertising companies for big business. The people writing the report come from advertising. The message they push is that big business is good. The only difference is that Brown paid for the report from taxpayers’ pockets. If the advice in the report is followed, taxpayers will find themselves paying again and again.

Pulling apart the whole report is going to take a long time, and many people have already torn it to shreds. Instead of emulating them, let us examine the synopsis from the mouthpiece himself: Gordon Brown. Brown wrote an article for the The Times, all about Digital Britain and the report. Of course, I mean that somebody from a PR background, probably a chum of Stephen Carter, wrote an article for The Times, and Brown put his name to it. This is how it went…

The digital revolution is changing all our lives beyond recognition and today we shall set out how Britain must change with it.

How Britain must change with it? This implies the government are somehow leading the way. The funny thing about the digital revolution, and the impact it has on people, is that it has happened without the government leading the way. After all, revolutions involve ordinary people overthrowing governments, not governments telling ordinary people what to do. There is no evidence that Britain’s government has the insight, skills, experience or vision to be telling the rest of us what to do to keep pace with this revolution. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Whether it is to work online, study, learn new skills, pay bills or simply stay in touch with friends and family, a fast internet connection is now seen by most of the public as an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water.

That is a sexy soundbyte. ‘As indispensable as electricity, gas and water’. Many journalists repeated or paraphrased it. Keep it in mind, because we will come back to it later.

Just as the bridges, roads and railways built in the 19th century were the foundations of the Industrial Revolution that helped Britain to become the workshop of the world, so investment now in the information and communications industries can underpin our emergence from recession to recovery and cement the UK’s position as a global economic powerhouse.

Investment is key. Nobody argues with that. But who is doing the investment, and why? Picking bridges, roads and railways is far from the most obvious analogy. The most obvious analogy would be the investment in the telegraph. The Victorians spent tremendous amounts of money in laying the infrastructure so the whole world could communicate for the very first time. Because of the telegraph, messages could be sent almost instantly across the world for the very first time. Huge ships laid enormous lengths of cable along the seabed, spanning the vast distances between the continents. The greatest investment in the international telegraph network came from Britain. So if we want an analogy that is about Britain investing in pioneering communications infrastructure, the telegraph is the obvious choice. Brown and Carter must employ at least one person with enough knowledge of British history to appreciate that. So why talk abut roads and bridges instead? Because the state builds roads and bridges using taxpayer’s money, but the state had nothing to do with the telegraph. Private money set up the enterprises that laid the telegraph wires all around the world, and they did it without needing help from taxpayers.

Today the Government will publish its Digital Britain report, which firmly places the digital economy centre stage as it is core to our future industrial capability.

The UK’s digital economy at present accounts for about 8 per cent of our national income. Its continued development is fundamental to the productivity and innovative capacity of so many other sectors and, with that, the creation and protection of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The digital economy may well be core, but that still does not explain the government’s role…

I am determined that Britain’s digital infrastructure will be world class. For me, it is all part of building Britain’s future beyond the difficult, short-term economic conditions. We must continue to invest to become a world leader in the new high-tech, low-carbon industries of the future by reigniting the British genius for invention, discovery and trade - to capitalise on our strengths.

Brown is a determined man. He is determined that we must invest. It has something to do with carbon apparently (presumably if we spend all day using computers, than global warming will be the problem of the Chinese with all their factories etc…). But what is this? The British genius needs ‘reigniting’. Did the flame go out? Maybe it was a coal fire…

Whenever I travel abroad, I see the presence of British products and services that testify to our national strength in the emerging high-end manufacturing industries, the information and communications industries and creative industries such as advertising, film and television.

I guess Brown never sees me when I am abroad. I work in one of those industries and do most of my work abroad, bringing money back into the UK. If I saw Brown, I would be telling him how mighty hacked off I am about how so many of his policies seem designed to hinder me, not help me. But, like Brown, I am straying off the point…

These are the dynamic sectors that we need to back and promote. So, like other leading economies, we must develop the next generation of communications networks - fixed, mobile and broadcast.

That was quite a leap. One minute we were abroad. The next we are building networks in the UK. Let us not even talk about how the low-carbon objective fits into this globe-hopping whilst home-stopping equation. We may have some ideas how this could fit together, but there is nothing in this article, nor the Digital Britain report, that makes any attempt to reconcile them.

The private sector is rightly leading the way and investing significant sums.

The private sector is doing what the private sector does. Good evidence that the government is irrelevant… but wait…

But there is also a role for targeted, strategic action by government. We can create the right framework, for example, for the release of wireless spectrum - a national asset - while also liberalising its uses and extending mobile broadband coverage.

Tosh, tosh, tosh. Hypocrisy. We got 50% of the way through the article, and when we finally discover something specific that the government wants or should or may do, it is a load of hypocritical nonsense, the reverse of what they did in the past. Gordon Brown, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, pocketed £22bn from the sale of 3G wireless spectrum. He did that by utilizing an auction mechanism designed to squeeze money out of big business at the height of the dotcom boom. Did he spend the money on investing in Britain’s communications infrastructure? No. He took £22bn that might have been better spent on communications infrastructure, and which had to be recouped by charging higher prices to British customers. Did he spend it on any infrastructure, like roads and bridges, or for health, or for education? No. He used the money to pay down the national debt. Yes, there was a time when Gordon Brown took money from big business and used it to reduce the national debt. Obviously, the world has changed a lot since then. However, it rather proves that asking Brown to make investment decisions for the future is like asking Brown to end the cycle of boom and boost. It may sound like a good idea, but do not bet your house on him actually doing it.

In our fibre optic and cable networks, which will provide the next generation of superfast broadband, the Government must also complement and assist the private sector to move farther and faster.

Now we are getting to the point. Government must ‘complement and assist the private sector’. That is a nice, roundabout way of saying Government will ‘force taxpayers and/or customers to subsidize big business’. I can see why the spin doctors picked their wording, and not mine. The Government’s proposal seems straightforward. Take a rubbish business like cable operator Virgin - formerly known as ntl - and make sure the market is rigged to suit their interests. Meanwhile, Virgin announces some “unlimited” music download package to raise the question of why anybody would ever download illegally. Presumably the answer is that the chain of cause-and-effect is illegal downloads force reductions in retail prices. If retail prices had been low in the first place, there would not have been the incentive to turn to illegal downloads.

ntl started out by getting a lot of money from private investors, were very badly run by management, went bust, and their investors lost almost everything they had put into the business. Private investors are not so stupid that they will do that again. So the Government has the solution. Because ntl has a new name, and hence must now be a really good and efficient business, it makes sense to ensure they have a safe place in the future market and guaranteed profits for ever more…

The government’s protection will not just go to Virgin/ntl. The government has long been negotiating the subsidy it will guarantee to BT in exchange for building superfast broadband networks. Should we fear that BT might waste that money? The relevant division is run by Steve Robertson, a man who has spent most of his career avoiding competition by working for the nationalized BT, apart from a brief time when he jumped on the dotcom boom bandwagon and jumped back again when things got rocky. BT is now privately-owned, but the broadband infrastructure division, Openreach, is still a monopoly, protected from competition. Now the government will guarantee the Openreach division will be profitable by taking money from ordinary people and giving it to Openreach to build the infrastructure that will enhance its monopoly position. And why is BT Group not able to pay for this infrastructure investment from its existing profits? Well, one major reason is that the only division where BT actually faces open competition from equals - BT Global, which sells IT services to multinationals - loses so much money that it consumes the profits of all other BT divisions. Which means every BT customer is already subsidizing their inept IT services division and hence underwriting their big contracts to their big business customers. Sounds fair? No, I do not think so either.

BT’s management can only run a profitable business when they are in a market skewed in their favour. That does not sound to me like the kind of semi-monopolistic, badly-run, inefficient business that the ordinary British citizen should give be giving huge amounts of money to. BT is not the part of the private sector that ‘leads the way’, to use Brown’s words. This is the part of the private sector that hides from public eyes, only willing to spend when its profits are guaranteed by promises from government, only willing to innovate when it has a sure-fire hit. Worst of all, we have been down this road before. The government had a wonderful boast it would computerize patient records for the NHS. Years later, and that project is well behind schedule and well over budget. The main supplier for the NHS contract, BT (see a connection?) has been suffering huge losses on the deal. Do we really expect the same combination of big business and big government will do a better job with building our next generation of broadband networks?

Modernisation of our communications infrastructure is vital to take advantage of important shifts in technology. The public sector, businesses large and small - and those who work in them - need access to both fixed and mobile high-standard, high-speed networks.

But I am clear that this transformation must benefit us all, business and consumers alike, in every part of the country. Digital Britain cannot be a two-tier Britain - with those who can take full advantage of being online and those who can’t.

This is classic BrownSpeak. It is also another kind of BS. The bulk of the market distortion in the Digital Britain report is not geared to ensuring some access for all. Most of it is geared to ensuring faster networks for some. Not surprisingly, big business wants to spend money where it can make money. Strangely, the government wants to give them more money to help them make money, as if the free market did not give enough incentive already. That is like subsidizing an airline that only wants to fly on the most popular routes. The superfast network that would be built by BT is geared around better speeds for urban dwellers. If we really want to avoid a two-tier strategy, Brown should stop kissing the backside of big business and put the taxpayer’s money into doing the big things that big business does not want to do. The losers in two-tier Britain are the rural poor, who are left behind. Their post offices get closed down, yet we expect them to be happy whilst disconnected from the huge advantages of the modern internet. Meanwhile, our cities are overloaded and riven by anti-social behaviour. The Government’s solutions are routinely and depressingly oppressive. They deal with symptoms, not causes. Never mind Tony Blair’s mantra: ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. Now the message is just: ‘tough’. The government wants more spying on people, more congestion charges, more handing out of ASBOs. Digital Britain was an opportunity to think, in a far-reaching way, about how technology could change Britain for the better. It was an opportunity missed by people lack the imagination.

The Digital Britain report is small in outlook, because it shares the same outlook as big business, which also likes to control people and keep them under scrutiny. Big business likes to keep a close eye on people because it cannot find a better way of managing and working with them. Britain’s big government and big business both suffer from woeful management, who prop each other up and help each other stay in their cosy positions of power. A digital revolution could offer a radical alternative, using technology to really change our way of live for the better, and solving multiple ills at the same time. Our government’s idea of regionalization is to move jobs out of urban offices in London into urban offices in cities in the North, or Scotland, or Wales. We need to be move jobs to the countryside. We need to encourage youth to stay in rural areas, and encourage working people to move into rural areas, by giving them a wider range of opportunities. With technology, we can move jobs out of cities and give people freedom to do the work they love in the place they love. Digital Britain could be the enabler for that. Instead of asking how we stop the countryside from falling too far behind, we should turn the problem upside down, by using public money where private money will not go, and letting private money pay for the rest. Let us prioritize fiber-to-the-cabinet for rural dwellers, and encourage the building of lots of small and super-connected villages as an additional way to deal with the shortages in housing. Let us use tax incentives to encourage homeworking, in recognition that homeworking helps us reduce the costs of congestion and carbon emissions. The creative and knowledge industries are ideal for homeworking. Instead of kowtowing to big business, which always prefers to assemble its workers in urban offices (BT recently forced some homeworkers back to the office) let us give business the incentive to change and improve management, so the same work is done even though people work from home.

So the first step must be to make the existing broadband network truly available to all. Just as we remain committed to a universal postal service, we pledge today to give every home, community and company access to broadband internet.

If you are like me, you must be bemused by Brown associating his dismal failure to protect post offices with his plans for a universal internet. That rather suggests it will be a universal internet, but only if you live in the right places.

These technological advances will be accompanied by a revolution in content, which they allow. We must develop and sustain public service content, such as commercial regional news, which we all value and rely on, ensuring that it can be delivered across multiple digital outlets by a range of providers accessible to all.

These are difficult times for local newspapers, TV and radio and, as Ofcom has said, a regionalised TV news network is no longer financially viable. However, competition in news - as in business - is vital to provide consumers with the highest quality and we cannot allow a monopoly to take root. Remaining in touch with local issues and holding councils and regional bodies to account is the lifeblood of our democracy.

Brown is once again confused about the boundaries between this country and the rest of the world. He has made that mistake before. He used to say he fixed boom and bust for the UK, only to discover that Britain’s economy is not independent of the global economy. The same is true for content. The revolution in content is taking place, and it is global in nature. Brown’s vision of public service content is outdated, because it assumes a connection between content and scale, between content and geography. We already live in a world where listeners of Invicta Radio in Dover could just as easily get the headline news from Al Jazeera in Doha.

Broadcasting on a local level is in terminal decline, for the same reason that Brown is closing post offices - not enough people need or use the service to keep it viable. The solution is not to use public money and public intervention in the market to create jobs that serve diminishing audiences. As mini-broadcasting shrinks, it will make room for two trends that will fill the gap: micro-broadcasting and macro-knowledge sharing. Micro-broadcasting means that, instead of getting the news from somebody sat in an office in the biggest nearby town, who have themselves got most of their content from a bureau, more of us will come to rely on a patchwork of smaller, informal, charitable, volunteer and semi-professional broadcasters. You will get your news from a mix of podcasters, bloggers and professional sources. Some will be friends who act as informal information hubs on social networks. Universities can provide info for their students and surrounding residents. There are many possibilities for how micro-broadcasting will grow, the only certainty is that it will grow as it becomes cheaper and easier. That may represent a scary future for some, who prefer their broadcasting regulated and controlled. These same people would like to control the internet, and struggle to understand why you cannot. I can see why the Government would rather deal with dozens of small radio stations instead of thousands of people sharing content from their bedrooms or home offices, but that does not mean the Government of preserving the past and forestalling the future.

The partner trend to micro-broadcasting is macro-knowledge sharing. Ordinary people, or the micro-broadcasters, will increasingly get their information by mining valuable data sources, managed over the internet and available for free. There are plenty of examples of ’serious’ journalists caught copying and pasting from Wikipedia, so we should expect more and more broadcasting will rely on reuse of public information provided on the internet. This is not bad for democracy, despite Brown’s insistence we need local journalists to decipher local events. I am already more likely to get good, detailed and useful information about the internet than from the local radio. I do not want to listen to the local radio every day, just in case they say something relevant to me. In contrast, I can monitor my MP by getting email alerts from TheyWorkForYou.com and can both see, and report, local problems using FixMyStreet.

We also need to help Channel 4 to secure its future. In its short history, the station has produced Oscar-winning films and some of the most popular and highest-quality programming. But it now requires long-term stability to develop as a truly global player.

I cannot imagine a more confused paragraph. The confusion is accentuated by presenting a national television broadcaster as a potential ‘global player’. Content creation is not the same as broadcasting, though they used to be vertically integrated. Now I can watch Virgin One on Sky’s satellite network, the BBC on Virgin’s cable network, and Channel 4 over the internet. When Channel 4 was launched, it increased viewer choice by 33%. You used to have three TV channels, and Channel 4 added a new one (at least in the evenings - it was a long time before they started broadcasting during the day as well). It was a broadcaster in the traditional sense, when broadcasting was the way to that content got from the maker to the viewer. Now, Brown is suggesting its future role is as a content creator, making films and programmes. But content creation does not need to be linked to broadcasting. For every hour that Channel 4 broadcasts, it needs an hour of content. Some will be made by Channel 4, some by independent producers with commissions from Channel 4, some will be bought in from elsewhere, like US TV shows. Broadband ubiquity means that there is no need for an intermediary like Channel 4 to be involved in screening US TV shows or distributing independently-produced content. All the mainstream channels will find they decline in importance as broadcasters, and will need to shift their focus to content creation in order to survive. That does not mean the taxpayer needs to help them survive. Public money for content should be just that - open to all content providers, not mediated and managed by increasingly irrelevant broadcasters. The ‘channel’ part of Channel 4 will increasingly become an anachronism. Rather than wasting money on sustaining old distribution models, it would be better to speed the transition to universal broadband.

Improved communications technologies from the progressive digital switchover will enable the Government and local authorities to provide taxpayers with improved individually tailored public services offering the greatest value for money, and increasing efficiency for citizens and businesses. We must also introduce a robust legal framework to combat digital piracy and secure the rights of Britain’s creative talent.

Here is the really important paragraph, the reason for the report. Or rather, here is the importance sentence, which comes after some impenetrable waffle about ‘tailored public services’ (surely some kind of oxymoron?). There will be an election in less than twelve months. Gordon Brown would quite like it if some big media companies - the ones that own newspapers and the like - would support him in that election. To get their support, he will do something they like, by using the law to bolster their big business profits. Pure and simple. It sounds better when you say call it countering piracy (like sending gunboats to chase Somalis with speedboats and AK-47s) and say you are securing the rights of Britain’s creative talent. It sounds less convincing when you point out that even the Digital Britain report makes it plain that Britain’s creative talent does not own the rights to the work it produces. It sells the rights to big business, very often foreign-owned big business. So this legal framework may be of great benefit to big business, but is largely irrelevant to the majority of creative artists. Those artists are just as likely to get screwed over by big business as the rest of us.

Broadband is at a tipping point. High-speed internet access will soon be essential for everyone. Only a digital Britain can unlock the imagination and creativity that will secure for us and our children the high-skilled jobs of the future in a global economy.

Broadband is at a tipping point. Sounds good. What does it mean? What are transforming from, and what are we transforming into? Per this report, it sounds like the government is doing everything imaginable to keep things just as they are, and just how big business likes it. Change would be wonderful, but change is disruptive and change means risk for big business. Just like banks, the big telecoms and big media big businesses are run by people who love to be paid like they are risk-takers, whilst relying on the poor old taxpayer to pay for a safety net that protects them for the consequences of their own inefficiencies and mistakes. To keep big business happy, all mention of net neutrality was erased from the final version of the report. There is nothing in here about investment in small business, only big business. There is nothing in here about ensuring the rights of the ordinary person. That sounds not like a tipping point, but big government colluding with big business, as usual.

Brown is correct that high-speed internet access is essential for everyone. It is vital for the economy. It is ‘as indispensable as electricity, gas and water’ (I told you I would come back to that). The problem with this article, and the Digital Britain report, is that it gives absolutely no guarantees to anybody other than the big businesses that Government has been negotiating with. It makes no promises to the ordinary person that they will have broadband access. Sometimes governments do make promises to people, and they keep them too. Those promises can be made even if it involved big business. Water is big business. Gas and electricity is big business. However, ordinary consumers have rights to water, gas and electricity. Those rights are protected in law. The utility providers must and do respect those rights. The Digital Britain report, however, offers no genuine rights for internet users. It is hypocrisy to say broadband is as essential as water, whilst also pushing proposals that are designed to forcing ISPs to cut off paying customers. It is hypocrisy that high-speed broadband is called essential, whilst the government is intending to force ISPs to waste their money, interrupt their customer’s services, and turn high-speed into low-speed or even no-speed broadband, not because customers had failed to pay their bill, but because customers used the service to do things that another, different company does not like.

Amidst all the advertising-speak from Brown’s buddy, Stephen Carter, the word essential it twisted and manipulated until it looks like a pretzel. It is essential that you pay for the service, not once, but twice, and possibly three times or more. You must pay your ISP for the service, and must pay the network operator to build the network. Because of the incompetence of the Government and the operators, there is every reason to believe you will end up paying a third time, through your taxes, and a fourth, as the Government protects big business profits by blocking competition. On the other hand, it is far from essential that you receive the service you paid for. That is why the report does not confer a genuine right to broadband, like the right to water, and gas, and electricity. In this regard, it already seems to be out of date. Just like in his Ofcom days, Carter is rendered irrelevant by events on the European stage, which suggest the courts will interpret that internet connectivity is a right. Doubtless, when the Europeans force the consequences on Britain, the British politicians will turn on the smiles and congratulate themselves, whilst brushing Carter’s report under the carpet.

Brown’s vision for Digital Britain is a road that leads nowhere. It lacks imagination. It looks backwards, not forwards. It talks in the language of the internet, but walks the walk of monopolistic big business. That is no surprise when you realize its author is Stephen Carter, the advertising guru who makes a good living from impersonating someone who understands the future of technology and communications. To a dinosaur like Brown, Carter probably looks like he is evolved, but Carter is nothing more than a warm-blooded rodent that toadies to his master. This is from Carter’s introduction to the report:

I would also like to record my particular thanks to …. and most importantly for the political leadership of the Prime Minister, whose recognition of the importance of this sector and the need for a coherent strategy are what has made this work possible.

What a masterpiece of hollow. Carter praises the leadership of a man who looks backwards. He hails coherence as if the coherence of big business greed is more important than the creative anarchy of the internet, the vitality of freely exchanged ideas or the unpredictable dynamism of genuine free market competition. It is just another aspect of the merry-go-round of corruption that keeps spinning round and round. Corruption involves more than MPs fiddling their expenses. It runs deep, and it includes this shameless collusion between government and business interests. Carter is the inverse of Robin Hood. He schemes to take money from ordinary folks and to give it to the rich and powerful elite. And then he condescends to tell you why that is in everyone’s best interests. These are slick words, used to package corporate greed and political backscratching and make it look like a gift. Swapping one main party for another will likely make no difference. Stephen Carter is on first name terms with the Tory leader, David Cameron, and the Shadow Chancellor, George Osbourne. It is reported that Carter could very well reappear as a hanger-on to a Tory government, if they got into power. Just like the war in Iraq, it seems ordinary voters are stitched up again. That is why I am joining an international movement to reform the law and create the vibrant and free economies that politicians like to talk about but work against.

The Pirate Party is rapidly establishing itself in countries all over the planet. The Swedish Pirate Party paved the way, and shown that the issues they raised are deeply important to many people. In the European elections, it was supported by over 7% of Swedish voters, an incredible result for a new party, started from scratch less than three years ago. The Swedish Pirate Party is being joined by sister parties in other countries. The German party did well enough in its elections that it qualified for official recognition and state aid. Parties are being founded in such diverse countries as the USA, Brazil, Australia and Russia. I am joining the Pirate Party UK and helping to establish a new voice that speaks up for ordinary people and understands that the impact of new technology is too great and too important to allow it to be dominated by the interests of big business. Gordon Brown’s blinkered vision is of digital division. That division will be between vested interests and the rest of us. Stephen Carter, who scuttles backwards and forwards between big business and big government, thinks that balance is achieved by finding compromises that suit both his paymasters. In his world, the only role for ordinary folk is to hand over their money and believe his advertising lies. Remember, his old company helped to spur internet activism, by being so bad it provoked frustrated customers into launching the infamous ‘nthell’ forum. We need to organize and stand opposed to Brown, Carter, and the interests they serve.

It will be a hard fight, but one we must fight. Neither big government nor big business will look after the interests of the common person. Sometimes, when the law is corrupt, and the rulers more corrupt still, you have to become an outlaw, a rebel, or a pirate. Now is the time to secure our future, keep the internet free, and ensure everybody can access the internet for personal, social, cultural and commercial gain. In the 21st century, the internet is as essential as water; the Pirate Party will campaign to ensure everybody has the internet as their right.