On Tuesday 30 Mar 2010, Peter Merchant wrote: > http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/8357/digital-economy-bill-protest > s-spread-across-the-uk/
Yes, but that report is nearly a week old, so the momentum has been lost. The LibDems were the only major party opposing the bill. Now they've decided to support it, it's a shoo-in, so it doesn't really matter how many protests there are. I just hope the LibDems are right and the process of kicking serial infringers will be fair and just. My worry is that we end up in the same situation as in the US where individuals get letters threatening legal action and have to decided between paying the money to the protection racketeers or facing years in court and the millions of $ that that entails, even if they win!. Even when the money for defence is provided pro bono (eg out of the coffers of some support organisation), the victim can get hammered (and that takes no account of the stress and time involved in the process). See http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=124929 for a couple of examples, where the defendants had help and were still hit for huge damage awards. There was also the woman who had never used a computer who got successfully sued (the computer belonged to her late husband) and the 12 year old girl who got the threatening letter. I realise that British justice is nowhere near as unjust as the US variety, but bad things do happen. This law needs debating to prevent those kind of situations ever being possible. -- Terry Coles 64 bit computing with Kubuntu Linux -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Wed 2010-04-07 20:00 http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2645413 Chat: http://www.mibbit.com/?server=irc.blitzed.org&channel=%23dorset List info: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/dorset
