David Cameron’s plan to introduce a police state and fund it through stealth taxes

OK, the headline is very mischievous but were this to be the Daily Mail then I’m sure it would pass as being wholly legitemate piece of journalism. That said, it’s not necessarily that far from the truth and here’s how.

This stems from his speech to the British Phonographic Industry the other day in which he had this to say regarding the issue of illegal downloads of music.

”
We need you in the music industry itself to continue to innovate and make the sort of technological progress that makes pirating CDs more and more difficult.

They should be doing the same when it comes to digital piracy.”

Dave’s not too good on this whole internet thing as we’ve all sort of picked up on by now but as someone with a desire to take over the reigns of power it would be nice to think he either one, has people with credible enough knowledge of the subject he’s talking on to advice him and two, he knows a little bit about the way the current legal structure works.

First up, let’s deal with Dave’s lack of knowledge on the old technology front and pin him down to something he believes in, yes I know it’s hard but there’s at least one thing we can gather from his speech.

Dave’s a supporter of DRM (digital rights management), which makes him a bit of a divvy in my book purely for that but fundamentally what it reveals is that Davey boy believes that the music industry should continue to waste substantial amounts of money investing in systems that by their very nature are doomed to failure. It does not matter what encoding is placed on media, it’s crackable. There is of course a trade off on performance as well. The more complex the encoding, the longer the decoding takes by whatever legitimate hardware is being used to play back the media which is crap for the end user as well.

However it’s when Mr Cameron moves on to ISP, the internet and filesharing P2P networks that he really drops his pants and deserves a good spanking.

He claims that ISP’s are the ‘gatekeepers’ of the internet. Sorry Dave, no they’re not and quite frankly they have no desire to be either. Thankfully though, those lovely people over at the EU have a nice little directive that covers this one if he’d like to go and look it up, it’s here, the European Directive on Electronic Commerce and it says:

“Article 12