Tag Archives: Letter

Reply from MP to “Please Demand Debate on the Digital Economy Bill”

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This is my MP, Sir John Butterfill’s (Con­ser­v­a­tive, Bournemouth West), response to this e-mail.

Dear Mr Renton,


Thank you for your email about the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill.


I note the var­i­ous con­cerns you have expressed which are shared by the Con­ser­v­a­tive Party and can assure you that the Con­ser­v­a­tive spokesman for Cul­ture, Media and Sport has taken them up with the Gov­ern­ment. The Gov­ern­ment have said that they will bring for­ward some changes for the Report Stage of the Bill and we shall be exam­in­ing them closely to ensure that they address these concerns.


My Party and I are keen to move amend­ments that address the prob­lem of peo­ple strip­ping out iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion from a dig­i­tal image. We want to clamp down on this and ensure that the Bill does not encour­age such activ­i­ties. We also want to see in the leg­is­la­tion spe­cific require­ments for a search for the rights holder and a sys­tem in place if that rights holder comes for­ward at a later date. In no way should this Bill actu­ally harm con­tent creators.


I am very hope­ful that we can get this right, as sort­ing out the cur­rent sys­tem will unlock a whole host of con­tent that can be used for the pub­lic good. I really believe that the BBC and British Library archives for instance will be much eas­ier to access under these proposals.


Yours sin­cerely,


John But­ter­fill

E-mail to MP: Please Demand Debate on the Digital Economy Bill

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This e-mail was sent to Sir John But­ter­fill MP (Con­ser­v­a­tive, Bournemouth West) on 17th March 2010. Read his reply here.

Dear Sir John Butterfill,


Since a num­ber of web­sites have pushed the issue of late, I’m sure I’m not the only con­stituent writ­ing to you about this, but nev­er­the­less I am writ­ing to you to reg­is­ter my con­cerns regard­ing the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill.


The con­tents of the bill worry me on many lev­els, from the pos­si­bil­ity of dis­con­nect­ing inno­cent users from the Inter­net with­out proper inves­ti­ga­tion, to the tech­ni­cal chal­lenges that will be faced by the ISPs, the cost of which will nat­u­rally be passed on to their customers.


But regard­less of these issues, I am more alarmed at the pos­si­bil­ity that the Gov­ern­ment and Lord Man­del­son may be attempt­ing to force this bill through before Par­lia­ment is dis­solved prior to the elec­tion, with­out proper scrutiny and debate by the House.


I would like to know your and your Party’s views on the con­tent of the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill, but more­over I would ask you to do all you can to ensure that this impor­tant and far-reaching bill gets the scrutiny it deserves rather than being forced through by a des­per­ate Government.


Yours Sin­cerely,


Ian Ren­ton

E-mail to Ofcom: DRM in Next-Gen BBC TV Signals

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This e-mail was sent to Andrew Dum­b­reck at Ofcom on 16th Sep­tem­ber 2009.

Dear Sir,


I am writ­ing to you regard­ing the doc­u­ment enti­tled “Enquiry to Ofcom from BBC Free to View Ltd con­cern­ing its DTT high def­i­n­i­tion mul­ti­plex licence”, which I have just been made aware of via an online news source.

As a Briton and a licence-fee payer, I would like to reg­is­ter my dis­tress that, from this doc­u­ment, it looks like con­tent providers are pres­sur­ing the BBC to pro­tect con­tent via a Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ment (DRM) scheme that would require all end-user equip­ment in people’s homes to have the abil­ity to decode it. This is a clear step back­wards from the free­doms that the BBC intro­duced with the iPlayer, and a step away from the licence-fee pay­ers being able to access the con­tent they pay for in any way they want.

Fur­ther­more, I use a custom-built PC as a dig­i­tal video recorder in my liv­ing room, using open-source soft­ware. These open-source appli­ca­tions gen­er­ally do not have a cor­po­rate spon­sor or a pot of money from which they could pay to licence the decod­ing tech­nol­ogy that is being sug­gested, which would ren­der my and sim­i­lar devices use­less for record­ing these signals.

I am strongly of the opin­ion that the BBC should be work­ing to make its broad­casts more widely avail­able, not less, and thus that the intro­duc­tion of DRM on BBC broad­casts is not in the pub­lic inter­est that the BBC attempts to serve.

Thank you for your time.


Regards,


Ian Ren­ton

Result: Suc­cess!

Letter to MP: The Intercept Modernisation Programme

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This let­ter was sent to Sir John But­ter­fill MP (Con­ser­v­a­tive, Bournemouth West) on 22nd April 2009.

Dear Mr Butterfill,


The con­tent of the Government’s pro­posed Inter­cept Mod­erni­sa­tion Pro­gramme and dis­cus­sions regard­ing the cre­ation of a cen­tral gov­ern­ment data­base for record­ing inter­net traf­fic data have been brought to my atten­tion by the Open Rights Group. I am writ­ing to you to express my con­cern and to ask that, if you are in agree­ment with my points below, you oppose any such motions if and when they arise.

Firstly, the expense involved in main­tain­ing such a cen­tral data­base would be enor­mous — com­pared to the cur­rent level of infor­ma­tion the gov­ern­ment holds on its cit­i­zens, the amount of inter­net traf­fic infor­ma­tion gen­er­ated by each per­son is vast. This infor­ma­tion is cur­rently gath­ered and stored for some time by Inter­net Ser­vice Providers (ISPs), but a sin­gle cen­tral data­base would be much more expen­sive to set up, main­tain, and search. I’m sure in the cur­rent reces­sion the major­ity of Britons could name any num­ber of things they’d rather their tax rev­enue was spent on!

The sec­ond issue that con­cerns me is pri­vacy. Though this kind of data is cur­rently stored by ISPs, I do not believe civil ser­vants have free (or even easy) access to it. The Police can have access to data on spe­cific indi­vid­u­als given due cause, and I have no issues with that sys­tem. How­ever, one cen­tral data­base or easy gov­ern­ment access to exist­ing ISP data­bases implies “data min­ing” — analysing large data sets, includ­ing data from indi­vid­u­als who are not sus­pected of any wrong­do­ing, in order to pick out sus­pi­cious behav­iour. I do not believe that indi­vid­u­als who are over­whelm­ingly likely to be inno­cent ought to be rou­tinely mon­i­tored in this way.

Fur­ther­more, the more freely this infor­ma­tion moves around, the more eas­ily it can be lost or stolen or hacked into and make its way into the hands of those who could use it to steal iden­ti­ties, steal money or sim­ply sell lists of e-mail addresses to spammers.

Lastly, I do not believe that there is even an advan­tage to these plans. I’m sure the given pur­pose will once again be anti-terrorism, but I do not believe the pro­posed plans are likely to reveal any evi­dence of seri­ous ter­ror­ist activ­ity being planned. For a fairly tech-savvy user (as we must assume ter­ror­ists who con­duct oper­a­tions online are) with the moti­va­tion to do so, encrypt­ing one’s e-mail or even one’s entire inter­net traf­fic is not dif­fi­cult. This degree of inter­net traf­fic mon­i­tor­ing will only affect those inno­cent peo­ple who either don’t know how to encrypt their com­mu­ni­ca­tions, or don’t believe that they ought to have to do so just to stop their own gov­ern­ment snoop­ing on them.


Yours sin­cerely,


Ian Ren­ton

Letter to MP: Freedom of the Press and the Guardian’s “Gag Order”

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This let­ter was sent to Sir John But­ter­fill MP (Con­ser­v­a­tive, Bournemouth West) on 13th Octo­ber 2009.

Dear Sir John Butterfill,


The Inter­net has been buzzing today with the news that the Guardian news­pa­per was pre­vented from pub­lish­ing a ques­tion that is due to be answered by the Sec­re­tary of State for Jus­tice tomor­row (Wednes­day 14th Octo­ber). This action was brought about by solic­i­tors Carter-Ruck on behalf of their client, Trafigura.

Regard­less of the nature of the ques­tion and of the Guardian and Trafigura’s less-than-amiable rela­tion­ship, I’m con­cerned about this clear attempt to restrict a fun­da­men­tal free­dom of the press — to report on activ­i­ties at West­min­ster — by lawyers act­ing in the inter­ests of a large multi­na­tional corporation.

Although Carter-Ruck have (as of about 1.30pm today) dropped their gag order, this kind of thing could eas­ily hap­pen again in the future, and next time the legal chal­lenge may not be dropped so quickly.

I would like to know if you or your Party would sup­port a pro­posal strength­en­ing and clar­i­fy­ing the right of the press to report on par­lia­men­tary activ­ity, to ensure that this sit­u­a­tion does not hap­pen again.


Yours sin­cerely,


Ian Ren­ton