Digital Economy Bill Shoved Through With Minor Modifications

[muriel_volestrangler]

As mentioned yesterday, the UK House of Commons came up with a bizarre plan to have a brief debate on the Digital Economy Bill in a "wash up" process, and then basically approve it and promise to come back and fix it later. It's a bizarre way of doing things. Charles Arthur did a nice job blogging the debate, which mostly consisted of a bunch of MPs pointing out how ridiculous it was that this bill was being rushed through without any real debate, followed by Digital Britain Minister Stephen Timms (who has been known to not even remotely understand this issue) got up and basically said "well, too bad." As you read through what happened, it's almost all people protesting what's in the bill as well as the lack of discussion on the bill, followed by Timms saying:
"My sense is that there is a pretty broad acceptance across the house... that legislation is appropriate for dealing with it. There is definitely significant harm to the creative industries... estimated at £400m for the music, film and TV industries in the impact assessment of the bill... this is a very serious problem."
That £400 number is totally made up (apparently, at yesterday's event various other numbers were thrown around as well). But the bigger point is that Timms is basically lying. There was not "pretty broad acceptance" in the house that the legislation was appropriate, or even that there is significant harm to the creative industries. The debate was almost entirely against the bill. Still, as with yesterday, the chambers were not particularly full for the debate, but a bunch of MPs who don't really understand or care about this issue showed up at the end and voted, so the final tally came to: 189 votes to shove it through, and only 47 against. The only real "concession" was the dropping of the hugely controversial clause 18, giving the gov't excessive powers to adjust copyright law in the future. Of course, when that first came out, I wondered if the whole point of clause 18 was to draw the fire of consumer groups, let it be dropped, while everything else got shoved through. It looks like that may be what happened. Update: Or not. Further analysis from folks suggests that while Clause 18 may not have made it into the bill, what was in the clause did, in fact, still make it into the bill. So it's even worse than before. Lovely.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100407/1519078915.shtml

This is bad. I'm not sure about what should have actually happened with the bill, but rushing it through without proper debate is pointless. Why couldn't it have waited until the next Parliament? There's nothing urgent in it that I know (and if there had been, Labour could have allowed more time for it earlier - everyone's been assuming May 6th for the election for ages). I don't know how the vote split (Diane Abbot voted against, because she said on 'This Week' she'd just come from doing so), but if this was Labour trying to get it through before the Tories get in, then I'd have been happy for the Tories to have made it a whippable vote and get a lot more than 47 to oppose it - just on the grounds of democracy. As far as I can tell from the Guardian's live blog, the Lib Dems opposed it (but there was a lot about amendments), and the Tories were apathetic: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/apr/07/digital-economy-bill-internet

[T_i_B]

1. How MP's voted

Looks like my own MP didn't bother to show up.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmtoday/cmdebate/32.htm#hddr_2

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Mine neither; even Ian Paisley voted against it!

Good to see him do that, actually - he's retiring, so he could have just ignored a late night vote and gone back home, or gone all the way back to Belfast. It's not a subject I imagine is of particular interest to him, but perhaps he objects to it being rushed through too.

[ikri]

3. Every time I consider voting Labour again

They do something like this.

If the media distribution companies are dying (and it is the distribution companies, most of the artists are doing just fine) then let them die, shit like this isn't going to save them.