The UK government forced through the controversial digital economy bill with the aid of the Conservative party on the evening of 8 April. This meant it would get royal assent and become law – after just two hours of debate in the Commons. The digital bill is a clunking, medieval assortment of ill-informed and manipulative clauses. It fails abysmally to distinguish between civil and criminal law, property and monopoly rights. Below is a wonderfully articulate, succinct and educated letter, written by a UK resident congratulating one of the few MPs who did actually attend parliament to hear the reading of the bill and highlights the failings of the bill – most MPs ignored it of failed to attend. Quote below from Cameron Neylon.

‘Dear Don Foster,

I am writing firstly to commend you for your attendance at the Digital Economy Bill Second Reading last night. I was one of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people watching the reading unfold on Twitter. By now perhaps some MPs and party strategists are digesting what happened but I wished to pick out a few things that seemed particularly relevant, particularly in the context of a general election.

This was the first real exposure of many of those watching to the internal functioning of the house. A large community of highly engaged people motivated to either watch, listen, or follow blow by blow descriptions of exactly how the debate proceeded. The almost universal reaction was one of abject horror.

Representative democracy bases its existence on the assumption that the full community can not be effectively involved in an informed and considered criticism of proposed bills and that it is therefore of value to both place some buffer between raw, and probably ill informed public opinion, and actual decision making. This presumes that MPs, particularly party spokespersons take the time to become expert on the matter of bills they represent. By contrast what we saw last night was a minute by minute dissection by well informed people outside of parliament of what, with a small number of honourable exceptions, totally uninformed people within parliament were saying.

The placement of copyright infringement alongside theft (Afriye, Timms, Wishart) displays a fundamental lack of understanding of the UK legal system, and particularly the distinction between civil and criminal law, property and monopoly rights. Not things that are well understood by the public but things that the public have a right to expect parliamentarians to educate themselves about as they go to the heart of what the bill is about. These points were dissected and rebutted instantly online only to be repeated uncritically in the house.

The idea that the bill has any chance at all of reducing illegal filesharing by 70% is laughable, as is the idea that “technical measures” can protect public WIFI against unfair take down notices. Finally the notion that the “creative industries” are suffering when they have taken record profits are their own research shows that illegal file sharers are their biggest customer needs to be put to parliament.

But the UK’s real creative industry were those on Twitter last night. The people whose livelihood depends on a free and working internet, who work as sole traders or in small companies. The people who will create the media of the 21st century. The people who will bring the UK out of recession. They were out in force last night and while we disagree passionately about the details of copyright and intellectual property rights and how they should be best applied, there was one voice united in the wish that the Digital Economy Bill in its current form be buried.

Particular horror was reserved online for those MPs who stated clearly that the process of the bills progress was unacceptable. That something so important has had such little scrutiny and that something so controversial has been placed in the wash-up process. Member after member stood up to say the bill and its progress was flawed, dangerous, and “appalling” but they would nonetheless “reluctantly” support it.

Finally I would note that, while you were present, the lack of other Liberal Democrats in the house was noted. This is a natural constituency for your party. Indeed Bath has a vibrant technology community as you are no doubt aware. I hope your party strategists have seen the damage that was done last night and I hope they draw the logical conclusion. If the Liberal Democrats turn out in force tonight and bury this bill at the third reading then it will make a difference to your electoral results. If you want a hung parliament, this is the way to get it.

Yours sincerely,

Cameron Neylon

p.s. I will be posting this letter publicly on my blog at http://cameronneylon.net Please feel free to reply or comment there. I hope you will give me permission to publish any other reply you make in a similar form.’

Adidas has launched a range of men’s trainers in the US that transform into a branded virtual world held in front of a computers web-cam.

The five different trainers will enable Adidas to introduce three games developed by game developer xForm into the virtual neighborhood. The games will include a skateboard game, where the trainer acts as the controller to navigate the virtual city’s alleys, along with a Star Wars themed game and music based game.

Last Monday Alberta Cross released their incredible debut LP, ‘Broken Side of Time’ and, with it, were the first band ever to use ‘Augmented Reality’ technology within their album artwork.

Lead vocalist Petter Stakee commented

“The album is pretty haunting in itself, we wanted the videos to show it and put that across” Stakee continues “Brantely and I talked about ideas to match the video with the music so he went to Salt On Sea in California, which looks like a ghost town that’s been blown up by a nuclear bomb to shoot the videos. It was on old posh Hollywood star’s getaway, they all bought houses there, and one night the whole place sunk into the sand because of a chemical reaction… Some of the old shit like old cars, houses, broken vinyl records are still there, half buried”

The content of each marker/code will be changed regularly and Alberta Cross will be uploading special videos, competitions and other content throughout the year, which will only be available to those who own the album artwork.
‘Broken Side of Time’ was released last Monday through Ark Recordings and

Did You Know 4.0?” has now been created for the Economist’s Media Convergence forum in October:

The original ‘Shift Happens‘ presentation by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Brenman was turned into a video and uploaded to YouTube in June 2007. The video was then remixed and became a serious YouTube hit called ‘Did You Know?‘ and attracted over 6.5m views.

There are warehouses full of them.  Poor little :CueCats™ motionless on dusty shelves fooled into believing Barcode scanning Nirvana was their destiny.  Alas the 1990’s :CueCat concept was a commercial failure. ‘CRQ’ (a word play on ’see our cue‘) is software developed by Digital:Convergence intended to convert ‘Cues’ from television signals and the :Cuecat bar code reader into URLs.   Apple laptopPro users are using ‘declawed’ :CueCats with the movie/book/music catalogs program Delicious Library.  They can also use the :CueCat with the Pedia (Bookpedia, CDpedia, DVDpedia, Gamepedia) line of applications from Bruji.  Thanks to folks over at the Social Book Network LibraryThing it is now purring, clawing and devouring it’s way through my books with gusto.  I wish it’s tail would wag…

Starting with a raft of digital marketing, web-build and film work for Graham Coxon, the time is nigh to launch a company: head, heart and feet first – curled up foetal position – into the crunch. We Are Humans.

MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables – cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?

Plunge deep into his mind. Over at Twitter.