According to leaked documents obtained by The Times, the UK government is planning a green (discussion/consultation) paper proposing strong action against “illegal file-sharing.” According to the leaked documents they want ISPs to take the primary responsibility for monitoring usage and to ban any of their users who continually share copyrighted materials without permission. Whatever your position on copyright enforcement in a digital age, this is a ludicrous idea.

Logistically such proposals will be almost impossible to enforce effectively. Setting aside the issue that many of us encrypt as much as possible of the data going out from our computers, it will effectively require ISPs to monitor all traffic going through their networks in a far more intrusive way than they currently do.

Most ISPs watch traffic and do some work to “shape” it to make sure that, say, email takes priority over bittorrent, but they can do that at a high-level without looking closely at the content of that traffic. Under these proposals they would have to track all the data moving between your computer and the internet, and piece it all together to detect any material that could conceivably be copyrighted. The privacy issues around that are startling, but the technical issues are only starting.

Once the ISPs have that data, they then need to work out if it is indeed copyrighted and have a mechanism for working out if their users have the rights to distribute it. If I rip the new Ratatouille DVD and stick it on bittorrent it’s fairly easy for them to identify that, and there’s a good chance I’m infringing copyright. But what if I’m a Pixar employee uploading it to an online storage site so that I can pass it along to selected technical or media contacts? Or how’s about an event like Greenbelt were to ask a group of us to make a new promotional video available? That would probably contain multiple copyrighted items under an appropriate license, but torrents may be the most appropriate distribution mechanism and volunteers (rather than staff) may be the best people to get it out there.

In either case, there’s the hassle for me in having to provide a paper trail to my ISP each and every time I want to do something that might appear slightly suspicious, and of course there are the ISPs who will have to be able to process that paper trail, check its veracity, and potentially then provide an audit trail on up to whoever manages the regulations. They’re going to have to charge me more in order to cover those costs, and I’m going to have to put in a lot more effort to perform tasks that are currently simple and will remain entirely legitimate.

TechCrunch UK is among the commentators wading in to criticise the plans. Their technical argument is similar to mine, but the economic one is quite different. Whether or not music ends up mostly being available for “free” there are numerous issues we’ll need to address, particularly that while the cost of distribution may come down that is only part of the cost of production.

Regardless, this issue stretches well beyond music, and the point stands that this is an example of government’s response to new challenges being driven by the desires of companies about to go out of business, and not by a real desire to engage with the future of the creative industries.

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For some time now I’ve been interested in the possibility of bringing together political information from all different layers of government and finding ways of layering it. Too few of us understand where the key decisions on the issues that concern or affect us are taken. Action at a local level can be a very powerful political tool it’s hard to find out which level is most appropriate, or to trace how issues move between layers. Unfortunately it can seem even harder to find well-structured data at more local levels than it is on a national level.

That’s why I was very interested to discover Civic Footprint, a project of the Center for Neighborhood Technology that provides a simple web interface (and since May 2006 an API) for residents of Cook County, Illinois to find out the ‘political geography’ of their address.

For users of the website those districts are matched up with representatives, so you can quickly find out who represents you on each level, and from there jump off to that representative’s website or wikipedia entry, or a Google News or Technorati search for them. It’d be nice if the congressional pages (such as this for Danny Davis (D)) were integrated with a site like govtrack for more targetted information that google or technorati can provide, but it’s still a great source of information.

It doesn’t look like the API will yet tell you who the representatives are for each of your districts, simply providing the IDs of those districts. Hopefully it will soon. It’ll be very interesting to see how the site develops, as it shows potential to become something of an example of how civic and political data can be made accessible and how services can be built on top of that.

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On Tuesday the Center for Digital Government announced that Michigan.gov had won its annual “Best of the Web” award. You can see the state’s press release here.

The site has introduced a number of useful new features over the past year. If it weren’t for their recent addition of news feeds I probably would have missed this story, and quite a few others, and their efforts to improve accessibility, and unify public facing services are to be applauded. But the fact that they won the award is a sign of the poor state of governmental websites in the United States.

The improvements that the state website has been making should have been made several years ago. As they add features that the rest of the web embraced several years ago, the “open data” movement has taken off, but there’s no sign of trying to provide the core governmental data–information that would help citizens find new ways to interact with their government and participate in democracy–more accessibly.

Accessible, informative and useful government websites are a good thing (attractive, inviting ones would be nice) but it’s a shame that they can’t be part of a more general strategy designed to provide well-structured, useful, mashup-able data about all activities of government.

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