That is a fair point, but I think it's orthogonal to the main issue. There are already laws about accessibility and discrimination for various other commercial activities, and I see no reason similar rules could not be extended to cover provision of creative content within the kind of scheme I described.

As a curious aside, technically there is already a provision for raising problems caused by DRM with the government in the UK. However, it's so obscure and awkward that I've never heard of anyone actually trying to use it.

That is one of many options.

I find it amusing to see how hard some people will work to try to compromise my inconsequential system. I set my messages log to turn over at a very high file size now so I can see the activities more readily through only one file. Even with people attacking at this frequency they pose no real danger to my system, either by way of filling my "logs with crap" or by actually trying to get it (as a prohibited user name).

My home box has seen a dramatic up-tick in frequency of ssh attempts - particularly as root (even though I don't allow remote logins as root regardless of whether the password is right or not) - but the frequency of attacks via PHP and other potential shellshock vectors hasn't changed much.

I recently had one IP address in China make over 10,000 attempts to log in as root via ssh in one morning. By comparison on the same day I saw only 109 failed attempts to load various php configuration pages.

Think about the content that is created today through the work of skilled, creative people. We're talking thousands of person-years for blockbuster movies, AAA games, top TV shows. Just presenting TV news and weather bulletins takes a not-so-small army of people working 24/7. For smaller scale works like, say, academic textbooks, we're still looking at a whole team of people working over several years.

The question is, is that kind of content naturally abundant? If society truly would continue to benefit from the same quantity and quality of such work even if those skilled, creative people didn't get paid, then you're right and the scarcity is artificial. Otherwise, we're not talking about artificial scarcity, we're just talking about economics.

But the law doesn't say, for example, that you have a legally protected right to make back-ups. It just says that making back-ups under certain conditions doesn't infringe copyright, which is a completely different statement.

The guys who negotiated these laws are not new at this. These changes have been in negotiation and consultation for several years, and despite the apparent wishful thinking of many posting in this Slashdot discussion, they didn't get to that process and then accidentally give away the keys to the kingdom without noticing.

Personally, in an ideal world but one where we accept the basic principle of copyright as a reasonable economic tool? I'd have:

1. 100% effective DRM. (Yes, really, but read on for what balances it.)

2. Compulsory escrow for any work being distributed commercially with DRM applied, and criminal sanctions for those who fail to provide the unprotected content to the relevant regulatory authority.

3. Much shorter copyright durations, probably varying by industry/type of work and dictated by what creates a reasonable commercial incentive but not an excessive one in each context, which I suspect would be around 5-10 years in most cases.

4. Original creators keeping the master copyright to any work they do, so big media distributors can only ever have exclusive licensing for relatively short periods (maybe 1-2 years) after which they have to renegotiate with the original creators if they want to renew their licence.

In short, I would give the creators primary control for the duration of the copyright, I would make big distribution channels into a market that is subservient to creators rather than the other way around, and then within that structure, members of the general public get a clear choice to enjoy a work immediately on whatever terms the market will support (one-off purchase, rental, library subscription, etc.) or to wait a significant but not absurd length of time until the work enters the public domain forever.

In shorter, I'd screw the distributor middlemen, make copyright back into something that provides a reasonable incentive to create and share good works, and make the default legal position that everyone can enjoy everything once that incentive has done its job.

What does America have to do with anything? This is about the UK, I live in the UK, and I'm talking about UK law. Here we have the EUCD, which is hardly "murky" on this matter, and the relevant provisions have been incorporated into UK law for around a decade now.

When do you think this hasn't held up in court? There have been various cases elsewhere in Europe where things like mod chips have survived a court challenge in various ways. However, in the UK, the judiciary seems to have taken a very consistent and pro-rightsholder view in such cases so far.

Also, what "clearer law saying something is specifically allowed" do you think applies here? The changes taking effect today have little to say about TPMs.

Perhaps you should read the Intellectual Property Office guidance (PDF) about this issue. Pay particular attention to the FAQ on page 4, where for example it notes:

Or just go straight to reading the changes themselves, which are written in legalese but clear enough for a non-lawyer to understand.

That's not how I read the BBC article, but if that is what it meant then it is wrong.

We have the EUCD here, which in somewhat similar to the DMCA. In fact, it is arguably stricter in this particular area, because it covers not only access control mechanisms but also copy protection mechanisms. The relevant details of the EU directive have been incorporated into UK law for roughly a decade.

Rightsholders can therefore pursue not only those circumventing such technical measures but also those making or distributing the equipment used to do so, and in some cases this can fall under criminal rather than civil law. Moreover, this has actually happened, for example in the Sony PS2 mod chip case.

Yes, it still is. That's the point. Almost all of the theoretical benefits of these changes can immediately be nullified, because all the content provider has to do is apply technical measures and then breaking those measures remains against the law even if the copy would otherwise now be legal.

Well, I think I lowered its chances of acceptance even more by posting it.

This is progress of a sort, though it has been a very long road with many false starts.

Even so, it's interesting to see what they didn't include. For example, notice that almost none of the changes affect software at all, nor do they help at all with content that is protected by technical measures for DRM purposes.

In other words, those who want to remain legal are still at the mercy of content providers doing things that may or may not work reliably, may or may not interfere with the normal operation of computers/mobile devices, may or may not cause huge problems with restoring access to purchased content if such devices fail, etc.

Don't be fooled. A lot of the apparent improvements in this new law are immediately negated by technical measures.

To follow up: I just spotted a note at the end of one of the articles suggesting that it wasn't actually the government's own systems that fell over, but rather something provided by Vodafone. I suppose that raises questions about why a system like this would need the services of a company like Vodafone for its implementation, but presumably this at least puts the outage in the "more subtlety in the real world implementation" group, which is reassuring in some ways.

Also, we're talking about a system that fundamentally just needs to collect some money and then update a simple database, on a scale of only thousands of users per day. If it weren't for the inevitable security/privacy/reliability concerns because this is an official government system, it's the kind of project a new web developer might write as an exercise in a day and a single properly configured web server would be expected to handle the entire load even at peak times.

Even with those concerns, I am struggling to imagine how you could build a system with such simple fundamental requirements that falls over on its first day of service. The post mortem for the outage would be interesting to see; either someone was spectacularly incompetent or there is a lot more subtlety (or artificial complexity) behind the real world implementation of this system than we might expect from the outside.

I've heard that argument before, but if we're assuming the behaviour of make install/make uninstall is sufficiently non-trivial to worry about the system getting messy, how are you supposed to make that package without becoming an expert on what each piece of software's make install would have done anyway? The closest I've seen to automating this process is tools like checkinstall, but since make install can do arbitrary things, no automation tool can be fully trusted if you haven't vetted the makefile behaviour first.