I disagree. In all of this, the first premise you have to accept is that the speed limit is correct in the first place.

In the UK we have something like 250,000 miles of roads and just 6 different speed limits. Now for every one of those quarter of a million miles of road to be set at a speed limit that is definitely not too low would be a miracle.

The easier "catching" someone for speeding gets, the more it will be used for revenue raising. The fact that people may lose their jobs along with their licences seems to be irrelevant.

"Several sections of the ACTA draft show that rightsholders can obtain an injunction just by showing that infringement is "imminent," even if it hasn't happened yet."

You have only got to look at their other wish lists that include such things as "everyone should have to install spy software on their computers, to look for and delete things we think they shouldn't have", to see that, armed with this legislation, they will argue that anyone with a computer is potentially going to infringe imminently and so fair game for their legalised extortion.

If this doen't shore up the share price, I don't know what will (James Bond doesn't seem to be enough any more).

No, I'm sorry but I fundamentally disagree, and your comments just demonstrate how pervasive the banks' spin on this has been.

"ID Theft" does not exist. It is simply a spin doctor phrase to convince you that it is you that has lost something and not the bank.

So why isn't there a name for a bank robbery where they have stolen your car and used it in the crime? Although I suspect if they thought that they could spin it so that you were therefore considered liable for their losses they might just invent one.

Firstly, they haven't stolen your identity, they have copied some information relating to you. It could be that to do so they have done something illegal (data protection, etc), but you have still not lost anything.

The fact that I can guess from your /. id that you name is Jason Levine, doesn't mean that you have lost anything or that anything has been stolen, in the same way that it is not true that a photograph can steal your soul. If I subsequently use your name whilst committing a crime doesn't alter that fact either.

What annoys me is that by coming up with the spin incantation "ID Theft", banks have been able to make what is actually their problem your problem

Its not "ID Theft" its FRAUD

Before "ID Theft" existed, con artists would regularly pretend to be someone they weren't in order to steal things. If I pretend to be an engineer from the local telephone company in order to con my way into an old ladies house and steal her purse, no one would even think for a minute that the telephone company should foot the bill, but when someone pretends to be me and convinces a bank to give them some money on that basis, apparently it is ok for the bank to turn round and try to get me to pay for the result of their gullibility.

Yes, but COPYING something that doesn't belong to you without permission is NOT stealing. Get over it. Stop trying to justify your ignorance of the facts.

I agree. I would also say that there is no real journalism here either. Quoting things like 'A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers' individual sites.' without any analysis of what the underlying numbers are gives a very distorted impression

One of the most obvious questions to ask is "How does the number of people represented by the 56% of Google visitors that apparently do click through compare to the numbers that would have gone to the newspaper website directly.

My guess is that Google's 54% is way bigger than the 100% of people that would have got to all the newspapers' web sites by other means, combined.

The only way the "supply and demand" model fluctuates prices is when there is a true market, with many people selling the exact same thing and many people buying it (think commodities).

In this situation, each seller is not just calculating what the customer is likely to be prepared to pay for their product, but how cheaply one of their competitors is likely to sell their identical product for, thus attracting buyers away.

The situation with music and movies is not a true market. Although there is still a calculation as to what the customer is ultimately prepared to pay, there is no real competition from other suppliers as, someone who wants to listen to one artist's music is not necessarily going to switch to another company's artists just because their CD's are cheaper to buy.

Yes, things like price anchoring and appeals to "think of the poor starving artists" help the public to keep swallowing the pills, but the real issue is that without real competition, the media companies have too much control for the "market" for it to ever establish the true price of the product.

Whether you agree with it or not, the rise of the Internet "pirate" is the first real competition these companies have ever faced.

I don't know if as many people would have a problem with this sentiment per se. However, the patent system is regularly abused by people who haven't spent time and money inventing something and aren't actually going to spend any time and money producing the product either, but simply look to sit on the patent and make their money from suing anyone who does put the effort in and brings the product to market.

The other problem is the granting of patents (especially software patents) for things that the patent office may think is novel and worthy of protection, but we all know is so obvious that it wouldn't occur to any of us to try to patent. However, once the patent is granted, again the patentee puts all their real effort into suing anyone who dares to come up with the same idea.

It is this leeching and obstructive use of patents that I would imagine that most people have problems with.

What about a double-decker arrangement? The keyboard would be on the desk in the usual way, but the touch pad would be on a shelf below the desk.

This would be a bit like some workstations currently position the keyboard (on a retractable shelf) only, because you dont need to see the touchpad when you are using it, the shelf doesn't need to be able to be pulled out.

Would the tremendous increase in bandwidth and reduction in costs of changing to a digital infrastructure have anything to do with this, or is it all just down to competition?

In the UK, the telecoms provider (BT) was privatised, not as a result of any political ideology, but so that they could borrow the billions required to digitise the network without the government's involvement. In the end however, they didn't need to borrow anything as the massive savings they made from digitising the first parts of the network more than paid for each subsequent upgrade.

Being digital, the new infrastructure enabled BT to do many things from a computer keyboard that they previously had to schedule a highly trained engineer out to do and BT soon found that it was making a profit from the standing charges alone - any money made from people actually making calls was a (huge) bonus.

All this success was sold as being as a result of privatisation, rather than digitisation, which in turn led to a rush to sell off anything that wasn't nailed down - usually at, what later investigations found to be, significantly below real value.

Of course none of the subsequent utility sell-offs had anything that corresponded to BT's digitisation and have instead led to inefficient monopolies. In the fine tradition of BT however, the privatised companies rarely actually have to put their hands in their own pockets as all upgrades are paid for by large, government approved levies added to the bills - long before any benefit (if any) to the consumer is actually provided.

These levies ensure that dividends are not affected by the need to invest in the infrastructure but, being able to have their cake and eat it, the value of these infrastructure improvements (paid for by the customers and not the shareholders) significantly boosts the value of the company and so the share price.

Back in the day when Microsoft Office had more competition from the likes of WordPerfect, a business I was working for went out and bought Word for all its PCs (a couple of hundred) because a senior manager had a "pirated" copy at home.

Unlike some other software at that time which employed dongles and other copy prevention measures, Microsoft didn't seem to have any real security on their software - you just copied the disks. It seemed as if they almost meant it to be copied a few times in order to get market exposure and more sales (looks like it worked as well).

I can see what you are getting at, but I'm not sure your analogy is correct.

Ignoring the fact that if I steal the car, the dealer no longer has a car to sell, whereas if I copy the car, he still does, there is still the issue of power.

To have a real market, the buyer and seller have to have an equal footing, which is why attention is paid to things such as price fixing and other anti-trust issues.

In the case of the car dealer, he does not have a monopoly and so his competitors can offer the same car under different terms and you, as the customer, can choose which offering suits your requirements the best. In this way a true marketplace exists and, other than the "no stealing rule", the government need not be involved.

In the case of the entertainment industry, there is a monopoly - if you want to listen to a track by your favourite band, being offered the choice between that band and one you don't want to listen to, is no real choice at all.

In this case however, rather than looking at this situation as a monopoly one and regulating in favour of the customer, in order to balance the market position, governments (perhaps as a result of lobbying) instead legislate in favour of the music industry, thereby distorting the market further and significantly disadvantaging the consumer by reducing their legal rights (e.g. not being able to take advantage of their fair use rights as this will contravene the industry's new rights to protect their encryption, etc)

You might not agree, but it is not necessarily entirely surprising that, being put in such a disadvantaged position, the customers look to subvert the status quo, by circumventing the controls the seller tries to impose.

When entertainment began, it is more likely that people would perform and then pass the hat round to get what people watching thought it was worth.

I'm not sure that copyright laws existed back then either, which begs the question; how did anyone ever make a living?

Copyright was originally introduced to cover written works such as books. Go to any decent library and you will find books that have lasted a lot longer than most films do.

In reality, copyright laws were introduced to encourage creative people to create more stuff for the enrichment of society as a whole. The terms of these copyrights were carefully chosen to give the creator enough time to make some money, but not so long that they could simply stop creating and sit back and live of an afternoon's work they put in fifty years before in a recording studio.