A photographer's view of the Digital Economy Bill

Following this morning's post on the Digital Economy Bill I came across two sites of interest if you want to follow it's progress...   The first is a twitter stream on the bill - clearly a good spot to head for for up to date comment.

The second is Pro-imaging - a site 'supporting professional image creators' who are following the bill's progress because online intellectual property is a clearly of interest for people making a living from photography.  Apart from some useful links on submitting comments and following the bill's progress in the house they raise some points on what they see the bill misses. 

The first is a proposal to add compulsory school education in Intellectual Property...  I understand where they are coming from - but it's something I personally am against.  Firstly if it's not already mandated after two hundred years of copyright it is hard to see it as a 'must have' - and secondly it's a topic that could easily turn into indoctrination rather than education. That's not to say that I don't think there is value in school students debating intellectual property issues - but since principles of intellectual property have a clear political dimension we should be very wary of mandating what students should be taught to believe..

The second though I do support - an artists right to attribution - in principle at least.  Clearly passing someone else's work off as your own is fraud and shouldn't be condoned.   On the other hand their proposal of making it an offence to tamper with metadata in a file...... sounds like a big sledgehammer for a pretty small nut.  I'm not sure it's practical  - how would you prove who made changes to the meta data on a file? And I have no idea what is lodged as meta data if I edit or crop a file and then save it. (When does it become a secondary work?).   If I change format and the meta data is not transferred is that an offence.... Nya. Not such a great idea......

Piratpartiet and The Pirate Party -  Working for copyright reform.