Ship’s Biscuit — Flipping the digital landscape to portrait.

Following on from my earlier post about Virgin Media’s new snitch policy, it set me off thinking over my lunch in very long sentences about the ramifications of this. The main (really long) sentence goes as follows. If the government is gong to legislate that the BPI can force ISPs to give them their logs to enable them to snoop for perpetrators of Internet crimes against creativity then surely it follows that individual content creators also have those same rights? If the BPI can have such access, why can’t the average Joe on the street take a look and see how his content is being passed around?

Essentially, what I’m saying is that it is likely that, if this legislation is successful, ISP logs will become public access. This then may mean tools become available (probably made available by someone like Google who seem to release these type of category-smashing tools for fun while their working on something more important), such as those used by Hitwise to analyse ISPs to provide meaningful statistics. The statistics would allow, in essence (as the excellent Hitwise service does) people to see any form of online activity, particularly P2P sharing. Essentially, it would be like making public everything you do in the comfort of your own home.

I may be speaking out of turn but it kind of feels right and it feels like the kind of direction we’re going in. Surely, data about public access to public web sites is the property of the public, right? Likewise, data about how public content is traded is also public knowledge. Given that this data is currently only available (at a pretty penny) from companies like Hitwise, which is owned by Experion, it seems only right that at some point in the future this information will be available to all. Probably given it’s freedom by a combination of the UK government and Google. Surely privacy advocates are going to have a field day with this?

So where does the access stop? Who isn’t a content creator these days? From big corporations using ad agencies to create stunning visual pieces to Tay Zonda creating, well, stunningly awful but incredibly infectious music. Don’t they all have the right to be able to trace how their content is being passed around. And given that no one body is ever likely to be trusted, funded or even liked enough by enough content owners and creators to take the task up, it makes sense that it’s carried out by the content creator themselves, should they chose to do so.

I’m aware that in actual fact, the BPI is a representative industry body and, as such may have authoratative powers to execute decisions about the misuse of ISPs. But the ramifications of this arrangement go on and on.

I sense a an enormous privacy backlash.