Matthew Revell

I wonder how many other people delete the responses to Downing Street petitions without reading them?

Once you’ve read one patronising, content-free “thanks for helping us maintain a veneer of giving a damn what you think but do you honestly think we’re gonna take any notice?” response, you’ve seen them all.

Starting on Friday 27th July I’ll be presenting a new weekly show on WCR FM.

From 7pm to 8pm I’ll cover what’s going on in Wolverhampton politics and also look at the wider political scene from a Wolverhampton perspective. Each week I’ll have a couple of studio guests, interviews, debate and reports from around the city.

I’m going to take a fairly broad view of what counts as politics; it’s not going to be party political yawn-inducing tribalism. Of course, politicians will be on there: Wolverhampton South West MP Rob Marris is a guest on 7th September, for example.

I think Wolverhampton deserves a show that scrutinises the city’s politicians, that has an open debate about different ways of doing things and that represents the broad sweep of opinion and life in the city.

Some names familiar to readers of this website will pop up, too: Jono will be on to talk about free software and Stuart will be talking about digital rights.

If you’re in Wolverhampton, you can get WCR FM on 101.8 FM. Alternatively, you can listen to a live stream from the WCR FM website and I’ll be making the show available as a podcast from www.wolverhamptonpolitics.co.uk

So remember: 7pm - 8pm UK time on 27th July! There’ll be a phone-in each week too - 01902 57 22 57

I wonder how many people will find another reason not to vote Conservative in David Cameron’s recent speech to the music industry. Within the IT industry, probably quite a few.

In summary, Cameron praised the music industry’s technological innovation and went on to suggest that ISPs should prevent illegal file sharing. Both notions are, to most people in the IT industry, nonsense.

I feel a few lines, in particular, are worthy of comment.

“And at a time of technological revolution, you have adapted to changes in consumer behaviour with great ingenuity, launching online and mobile services.

Matching business acumen with creative instinct, you have shown you have the dynamism necessary to succeed in the 21st century.”

Is that the same business acumen that led them to resist technological advances including radio, cassette tape, DAT and recently music downloads and ring tones, only to finally capitulate when they had virtually no other choice? From what I’ve seen, the music industry’s innovation is limited to finding new ways of maintaining the status quo.

“And each year, an estimated 20 billion - that’s right, 20 billion - music files are downloaded illegally.

This alone has cost the music industry as much as £1.1 billion in lost retail sales since 2004.”

The record company staff must have been delighted to hear their own line quoted verbatim back at them. Based on the behaviour of my own friends, I can’t understand why anyone would believe this particular piece of propaganda to be true. People don’t download only music they would have bought anyway; I imagine they’re much less discriminating in what they download for free than what they’d actually pay for.

But whatever, the figures don’t add up. 20 billion files a year, assuming 79p per file at retail adds up to £15.8 billion per year, not 1.1 billion over the past three years. But then I only got grade C at Maths GCSE, so maybe I’m missing something.

“…decriminalising the millions of people in this country for copying their CDs onto music players for personal use…”

Can’t argue with that.

“Some ISPs claim there is nothing they can do to stop illegal downloading of music.

But last month alone, there were eight sites that hosted more than 25,000 illegal downloads.”

And those ISPs are pretty much right. Block those eight sites and another eight sites will appear, or another technology will develop that doesn’t require tracker sites.

“They have already established the Internet Watch Foundation to monitor child abuse and incitement to racial hatred on the internet.

They should be doing the same when it comes to digital piracy.”

I screamed inside when I read this. The casual linking of these three disparate areas of internet activity looks so obvious when you don’t understand the practicalities or potential fall-out. It’s not as simple as blocking ISOHunt or MiniNova.

ISPs fight child porn and hate speech because they are evil. They make an exception for these two particularly nasty activities. File sharing is not evil; it may be illegal and it may harm some people’s business interests but it’s not evil. A party supposedly against state intervention in business and private life shouldn’t take the voluntary blocking of two extreme activities as a cue to hint at the need for the statutory blocking of far less harmful activity.

But it’s not just about the thin end of the wedge. Political Penguin has an easy to understand explanation of why it isn’t just a matter of blocking torrent tracker websites. Imposing, or even just strongly suggesting, that ISPs should filter certain content marks a fundamental change in the role of the British state and it would impose a huge financial burden on … you and me! We’d pay for the ridiculous arms race that would ensue and that the ISPs would lose.

I don’t have answers to file sharing or piracy. I do believe in copyright. I believe that artists deserve payment. I don’t believe in propping up a failing business model, if that’s what it is, by adding an enormous and worthless burden of red tape to another industry.

Update: Prague Tory has left a comment and my reply to that clarifies some of what I’ve written above.

Tomorrow, most of the UK has some form of local election, whether it’s for local councils, the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh Assembly.

If you have the opportunity to vote tomorrow, use it. If you’re in an area with a BNP candidate, use your vote to make sure they don’t get in. If you’re unhappy with your local government, vote to change it.

I plan to vote first thing - yes, I can vote for myself

I’ve lived in Wolverhampton for seven years and I actually quite like the place. There are things about the city that frustrate me, though.

Take the city council, for example. There’s a sense in Wolverhampton that our council is particularly lazy. Whether that’s true, or not, is hard to say. Certainly, when I’ve tried to email individual councillors, getting a response is difficult. My feeling is that the council is missing opportunities to help make Wolverhampton a better place to live.

So, I’ve decided to stand in May’s local elections, in my own ward of Graiseley.

Of particular interest to readers of this blog, I want to promote the use of open source and issues of information freedom, whether not I’m elected. I’d appreciate any input that people have on that front.

I won’t take up too much space on this blog. Instead, I’ve set up a blog to talk about my campaign and the ways in which I want to help make Wolverhampton better - www.matthewrevell.com

The people at MySociety have, once again, stepped into the gaping communications void left by local government in the UK. An encouraging point, though, is that central government funded it.

Neighbourhood Fix-It is simple:

1. Something’s broken in your local area, so you visit www.neighbourhoodfixit.com
2. Enter your post-code, press Go.
3. The site shows a detailed map of the street in question. Click the location of the problem.
4. Describe the problem (e.g. sunken man hole), enter your details and click Submit.
5. The site sends your report to the relevant local authority.

Brilliant! Inevitably, a good number of local councils will fail to see why Neighbourhood Fix-It is important and many will ignore the reports, at first. Conversations with other people suggest that my experience of contacting local councils, particularly by email, is typical: i.e. they’re slow, overly formal and slapdash.

Of course, WriteToThem is now taken seriously by many Members of Parliament and Neighbourhood Fix-It is likely to gain similar acceptance by local authorities, within time.

Well done to all at MySociety, not least Chris Lightfoot who, sadly, died recently.

England has some of the most varied accents and dialects of any country in the world. In fact, the British Isles as a whole are blessed with colour and variety in their spoken languages. Multiple invasions and migrations over the centuries have given us truly regional forms of speech.

The tax funded British Library has put together an audio archive of these accents and dialects. Why, then, do they restrict access by making them available only in the proprietary WMA format? To make it worse, you can only stream the audio!

Jonathan Robinson is the curator in charge of the collection; time to write an email, I think.

Via Ray Girvan.

Wolverhampton doesn’t have much in the way of decent local media, particularly on the web. At least, that’s how it seems to me.

I tried to find out who was standing for the General Election in Wolverhampton. A Google search came up with nothing. So, I’ve set up Wolverhampton Politics. Depending how things go, I’d like to keep it going after the election, and provide some scrutiny of our city council!

I’m going to mail each candidate to see if they’ll give me an interview. I want to know what they plan, as individuals, to do for Wolverhampton; not what their leaders tell them to think. It’d also be interesting to know what they’ll do for Wolverhampton even if they aren’t elected … surely they’re not just cynically pretending to care so they get all the trappings of office!

Let me know what you think.

www.wolverhamptonpolitics.co.uk