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Digital Britain: Less a Policy, More a Typo
August 17, 2009
Posted by: Glyn Moody
While the digital revolution thunders along at a giddy rate in the real world, UK politicians prove to be all mouth and no trousers. Despite the rhetoric of making Britain a leader in digital content, the reality is the government just doesn't understand that this isn't business as usual, and that something has changed fundamentally, and requires a fundamentally different approach, not just some fine-tuning of old ideas.
There's more proof of this in the Digital Britain Impelementation Plan, one of whose actions is:
Legislate to ensure matched penalties for online and physical copyright infringement.
Right, this would be because online and physical instantiations of copyright are identical? You know, stuff like the fact that the on-cost is zero for digital, and non-zero for analogue? Or the fact that everyone commits copyright infringement thousands of times a day, just through completely normal, innocent online activities, whereas few outside the criminal community commit the analogue kind?
Actually, if you want the perfect metaphor of the government not really getting this online content stuff, you need look no further than the [PDF] title of the new document: “Digital Britian [sic] Implementation Plan”. Yup, as far as the UK powers that be are concerned, the real Digital Britain is little more than a typo.
Update: After some interesting to and fro with the Digital Britian [sic] team on Twitter, this typo seems to be visible only to certain PDF viewers: for example, Document Viewer. Just goes to show that free software reaches parts other OSes cannot.
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About the author
Glyn Moody Glyn Moody's look at all levels of the enterprise open source stack. The blog will look at the organisations that are embracing open source, old and new alike (start-ups welcome), and the communities of users and developers that have formed around them (or not, as the case may be).
Comments received
Sam Sharps said on Monday, 17 August 2009
Help me out Glyn - I'm a bit thick and slow and I couldn't see where it says 'Britian.'
I did spot you had spelt 'implementation' wrong in your article though.
Glyn Moody said on Monday, 17 August 2009
@Sam: glad you spotted that deliberate, ironic typo in my piece...
The real typo is in the PDF title bar of the report.
David Gerard said on Monday, 17 August 2009
The telling thing is the logo: a USB stick. Bits are things that are sold on physical buckets. From producers to consumers, never the twain meeting.
I'd love to see the designer's brief. Any decent graphic designer could easily come up with something that clearly says "network" - but that evidently isn't what was wanted.
Hence my <a href="http://notnews.today.com/2009/08/16/government-fights-back-internet-pirate-hordes/the-home-computer-of-1954-with-pirate/">suggested logo</a> for Digital Britain. Perhaps someone could make one for Steampunk Britain: the Indifference Engine!
David Gerard said on Monday, 17 August 2009
Aiee, HTML comment fail! The pic is at: http://is.gd/2lcoN