British to get Internet Pirate-Finder General

Via Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing (and paraphrasing his text):

Peter Mandelson, British Secretary of State, is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now being prepared for Parliament. These will give him (and his successors) the power to pass legislation without debate to amend Copyright and related law.

In other words,  an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight, provided it was in the name of protecting copyright. He would be able to:

1. Create new penalties for online activities he judges infringements — jail terms for file-sharing, search and seizure for suspicion of ripping a pal’s CD, etc.

2. Confer rights to third parties to investigate and punish infringers — giving record companies the power to monitor all your net activity, then order your ISP to ban you, etc.

3. Impose duties or functions on any person connected to facilitating online infringement — create militias to thug-police the web, force ISPs to monitor web content, etc.

4. Outlaw sites that let you transfer files in private — no more RapidShare if you want to give a copy of your photo album to a relative, &c.

To quote Cory directly:

This is as bad as I’ve ever seen, folks. It’s a declaration of war by the entertainment industry and their captured regulators against the principles of free speech, privacy, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence, and competition.

This proposal creates the office of Pirate-Finder General, with unlimited power to appoint militias who are above the law, who can pry into every corner of your life, who can disconnect you from your family, job, education and government, who can fine you or put you in jail.

Even an accusation is likely to be enough to get your entire property kicked off the ‘net under the terms that the Bill is already being drafted to include. Surely everyone except crazed record company execs and paid-for politicians can see that grabbing such a vast chunk of personal rights, privacy and freedom can see that this is a really, really bad thing, right?

Head over to the Open Rights Group for details on calling your MP to register your unhappiness.