Dear Nicola Blackwood,

Of the ~200 thugs Theresa May stated had been arrested during and
after the recent protests in London, 138 were the “mindless thug[s]” involved in occupying Fortnum & Mason.

I direct your attention to a video (published by the Guardian) taken by
‘legal observers’ within the Fortnum & Mason store [4]. The video shows
a police chief inspector calmly telling the protesters that they: are
free to go, will be safely escorted from the building, and had not been
involved in violent thuggery. So, Theresa May made a political
statement which contradicted the legal opinion of a police chief
inspector (or the inspector was lying when addressing the public);
either is distressing.

In all likelihood the charges against the individuals arrested will be
minor or will be dropped entirely; However, it is a concern if a
trumped up charge for a public order offence could in future results in
having you banned from attending protests.

In the mean time the figures are being used to fuel a cross party zeal
for authoritarian measures. I would like your assurances that you will
act to ensure that stereotyping and knee jerk reactions do not drive
policy. You seem to be a keen question writer and I’m generally happy
with the tone you’ve taken on the Protection of Freedoms Bill; perhaps
you’d consider a question to the home secretary on this issue?

(I have no involvement with UK Uncut or know anyone personally effected
by the events in question; I’m simply concerned by the tone taken by
MPs on this issue)

Yours sincerely,
Craig Loftus

P.S. I request the right to publish (on my blog) your response to my letter.

Dear Nicola Blackwood,

Ed Vaizey, MP Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries recently wrote in reply to a letter from the Open Rights Group:

Jeremy and I met with key players from the digital economy
on 23 February to discuss developing new ways for people to
access content online. Coming out of this meeting was a
proposal for a Working Group to be formed to look at
industry self-regulatory measures to tackle online
copyright infringement through site-blocking.

I recognise that it is very important that consumer
Interests are considered very carefully, and we will
be inviting consumer representative groups to participate
in future discussions on the issue.

As a self confessed civil libertarian I’m sure you react as badly as I do to extra-legal authoritarian solutions such as the site-blocking that Vaizey clearly supports. I urge you to voice dissatisfaction with such a proposal, and question the overly narrow remit of the Working Group.

“Industry self-regulatory” measures such as the US DMCA support for take-down notices are prone to abuse by aggressive rights-holders; particularly with regard to social media sites such as Youtube. It should be clear to anyone why they are popular with large corporate rights holders and unpopular with (legally) creative individuals.

Yours sincerely,
Craig Loftus

Dear Don Foster,

I have read of your position on the Digital Economy Bill and I am mostly pleased by it; we all like carrots over sticks.

I am writing to first add another voice to the mêlée pressuring MPs to ensure any self serving items introduced at the behest of lobbies are removed and that Labour’s draconian approach is resisted. Aside from any discussion on the societal cost of copyright, an act that press-gangs one group of companies into acting as policemen for another group is a many faced abomination.

Second; to give you the perspective of a PhD student at the University of Bath; one of the stereotyped targets for this bill. I can tell you we would dodge any stick you might try to hit us with. Without meaning to sound arrogant; I and my peers are more familiar with IT than you and yours. We know of and can use technology, to make ourselves anonymous and to encrypt the data we send.

Third, I fully believe the whole system of copyright in this country has lost sight of its original intentions and now solely benefits copyright holders while preventing creative endeavour. Not unsurprisingly, the current argument playing out is framed entirely as a dichotomy, ‘stricter controls’ or ‘what we have now’? But I’m sure an intelligent and interested man such as yourself will already be fully aware of arguments for the drawing-back of copyright. I would be thrilled to see you make your peers just as aware.

On this topic I recommend Jamie Boyle’s book The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (ISBN:978-0300137408).

Finally, I am extremely disappointed in the behaviour of the Lib. Dem. lords in introducing an amendment such as they did.

Yours sincerely,
Craig Loftus

P.S. I never download music or films; I buy CDs and rent DVDs. I do however enjoy the occasional YouTube clip.

1 860 kWh (per person per year, UK, 2007). I’ll write about how my consumption compares once I have more lovely data to play with.

That is based on data from The Department of Business Innovation and Skills on the UK domestic electricity consumption in 2007 (117 126.2 GWh) and the associated number of domestic meters (26 670.3×10³)¹. For the per person figure, the UK 2001 Census provides a persons per household figure of 2.36².

1. Electricity Consumption Data at Regional and Local Authority Level
2. Census 2001 – People and their homes in England and Wales

Dear Don Foster,

I would like to draw your attention to Clause 152 of the Coroners and
Justice Bill. The Bill is currently in the committee phase. I am not
very familiar with reading legislation or interpreting it, but having
read the clause, I would summarise as follows.

The clause amends the Data Protection Act 1998 to allow ministers to
break the act (by sharing personal information) when it is “necessary
to secure a relevant policy” i.e. whenever they like. No restriction is
placed on who the information may be shared with, or for what purposes.

Part B, subsection (2) also allows for the creation of offences through
the issuing of information sharing orders… I don’t know how these
things are normally done, but that just doesn’t sound right.

I fear this is a “get out clause” for those who feel tied by the Data
Protection Act. It also seems to clear barriers to sharing of personal
information between government departments… but further places no
restriction on sharing with the private sector.

Yours sincerely,
Craig Loftus

My letter was sent with the aid of WriteToThem.com.

I wasn’t wrong. Although the optometrist said that the relatively sudden onset of headaches was probably the result of working too hard (most of my few readers are probably laughing now).

Basically, I am more myoptic (short sighted, represented by SPH), but my astigmatism (none spherical-ness of the eye, CYL) is the same. Oddly, the ways my eyes are pointing (Axis) has reversed… either that or someone wrote them down the wrong way around!

To cut a boring story off quickly, I ended up shelling out £309 for a new pair of frames and lenses! My current frames have last for about 5 years (with 3 prescription changes), so hopefully it will be money well spent.

I’m not really feeling very literate today, so I’m just going to make an ad-hoc list of points which come into my head:

• As soon as you make land-fall in the country the state assails you
• Conspicuous consumption at a scale I’ve never seen before
• A tendency for large products, made from expensive materials, but made poorly
• Service staff skitter around like frightened bunnies, keen to help, but completely incapable of doing so
• For an Englishman, the culture of tipping felt so awkward as to make me reticent
• The programmes on their TV had me chuckling for hours
• Their cars aren’t just big, they are designed to look big
• The stereotypes of the average American have not been washed away
• Despite being in ‘hippy’ California, and despite assurances from various Americans, it was not easy to find vegetarian food
• Perhaps related to the last point, at no point did I find good food

I might add to this list as the visit comes back to me.

I should add the caveat that I did meet some wonderful and lovely people. People who were interesting, intelligent, witty and worthy of my admiration and respect. However, the ‘nature’ of these people did not seem to be represented in the media, the culture, the shops or the infrastructure.

I’ve been developing another section for my website, but I’ve been using XML processing features not available in PHP 4. Now that I’ve shifted to a more modern host and the holidays have come along I can finish off the section and add it to my website . It is something that I have been developing with help from some researchers at The Open University and hopefully will eventually be published on SourceForge.

During the switch I’ve also taken the chance to change to a much cheaper (and less flexible) hosting package. This unfortunately means that I have had to say goodbye to a lot of content which I was hosting for various people. Although I say ‘unfortunate’ I am actually rather glad to be rid of them, as I no longer have to worry unduly about breaking my website on a whim.

As far as work goes I’m still slogging away on the same project. Battling with conflicting interests and bloody politics… The project would be a doddle if we weren’t all so infuriatingly human about everything, but alas I don’t see any progress being made on that front for a long time. As I fear is the case with all knowledge management work, the project involves simplifying and making understandable and usable the complexity that is society (society in what ever form you happen to be looking at).

The first random thing I’d like to write about is probably another item in a growing catalogue of evidence that I’m obsessed with everything Google. For a while now I’ve been using their mapping tool (cunningly named Google Maps) to find my way about and for all those other occasions one needs to reference a map. Obviously one of the big uses is getting directions from one place to another. One aspect of which annoys me across all mapping tools is the inability to customise your route… when you know what they have suggested is just plain wrong! Well Google have done it again, now you just click on the route and drag it to another road, it will recalculate the route for it.

Along similar lines of “things you’ve always wanted”, I’ve started thinking about how to make my own piece of writing software. You might shout angrily that it is a silly idea because so many already exist… and you’re right. Unfortunately none of them really suit the way I like to write. I want to be able to separate out the ‘content’ I produce from the document and from any kind of presentation. I want a semantic writing tool. I’ll write more about it in time, as my ideas come together.