Please do point out any major omissions.

The report acknowledges the loss of its contract with Carphone Warehouse, while BT, Virgin and TalkTalk have stalled on plans to implement the technology. However, it states: “Virgin Media continues to examine behavioural advertising technologies, including Phorm.  We remain in ongoing discussions with a number of UK ISPs and remain optimistic about our longer term potential in this market.”

Phorm claims successful custom with Korean service providers, but is still looking for “commercial deployment in a major market”.

Further analysis available at the Guardian.

While around 40,000 users have been sued in the US for file sharing, the number of British cases against individuals is comparatively low, with maximum fines remaining around £10,000.

But the number of cases in UK courts may increase if rightsholders snooping on filesharers are endorsed by stringent measures proposed by Peter Mandelson last month.

While the anonymity of users is by no means guaranteed by file sharing services, US consumers have described their shock when receiving formal notification of their activities online. But a closer look at privacy policies shows how little it might take for file sharing services to hand over users’ details over to record companies:

…your use of the BitTorrent Client to download files will, in turn, enable other BitTorrent users to download pieces of those files from you. Although your IP address is associated with your piece of the file, other users will not have access to any other personal information about you.

BitTorrent goes on to stress “We do not track which files you download“. That may be the case, but if a rightsholder company decides to pose as a file sharer and upload (or more likely, download) Vanilla Sky to other users, then they’ll be doing the tracking. That includes finding out IP addresses, from which it is easy enough to determine the internet service provider who may in turn send a legal notification to the offending customer. Carrying out a legitimate download on the BitTorrent client, Surveillance News was easily able to determine that one file sharer was connected via NTL.

Ian Clarke, founder of anonymous file sharing and browsing service Freenet believes this lack of protection, coupled with the threat of internet cutoff will drive users to newer technologies which protect their privacy in the hunt for copyright infringers.

“I don’t question Mandelson’s motives,” he says. “It is certainly the case that we as a society must find a way to incent creativity. Historically copyright has been one of the ways we do this, however it is increasingly unenforceable given improvements in communication technology.”

Clarke argues that the fundamental idea of copyright depends on preventing people from communicating – but as communication technology improves, it is becoming increasingly difficult to enforce.

“Ultimately the only way to reverse this trend is to impose draconian limitations on people’s freedom to communicate, monitoring all communication, and having the ability to deny people the freedom to communicate as a punishment,” he says.

One legitimate, student downloader says he is considering turning to Freenet to mask his identity.

“No-one likes the idea of Big Brother – no-one wants to be monitored or controlled. I’d go out of my way to stop anyone spying on my downloads, content creators or not – not particularly because of what i’m downloading, but simply the principle of the thing,” he says.

He adds that he refuses to download illegally. “When you can start affording software that you plan on using, then there’s an obligation there to start paying back the authors for the work they’ve put in.”

But he adds that despite renouncing illegal downloads, mass surveillance proposals like the Intercept Modernisation Programme would drive him to use encryption technologies.

“I think the more organisations or governments attempt to tighten the noose the more people will migrate to groups like Freenet and TOR. It’s not really about illegal file sharing; it’s more about protecting your right to anonymity.”

The company behind the controversial Webwise software which tracks web users’ browsing habits last week lost its technology chief, Stratis Scelparis who was involved in BT trials of the product.

The Telegraph predicts losses between £9 million and £12 million for Phorm, which has yet to make money since its launch in 2002.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reveals that Phorm’s anti-smear website, Stop Phoul Play, has been quietly taken down and that the company has also lost its director of communications, David Sawday.

While I was living with four other students, I downloaded a game – the Call of Juarez, a kind of Western shoot-em-up. I downloaded it using Bit Torrent, but after I’d downloaded it, the file didn’t work on my computer. I don’t know if that’s because it was a planted file, but a month later I got a big letter saying [Techland] had traced it to my IP address. There was this big booklet with all the laws in it. They had recorded how I had ‘infringed’, and they wanted an out of court settlement of £519.11 exactly. £500 was the fine; the rest was a labour charge.

The letter was sent by the games provider [Techland], and had been prepared by a legal company. I paid up. It was a matter of either paying, or having all the computers in the house seized. That was a possibility, because the IP address they detected was for a router, not for my specific computer. I thought about fighting the charge on those grounds, but it would have compromised the other students in the house, and all of our computers would have been seized.

I don’t actually share files, but it’s possible [Techland] deliberately put that file up. It’s a bit like entrapment really, just to catch people. I was even sceptical that it was a real letter – it was just a story that people get done and could have been a scam – but I know a lawyer who checked it out and she advised submitting.

I’ve cut back on my downloading – no films or games or anything big like that. Mostly because I’m scared of getting caught again; I’ve never wanted to download enough. It’s just music, although I don’t block my IP address. I do think it’s fair enough to fine people, I do know it’s illegal to download, and companies have to protect their interests. I suppose I’d be a bit miffed if laws came in to stop downloading, but more because I couldn’t access stuff any more [than privacy issues].

She invites those who are against file sharing to reply to her directly and support her campaign for talks with the government and internet service providers.

Artists can respond to a letter posted on the ‘It’s Not Alright’ blog by Ms Allen to other music artists outlining her response to Peter Mandelson’s clampdown on file sharing.

Ms Allen comments on the ‘damaging’ effect of file sharing, particularly on emerging acts. She is particularly critical of established artists who can afford to speak out in favour of file sharing, though she does not name any.

“And now some artists have got their message out there: that file sharing is fine when you’re a successful artist with sell out tours and a back catalogue ready to be sold to a new audience. That might be fine for them, but it’s not fine for the acts that haven’t made it big yet,” she says.

“We can talk about all the legal means of accessing music out there and even come up with new ways to access music, but ultimately we need to establish that we think file sharing is wrong.”

The majority of artists posting are in favour of ISP’s policing illegal downloads in some form or another, with others proposing new licensing rules or financial share from ISP’s to go to copyright holders.

What the artists say (again)

I want to put my hand up in support of Lily Allen. She’s asking British musicians to galvanise over a serious crime: the death of a Great British Industry – our music business. The world over, people are stealing music in its millions in the form of illegal file-sharing. It’s easy to do, and has become accepted by many, but we need people to know that it is destroying people’s livelihoods and suffocating emerging new British artists.

James Blunt

[There should be] a new law where ISP’s have to pay copyright owners a share of the revenue that is generated from broadband subscriptions in acknowledgement of the value that the sharing of copyrighted content online has to those subscriptions and the profitability of the ISPs.

Matt Bellamy, Muse

I’m worried about making sure new talent can continue to come through. Everyone in this world needs an income and the majority of artists chief income should be through selling music, I don’t know how we make it happen but we need to bang our heads together and find a new way to do that.

Tinchy Stryder, grime artist

The government has succumbed to a ‘politics of fear and control’ according to justice spokesman, David Howarth.

But the MP reserved most of his criticism for Conservative plans on civil liberties, announced earlier this week.

“It is not enough to campaign about the popular issues: ID cards, the DNA database, the ContactPoint database of all children or even the unfair extradition treaty under which Gary Mackinnon is being extradited to the USA,” he said.

Mr Howarth described the Conservatives as ‘fake libertarians’, and accused them of avoiding the issue of protesting.

“Protesters are unpopular with many people, but their right to protest should be cherished even if it is noisy for Members of Parliament to have protests in Parliament Square or annoying for the police to have climate protestors blocking a street in the City of London.”

“Democracy doesn’t mean just voting once every five years. It means a vigorous public debate about politics that everyone can take part in,” he said.

He also criticised the strict rules forbidding protestors to film police and criminal trespass laws brought in by the Conservaties.

Mr Howarth did not detail Liberal Democrat policies on surveillance, but said he would return to the issue on Wednesday. He also attacked the proposals of increasing detention of terrorist suspects without charge, overruled earlier this year: “The idea of holding people for months without telling them what they are supposed to have done belongs in the novels of Franz Kafka, not in a liberal state.”

Full speech available here.

Such is the promising introduction to a new Conservative policy document on ‘Reversing the rise of the surveillance state’ earlier this week, launched by Shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve and Shadow Justice Minister Eleanor Laing.

“New Labour has excessively relied on mammoth databases and wide powers of data-sharing, on the pretext that it will make government more effective and the citizen more secure.”

This is certainly true; despite being forced to give up a centralised database to store how, when and where we communicated online, the Intercept Modernisation Programme consultation rather sulkily insists this ‘would have several advantages’:

“It would be the most effective at delivering fast and efficient access in support of the law enforcement and intelligence agencies and emergency services; the least challenging technically to implement; and the cheapest to build and run.”

Mr. Grieve promises a Bill of Rights (to replace the Human Rights Act), and to scrap the children’s database and the National Identity Register. He rather noticeably avoids any mention of intercepting communications data, ID cards or indeed a general cessation in the collection of personal data. Some of the proposals echo those put forward in a Scottish consultation on data sharing and public authorities, including a measure to restrict local council access to personal communications data. But unlike the Scottish proposals, there is no hint that councils should make any effort to collect less – merely that access to data held across different accounts should be restrained.

More emphasis is placed in certain checking procedures and safeguards -  such as investing the Information Commissioner with more regulatory powers – than really cutting back on state policing measures.

The private sector

Tacked onto the end of the report is the suggestion for a ‘kite mark’ for companies to adhere to – a kind of best practice for data protection in the private sector. This isn’t so much of a sketchy outline as a concept at best. The efficacity of a kite mark is also doubtful, given that it would be voluntary, and bearing in mind the stark warnings about hacking threats from Russia and China in the ‘Snooping Dragon’ report. Mr. Grieve points to the (double) hacking of Monster as an example. The report concluded chillingly that the response to external hacking would be slow – a conclusion proved correct if this final, vague measure is anything to go by.

The figure may in fact be closer to 3.9 million people. The original statistics were said to be from a paper produced by a government advisory body, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property. In fact, the numbers were produced during a report commissioned by the British Phonographic Industry, which has been one of the key lobbyists for harsher measures against filesharers.

During Radio 4′s ‘More or Less’ programme, BBC journalist Oliver Hawkins discovered that the seven million figure varied widely depending on the assumptions made, e.g. the number of internet users in the UK – which was calculated by the BPI report to be higher than the number of users estimated by the Office of National Statistics.

Media roundup

So who used that seven million figure?

The Telegraph

The Daily Mail

The Guardian

The Independent

The Mail on Sunday

…while the BBC went with a diplomatic 6 million figure.

It isn’t entirely surprising that a niche group campaigning for privacy, filesharing and freedom of speech should be popular amongst the younger demographic. But perhaps the mainstream political parties ought to be concerned they cannot connect in the same way. SN has compiled statistics to show what the political landscape might look like if Facebook fans/group members were votes. SN wonders what Labour’s digital wunderkind Tom Watson (443 fans) would have to say?

Clicking the image will take you to Many Eyes where you can view and interact with the treemap. It compares PPUK to all UK parties represented in the House of Commons or at the European level. Adjust ‘size’ to show Facebook fans, current number of MP’s or current number of MEP’s. Many Eyes is in beta and may take a couple of tries to display.