Bloody hell, a month goes by, and China and Google
split up. That particular debate centres on how
national governments interfere with cyber communities for their own,
possibly nefarious, ends. Not new, and we should pay attention to it here. Censorship is creeping
back in many Western countries as well as being sort of expected in
what we rudely describe as the ‘less democratic’ world.

One output from the Digital Britain report published in the
summer is the formation of bills to go through parliament to address
the issues of copyright, open access, digital inclusion and so on, that a
digitally literate economy needs to get right. In the first and possibly last effort before the election, not everyone thinks that the government has got it right.  Here’s Cory Doctorow on boingboing describing the assault on freedom that locking down your ISP account presents. And here’s Rebecca McKinnon in the Guardian
touching upon the French efforts to reject the Satan of Music
Downloading, in the context of Google’s legal battles with China,
France, Italy, etc. Mind you, Johnny Halliday isn’t exactly going to be
troubling my MP3 collection in the near future, but I’m lucky to live
in a country where you can say stuff like that and you aren’t marked
down by the authorities as a travel risk.

Good news today – the government is tabling a series of amendments that appear to curtail the most iniquitous clauses in the bill, including the one that gives a (currently unelected) minister
the right to decide on who and how to crack down on copyright
infringement without recourse to any other parliamentary process.
Whether they do or not remains to be seen.

What’s this got to do with marketing? The dripping irony here is
that in the world of brand communication, we’re almost desperate for
consumers to download our brand content for free and share it with each
other. We want our viral messages to go viral, and for our amateur
enthusiasts to make their own versions of our slick commercials. We
want to show that consumers care enough about the brand to bother.
Which makes it surprising (to me, anyway) that there weren’t more
agency people involved in evaluating whether this new law is a blocker
to innovation. It’s not just about digital innovation, but innovation
in all forms of communication. At CES, the big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas,
most of the new technology devices being showcased have social
technologies built in to them. This means that people will be able to,
if they can be arsed, link to each other, recommend where they are,
tell people where they are going and where they’ve been through pretty
much any device. If you think of Twitter as “what are you doing?” think
of the next wave of social tech as “Where are you?” Hmm.

And this brings me back to the slow post movement recently on brand republic, and the kind comments I’ve received on Twitter and
Facebook about the past month’s abstinence. Mad busy, that’s all I can say. And will be at the weekend too no
doubt. Plus ca change

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