• Bill Thompson on Lord Stephen Carter’s interim Digital Britain report, and why peer review beats Peer dictatorship every time.
• Peter Wilby’s cover piece for this week’s New Statesman on the financialisation of British society.

“That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently: a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet’s brilliant tales, and a novel called Middlemarch, as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews. He had declined three dinner invitations in favour of this feast . . .”

There’s something about receiving a parcel from Amazon that takes me back to 19th-century New York. Breaking the seal on a bulk order of books (I’m a sucker for super-saver delivery) makes me feel like Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, ready to retire from society to my oak-panelled study with only a smoking jacket and a box of cigars for company. So it was last week, when I unpacked The Best of 2600: a Hacker Odyssey (John Wiley & Sons, £21.99).

You can read the rest here. James has kindly made an RSS feed for Reboot (the NS don’t provide one) for those who want to stay up to date.

The law may appear antiquated in the fast-changing world of the internet, but in most cases citizen journalists have the same legal protection as any other journalists.

And on the letters page Jonathan Mitchell QC suggests that the Guardian’s legal team are fostering “deeply undemocratic” ideas, after the publication of Winston Churchill’s famous “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech over the weekend:

When MPs make speeches in parliament, these are recorded in Hansard and the report is subject to parliamentary copyright (formerly crown copyright) under section 165 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Houses of Parliament might in theory restrict republication of the debates in Hansard; but for many years they have, in practice, allowed this quite freely… Even that formal permission would not be needed now, as parliamentary copyright lasts only 50 calendar years, so that the last remnants of copyright in this speech ended on December 31 1990.

Read the entire letter here.

I’ve been trying without success to get the widget in del.icio.us working so I can post links direct to this blog. In the meantime, here are a couple of titbits:

• Lawrence Lessig on net neutrality and municipal broadband in Wired
• Unsigned punk band make top 40 (health warning: they are represented by the PR company Quite Good, who were responsible for all the noise about Sandi Thom last year)

“‘Look at the debates that there have been on intellectual property since the arrival of the internet. They have been loud and shallow. They have been between people who say everything’s free and you shouldn’t pay for anything and people who say everything’s mine, and you should pay for everything. And actually neither of them are right.’ Andrew Gowers is sitting in a back room of the British government’s vast Treasury building. It’s just a few hours after the launch of his year-long review of the framework governing intellectual property, a text he hopes will change the nature of the debate not just in Britain, but internationally.

“The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property has been broadly welcomed by copyright campaigners…”

Read the rest here.

My favourite part is the exchange between the chair and Reilly at the end:

Chair: “Do you ever say no?”

Reilly: Looks questioningly at chair

Chair: “Do you ever take a view ‘we must not sell’”

Reilly: “Obviously there are business conditions that are important with regard to the sale, establishing a price, and our ability to actually deliver…”

Watch the clip here (via IPJustice)

The site was built on a Ruby on Rails platform by Hamza Khan-Cheema, and designed by Fernanda Ferretti. Lots of people offered friendly advice during the build, including Francis Irving and Chris Lightfoot from MySociety, Tom Armitage over at Infovore, and Nart Villeneuve at Toronto’s CitizenLab.

It was a really proud moment for me, when Bill Thompson, who helped build the Guardian’s first website, gave ChinaDialogue his seal of approval in his launch speech. He counselled that, despite what techno-utopians might say, the internet was no longer a place without borders, and that our site was a perfect gateway across one of the most important borders in cyberspace.

“Could people power stop Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! from doing business with China’s repressive regime? That’s certainly what Amnesty International hoped yesterday when they launched a new campaign urging web users to petition the three internet giants to reveal exactly what terms are forbidden from view inside China’s great firewall. The campaign is accompanied by a new report, Undermining Freedom of Expression in China, the role of Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google, which closes with some salient advice. Listing the footwear and apparel businesses…”

Read the rest here, and sign up to Amnesty’s Irrepressible Info campaign.

“It is nearly two decades since the British government tried to ban Spycatcher, and you would expect them to have learned their lesson. After throwing £2 million in legal expenses after the biography of former MI5 operative Peter Wright, her majesty’s government was forced to admit defeat in October 1988, leaving ministers red-faced and Wright seriously in the black, thanks to the free publicity afforded his book by his repeated trips to courts across the globe. Eighteen years on, it’s the turn of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to have a go. But this time they have a new weapon in their armoury – the vagaries of the British copyright system.”

Read the rest here.