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)

“…The report was given a guarded welcome by the recently formed Open Rights group which campaigned strongly against extending the 50-year limit, but the war is not won yet. The Gowers report is only a staging post, a way of influencing UK government thinking before Whitehall submits its own policy to Brussels where the final decisions will be taken. The real lobbying has only just begun.”

Then on Saturday one of my favourite writers, Marina Hyde, throws in her twopence worth:

“It was, of course, barely a fortnight ago that readers of these pages were pleased to take a lesson in political theory from my temporary Guardian colleague Mick Hucknall, the lead singer of Simply Red and a signatory of the aforementioned ad, who opened a presumably self-parodic opinion piece with the statement “copyright is fundamentally socialist”. Mick then contrived to conflate notions of intellectual property – and there’s something about “property” that grates with our fifth-form Marxist’s thesis – with solid leftwing values, though I’m afraid I’d rather lost track of his point by the second mention of “the free flow of ideas”, and realised we were being asked to conceive of a Beverley Sisters track as such.”

And finally, new media heavyweight John Naughton files his analysis on Sunday:

“American neocons like to say that the only things found in the middle of the road are ‘white lines and dead armadillos’. Much the same applies to intellectual property (IP)…”

As someone who’s devoted the last two years to getting accessible arguments about IP into the national press, I’m celebrating.

“‘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.

If politicians would like a clear view of how popular an extension of term is going to make them, they need look no further than the bevvy of responses to Mick Hucknall’s incredibly ill-advised piece on Comment is Free last week. Even if you ignore the ad hominem stuff, the reaction’s pretty damning.

Boingboing may be reporting this as a victory, but the battle isn’t over yet. The government will need to agree with Gowers, and as we know, a lot of high-level lobbyists have been side-stepping the independent review and going straight to the top. This week is the week to be making noise about why copyright terms shouldn’t be extended. My column in the New Statesmen this week is dedicated to the issue.

If you live in the UK and you haven’t signed ORG’s Release the Music petition yet, get to it. So far the media have gone with the “Poor Cliff” angle, but the other side of the story needs to be told too. Can you write a blog post/write to your MP/Give a Testimony that will let the UK government know that Gowers has got it right?

“Speaking as a reformed music journalist, it’s been fun watching the industry gasp its last breaths. First it sent peer-to-peer file-sharing underground with the closure of Napster in 2001. Now, it is suing its own fans. The music industry has struggled to cope with how its main export can now be translated into bits and sent down a series of tubes direct to its (not always paying) customers. And all the while, the music has only got better.

Vivendi Universal is the biggest of the remaining handful of bloated mega-corporations that have been suffocating innovation in the music industry since the late Eighties….”

Read the rest here.