A Very Belated Happy New Year.

Folks at The Independent are concerned about the UK government's new Civil Contingencies bill and a scared new world.

The RIAA had a bit of a setback just before Christmas in their pursuit of individual file sharers when an appeal court on the D.C. circuit rejected their subpoenas to Verizon to identify suspects. So theoretically ISP no longer have to hand over customer details to the RIAA. The appeal court was pretty blunt and said the text of section 512 (h) of the DMCA "does not authorize the issuance of a subpoena to an ISP acting as a mere conduit for the transmission of information sent by others." Donna has more.

Miriam Rainsford has an interesting commentary on Siva Vaidhyanathan's P2P essays at OpenDemocracy. She echoes, in this particular context, something John Naughton has been saying for some time: "we overestimate the short-term impacts of technology while underestimating long-term effects." I agree with Miriam also about the problematic use of emotive words but it does highlight a frustrating dilemma - in a world of short attention spans, before you can convince an audience of your perspective, you have to gain their attention. And using words like "anarchist" is a way to do that. If the language only leads to the usual polarised debate we see in the mainstream media then it gets us no further forward. However, if you can use it as a tool to alert sensible folk to the fact that there is a debate to be had and that it is a bit more complicated than the usual soundbites lead most people to believe, then there is some hope of progress. In the latter regard, I'd recommend both Siva's and Miriam's writings.

BTW folks I'm looking into switching my weblog to an OU server in the none-too-distant future, so look out for a url change for b2fxxx soon. We'd like to do some more active integration of blogs into some of our courses and it will make sense for my own blog to be in-house. It's time we started pushing some of the boundaries of what we can do with these kinds of technologies in an educational context again.