Digital Economy Bill becomes law: The costs of a terrible mistake

Anyone who read my School for Startups blog on April 8 knows I'm not a fan of the Digital Economy Bill that has now become law. 

That may seem odd.

I'm a writer, I appear on television and receive royalties, I produce webcasts and podcasts, and I actively support startups and small businesses that frequently depend on the unique content they can create and distribute for their survival.  At the Richard house we own three and four copies of some films in a variety of media because we won't just rip them and put them on a hard drive. We go see first run films in the movie theaters, we don't download them via Bit Torrent.  We do watch video on YouTube from time to time and the provenance of that content is sometimes dubious, but I also know from personal experience that YouTube will pull content if a legitimate copyright holder complains to them about stolen media, and frankly I'd pay for that content if there were some way to pay for it.

So, given that I'm a capitalist who believes in a wide range of property rights including copyright, and an honest guy who doesn't believe folks should steal, I find it astonishing that government has manage to create a flagship digital copyright protection law I wish I could sink with a nuclear bomb. 

Click here to read the rest of Doug's post.