So, many of you will have seen my Proud of Britain web site; as John Band put it,
Are you proud of Britain? Then visit the Proud of Britain website.
A bunch of disgraceful chancers, meanwhile, have set up a fake site promoting their authoritarian agenda. I'd recommend paying them a brief visit, and sending them your thoughts on their nefarious plans.
I have since received an Authentic Legal Nastygram from the Labour party over the use of their photo of smiling happy children about to be branded and registered in the Children Act database (a sort of junior National Identity Register) so that they can, as potential terrorists, be watched by the state. The threatening note ran as follows,
There is currently a photograph on the main page of the website, proudofbritain.net, which I believe you are author of. There has been no permission sought either from the photographer who owns the copyright nor the Labour Party who hold license on the image. You are currently in breach of copyright law and could be prosecuted for copyright theft. The photograph I am referring to is of a number of children, in school uniform holding a union jack flag.
The copyright holder has emailed you to request that you remove the image immediately, unfortunately, the email bounced back. If you receive this email, please remove the image immediately.
Melanie Onn
Constitutional and Legal Officer
Legal and Financial Compliance TaskforceTel: 020 7802 1220
Fax: 020 7802 1506
http://www.labour.org.uk
Sadly, unlike the last time a political party threatened to sue me Labour (or, at least, the copyright holder in the image) do actually have a case here so I've removed the image.
That said, the above letter is strikingly ignorant, even by Labour Party standards; as I've remarked before, there's no such thing as `copyright theft' and one cannot be prosecuted for infringement unless it is done on a commercial scale. This leaves one to wonder how it is that Ms. Onn came to hold the post of `Constitutional and Legal Officer'; of course, it's not as if the Labour Party doesn't make a habit of promoting the incompetent to positions they are unqualified to fill, as the continuing career of David Blunkett demonstrates.
(As an aside, I only noticed that I'd received the Threatening Note when the same woman wrote an actual paper letter to my ISP, since -- slightly embarrassingly -- my spam filter thought that the above letter was spam. When I checked through my spam folder for emails from the Labour party, what should I find but... an actual spam about their ID cards plan; a spam, moreover, which began with a vicious calumny, viz., that I am a supporter of their dangerous and stupid scheme. Spamming, of course, is illegal under the Communications Privacy Directive, and naturally I shall be filing a complaint.)
Comments
Posted by Gordon Barclay, Friday, 26 November 2004 19:35 (link):
Well that threatening letter only goes to confirm how petty minded and controlling New Labour are. It was clearly a non-profit satirical spoof. They just don't like the mocking, it's nothing to do with copyright. What sad wankers! What I'm not clear about is the enforceable UK law on this. Would an attribution to the photographer Richard Maude be enough to head off any legal action? What could that legal action be anyway?
Get the Labour department name: "Legal and Financial Compliance Taskforce" Very sinister sounding. I can almost hear the sound of jackboots kicking your door down at 3 in the morning. Compliance is mandatory! Resistance is futile! Sieg Heil!
Posted by Backword Dave, Friday, 26 November 2004 21:36 (link):
I still think it's worth encouraging bloggers to Googlebomb your page. Apart from John Band, Nick Barlow, Lenin, and Tim Ireland have joined in. Assuming that most people can't remember urls and rely on search engines to find pages, we're close to getting nine hostile pages to NewLab's original effort on the Google results. They're not having much luck with the public's contributions; nor with the celebs either. A superannuated film-maker? A businesswoman whose bras are made in China? A gardener? An economist? How my pulse quickens.
Posted by penwing, Friday, 26 November 2004 23:55 (link):
yeah - isn't parody listed under fair use? And hence a perfectly legal use of the material? Or is it satire? which is proudofbritain.net?
Alex x x
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Saturday, 27 November 2004 16:51 (link):
Sadly, I don't think that any such principle has been established in English copyright law. I gather (see, e.g., this posting about musical parody) that some judges are sympathetic to the notion, but it's certainly not one of the prescribed fair dealing exemptions in the current statute (see chapter III of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act, 1988).
Posted by James Graham, Saturday, 27 November 2004 01:58 (link):
I'm amazed they didn't at least bag the blogspot when they had the chance.
Posted by Simon Kennedy, Saturday, 27 November 2004 09:14 (link):
And shouldn't that be "union flag", not union jack?
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Saturday, 27 November 2004 16:37 (link):
Well, the letter as a whole is strikingly illiterate. For instance in the first sentence Ms. Onn states that she believes me to be the author of the photograph, not the web page; if so, this would make her letter somewhat silly. Anyway, hedging her bets, she refers to the children holding a `union jack flag', which seems a bit excessive (and certainly wrong, since the flag is being held up by potential terrorists, not flown in the bows of a warship).
That said, I understand that either `Union Jack' or `Union Flag' (note caps) is now acceptable in reference to the flag itself. See Julian Wiseman's page for full pedantry on this and other flag stuff.
Posted by Will, Saturday, 27 November 2004 19:16 (link):
She also doesn't seem to know the difference between "license" and "licence"...
Posted by ACB, Sunday, 28 November 2004 11:34 (link):
This smells of Nazism to me, threaten to sue the competition and then rub them out. Have you checked underneath your auto lately for suspisous devices with wires.
Right now Britain seems intent on destroying every institution that it could be proud of. Labor have destroyed the education system and tuned it in to one that rewards mediocraty, they overloaded the NHS with regulations and made it too expensive to opperate propery, and they deny that the British empire was once one of the richest and most powerful bodies in the world and that it brought many advantages to the developing world like the rule of law.
Britain should not be proud of Blair, it should be proud of what Blair wishes to destroy.
Posted by Chris Williams, Monday, 29 November 2004 11:34 (link):
We're getting off topic, here, but I'd just like to point out that the 'British Empire' which 'ACB' is talking about doesn't seem to be the one that existed on my planet. It brought lots of rule of law (except when it didn't, like the when it massacred Tibetans, shot down unarmed demonstrators in Amristar, gassed Kurds, etc), but often the law was more than a tad biased in favour of the British and their local mates. Hut taxes, forced labour, conscription, indentured servitude, selling people's islands out from under them (ongoing, that one), failing to feed the starving, nicking peoples' land - all these and more were perfectly legal. Mmm.
Globalisation and capitalism are desirable in many ways, of course, but recognising this does not mean that we have to cover up the fact that, just like the systems they (to an extent) supplanted, they were red in tooth and claw.
As someone once said: 'who whom?'
Posted by James Fairbairn, Thursday, 2 December 2004 18:39 (link):
Looks like the fools have moved the picture here. You might want to change the link on Proud of Britain to reflect this. (See what I just did there? Tee hee.)
Posted by fjl, Monday, 24 October 2005 10:38 (link):
You nutter ;-) .......Who is proud of Britain...?
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