The Government spent much of this morning back-pedalling from its site-blocking plans, with Business Secretary Vince Cable endorsing the Hargreaves’ Review into modernising copyright laws.

It’s generally good news, with the Government accepting sensible recommendations from Professor Ian Hargreaves as well as surprisingly useful advice from Ofcom – format shifting will be legalised (although details on how far that will extend are scarce) and site-blocking will be left to the courts, where it belongs.

The best news, however, was in page three of the Intellectual Property Office’s report on the changes.

That page is headed “Evidence should drive policy” and contains an astonishing admission that previous copyright decisions were not always based entirely on reality.

It is also important to stress that while the Government’s focus is firmly on economic growth, issues of fairness and social impact are also important in the context of IP rights

The IPO notes the Hargreaves Review identifies “two particular difficulties” in the copyright area: “a near-total lack of high-quality evidence on some issues and an overabundance of effective lobbying.”

That’s a familiar complaint among activists, who have long argued that the Government depends too heavily on skewed data from music and film lobbyists. (Indeed, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s own report on today’s news cites data from lobbyists BPI; the research might be perfectly valid, but it can hardly be considered independent and as such shouldn’t necessarily have the Government’s endorsement.)

To fix this, the IPO is to get a stronger “economics team” and will conduct proper, independent research into copyright and piracy in the next year. “The fundamental issue, however, is that key data is held by businesses and other organisations,” the IPO report said, before levelling this challenge: “IPO will work with those organisations to help them offer good-quality evidence; our challenge to them is to do so.”

Not only about money

On the very same page of the IPO report, there’s another intriguing point. The report says that, up until now, the Government’s focus has been on the financial side of piracy — as Bill Clinton loved to say, it’s the economy, stupid.

While that’s hardly news, it is a surprisingly honest admission — and the IPO argues money shouldn’t be the only consideration. “It is also important to stress that while the Government’s focus is firmly on economic growth, issues of fairness and social impact are also important in the context of IP rights. The Government will consider these impacts together with economic considerations in making domestic policy on IP,” the IPO said.

A common-sense, balanced approach to managing copyright, which takes into account economic concerns as well as wider social implications, and is backed up by independent research? It’s about bloody time.

A few weeks after Conservative MP Claire Perry tested the waters by suggesting ISPs should apply cinema-style age ratings to pornographic sites, Communications Minister Ed Vaizey has all but made it Government policy (i.e. he told The Sunday Times).

“This is a very serious matter,” he told the newspaper. “I think it’s very important that it’s the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children,” threatening to do so by law if the ISPs don’t get it together, much like the previous Labour Government did over music piracy and the ensuing Digital Economy Act – and look how swimmingly that worked out!

Aside from the enormous technical challenges of applying age ratings to every site on the internet, does the Government have any right to foist censorship on the British public? As a father of young children, I’m no keener on kids getting unbridled access to pornography than Mr Vaizey, but if he thinks slapping onerous filters on every web connection is going to hold back the tide, he’s wrong.

If Mum and Dad are worried about their teens running off to their bedrooms and downloading porn when they’re not looking, they could try something radical – discipline

The internet was as futuristic as Red Dwarf when I was at school, but I had no problem laying my hands on the copies of Playboy or Razzle being passed round the playground (sorry Mum). And if teenagers can’t get access to cyber smut, they can always flick to the nether regions of the Sky EPG late at night and catch more than an eyeful on the adult channels (funny how Perry and Vaizey aren’t so het-up about Murdoch’s money-spinning channels, eh?).

Vaizey’s using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, imposing blanket censorship when two simple measures will prevent children accessing adult content: filtering software and good parenting.

Everyday software such as Norton Internet Security includes parental controls that are almost certainly as effective as anything the ISPs can impose. If Mum and Dad are worried about their teens running off to their bedrooms and downloading porn when they’re not looking, they could try something radical – discipline. Insist the kids only use computers in communal rooms or set up Windows parental controls to prevent children using the PC late at night, for example. It’s really not hard.

My biggest worry about Vaizey’s iron curtain is: where will it end? Pornography’s an easy target: the argument that “no right-minded parent would want to subject their children to pornographic content” is morally difficult to oppose and will play well in the tabloids. But then what right-minded parent wants their child looking at snuff movies, or a Frankie Boyle sketch, or the BNP website?

Where does it end, Mr Vaizey? Where does it end?

His findings are based on some of the flimsiest research I’ve ever seen.  On page 13 of the report (PDF), for example, he laments the money being wasted on printer cartridges. Some Government departments are paying as much as £398 for printer cartridges, while others are picking them up for only £86 – a 78% difference in price. The horror!

What Green apparently hasn’t noticed is that all printer cartridges aren’t the same. Was that £398 cartridge for the monster A3 laser printer in the Department of Education, while the £86 toner was for the personal A4 laser printer sitting on Andy Coulson’s desk in the Number 10 press office? We don’t know. The report doesn’t state.

What’s more, the assertion that a £398 cartridge is a bigger waste of money than an £86 one is completely bogus if you don’t know the yield of the cartridges involved. What if, for example, that £398 cartridge lasted for 5,000 prints, while the £86 model petered out after only 1,000 pages? Is Sir Philip unfamiliar with the concept of economies of scale or does Lady Green get a rollicking every time she comes back from Tescos with a six-pack of Quavers, when she could have bought a single bag for a fifth of the price?

Green makes the same, disingenuous point about laptops. The lowest price of a Government laptop was £353, the highest was £2,000 – a difference of 82%. Yet on the same slide, Green concedes: “There is no standard specification across departments”. In other words, they’re different products.

It makes perfect business sense for the team editing video for the Department of Culture website to have a £2,000 MacBook Pro with all the necessary graphics grunt, while the civil servant who needs a laptop to tweak spreadsheets at the weekend could quite possibly cope with a £350 laptop from Dell’s Inspiron range. Laptops aren’t the same as the bed sheets, bras and knickers that Green knocks out in Bhs: they don’t all do the same thing.

In short, one of the UK’s “most respected” businessmen has produced a worthless piece of research comparing apples to pears, and has the Prime Minister’s gratitude for doing so. What a waste of money.

(Update: A Cabinet Office spokesperson insists that “where possible, Sir Philip has used examples that are like for like. Where that is not possible, he compared comparable products”. We’ve asked the Cabinet Office to supply the exact models used in Sir Philip’s comparisons, but it has refused.)

Call me an old-fashioned sentimentalist if you will, but when passing laws, shouldn’t the politicians responsible at least have the first clue what they’re talking about? (That is, of course, assuming they turn up to talk about it at all: 236 MPs voted on the bill, yet only a small fraction of that number actually bothered attending the risibly curtailed debates.)

I listened intently to much of the debates. I could do little else given my eyes were gummed together. And while I didn’t expect the vast majority of MPs to be particularly tech savvy, the levels of ignorance on display – even from the Minister for Digital Britain himself – was nothing short of scandalous. They literally didn’t know what they were talking about.

Here are just a few examples of the technical howlers I heard:

The Minister for Digital Britain

Of all the politicians in the House, Stephen Timms should be the most tech literate. Not only is he the Minister responsible for driving the Digital Economy Bill through, he spent 15 years working in the telecoms industry prior to becoming a politician. Alas, he soon proved to be way out of his depth.

Take the following exchange with fellow Labour MP Austin Mitchell:

Mitchell: Somebody might park outside my house with a laptop, access my signal and abuse it without my knowledge. What would happen if such an abuse occurred and it could be traced back to me?

Timms: In such a case, my hon. Friend might receive a letter in due course informing him that an infringement had occurred on his internet access. He would then have the opportunity to protect that access.

Mitchell: How?

Timms: My hon. Friend could introduce a password so that somebody driving up outside his house would not be able to use his access. The letters that are sent out will have to give such advice and explain what people can do.

Right… So the Minister for Digital Britain is patently unaware that the WEP security still used by many people with older routers is easier to crack than The Sun crossword, even if “protected” by a password. He would have found this out if he’d bothered to watch the (flawed) Panorama investigation into file-sharing, in which he appeared himself.

Lest you think this was an isolated incident, it wasn’t the only time Mr Timms erred. Witness the following dialogue with Tory MP John Redwood, in which he completely fails to grasp the entirely valid point Mr Redwood was making:

Redwood: Will the Minister explain what would happen if someone had paid for an article or some content from a paid-for site? What would they be allowed to do? Could they invite people in their home to read it for free online at their convenience? Could they print it out and circulate the print-out to friends or family, and could they make multiple copies? Is it just sending it around electronically that is illegal? I would be grateful to know what the crime is.

Timms: I think that the right hon. Gentleman is barking up the wrong tree. The owner of the copyright-the person who is responsible for the content, such as the right hon. Gentleman himself in the case of his blog, which he told us about, can do what he likes with that content. The amended clause 18, which is to provide a power to make regulations rather than change the law directly, will allow a copyright holder to apply for a court order to block access to a website.

Redwood: The Minister cannot say that I do not understand the matter. I am asking him how far someone could go in using something that they had paid for before falling foul of his proposal. It is a very reasonable question.

Timms: But the author of the content will not fall foul of the proposal. I do not imagine that the right hon. Gentleman will apply for a court order to block access to a website that holds his content. A music maker such as the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) might wish to do that, but the right hon. Gentleman clearly would not.

[At this point John Redwood rises to his feet, presumably to see if he can get the Minister to understand his perfectly straightforward inquiry for the third time, but it shouted at to sit down by several Labour MPs, including Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw.]

Timms: I need to make some progress.

You might suspect that Timms was being deliberately mendacious; ignoring Redwood’s legitimate concerns about usage rights in order to take a cheap swipe at his blog. But then you read this letter – sent out in Timms’ name, although conceivably written on his behalf – in which he defines an IP address as an “intellectual property address” and wonder if the man in charge of Digital Britain is really up to the job?

The people’s hero?

One of the few politicians who came out of the Digital Economy Bill debate with any credibility was Labour’s Tom Watson, who not only voted against his own Government for the first time, but tabled several strong amendments to the bill (many of which he was forced to withdraw).

Yet, even the clued-up Watson was found woefully wanting when it came to debating the merits of sending out warning letters to people accused of illegal file sharing:

Watson: If someone has an ISP connection, the bill is likely to be sent to a postal address, which will allow more certainty. People receiving notifications by e-mail may not see them.

Mark Todd: Is my hon. Friend sure that a postal delivery will suffice? Many people may have chosen to form a contract with an ISP at some stage before moving, and may not have seen any particular reason to notify the ISP of a change of address.

Watson: My hon. Friend has identified a further flaw in the clause that I had not.

I’m loath to criticise Watson, because his valiant efforts to rescue this bill far outweighed his mistakes, but do these MPs live in the real world? How on earth do they think you can get a connection without informing your ISP of your new telephone number and address? With the exception of mobile broadband (which wasn’t what they were discussing) it’s simply not possible. If they can’t get even the basic detail right, it’s no wonder the bill ended up in such a state.

The lack of opposition

In case anyone thinks this is an outright attack on Labour, the Conservatives were every bit as culpable for the passing of this bill as the Government that sponsored it. The Tory benches were practically bereft of MPs for the entirety of the debates and only nine bothered to vote (four in favour, five against). So much for “the opposition”.

The Tory front bench, led by Adam Afriyie (Shadow Minister for Innovation, Universities and Skills), displayed absolutely breath-taking hypocrisy. At various times during the debate, Afriyie referred to the bill as a “cobbled-together mismatch” delivered at the “fag end of a Parliament” before issuing the following diatribe:

“After three Parliaments of digital dithering, they [the Government] have left us at the last minute with some botched legislation. This is a washed-up Bill from a washed-up Government.”

Afriyie was one of the 189 MPs who voted for the bill.

Purely for the sake of research, and by no means due to me putting it off for a number of weeks for no particular reason, I found myself going through the various steps between 10.30 and 11.30 last night. And it worked without a hitch.

Perhaps part of the reason is because HMRC has greatly simplified the procedure – for instance, I wasn’t forced to enter all the details of The Guardian when declaring the magnificent £75 I earned for a piece on its website – but perhaps a bigger reason is because the team behind the system has done an excellent job in load testing and simulating.

It’s great to see a company, or in this case public service, learn the lessons from previous problems and rare that they get praise for doing so. Somehow, I doubt HMRC will get as much attention this year as they did last: people love to read, talk and write about failure, whereas success just doesn’t make a good headline.

Which rather reflects life as an IT professional as a whole. Make a mistake, everyone notices. Get something right, nobody seems to give a damn.

So it will surprise absolutely no-one that a Government-commissioned report into so-called “next-generation access” has reached the heady conclusion that the Government would be best advised to do chuff all. 

“There is little evidence that, in the short term, UK consumers will experience a detriment due to the lack of an extensive NGA network,” concludes the report’s author, former Cable and Wireless boss, Francesco Caio. Perhaps he should try getting out a bit more, because if he ventured even 50 miles outside of his comfy London office and started talking to people on the edges of BT’s rural exchanges, he would have found plenty of homes and businesses that are struggling on sub 1Mb/sec connections.

This very morning, in fact, Cisco released a report that claimed only Japan has the broadband quality to cope with next-generation web apps. The UK fell below the threshhold required for today’s apps, let alone the ones coming round the corner. 

 The case for public funding is debatable; the fact that Britain’s broadband network remains woefully inadequate is indisputable. 

Seven months… that’s 213 days, 639 meals, five and half million breathes, 1,704 hours of sleep. Empires have fallen quicker than that.

Not to suggest that in the mean time I was ignored, oh no. Every couple of months or so I would get an email from one department or another apologising for the delay, explaining that my request was being dealt with by a roomful of chimps high on Fanta and that a response would be forthcoming next month. I’d wait – well, I’d forget, it’s kind of the same – and then Outlook would ping with another apology, another excuse, another faint smell of bananas, and I’d be deferred another month.

It became a running joke in the office, right up until last week when the selfish Government finally dispensed with my sport and sent my answer along – I quote.

“We can confirm there is no truth in the story that the Government is considering any scheme to implant prisoners with radio-tags to track their movements.”

That my friends, is bureaucracy in action.