-Lavinia Carey is Chair of the Alliance Against IP Theft, and Director General of the British Video Association. The opinions expressed are her own. -

The proposals contained within the much anticipated Digital Economy Bill have prompted lively debate among politicians, industry and consumer groups. Unfortunately, some have characterised the debate as industry versus consumer, when in fact both industry and the consumer have an interest in reducing copyright theft.

The proposals will benefit millions of people, and significant consensus exists about the need to tackle the issue by first warning and ultimately taking action against those who distribute other people’s content online without permission.

Whilst some have criticised the Government’s proposals on temporary broadband account suspension this is one of a number of potential measures, implemented only after due process and a robust appeals process, which may be used as a last resort against those who have ignored multiple warnings and continue to persist in illegal file-sharing. Research also shows the important role the existence of such a deterrent has to play in changing people’s behaviour.

Equally, most parents would surely welcome a warning that alerted them to the fact that the activities of their children were exposing the whole family to security breaches. That is what happens when people file-share – the software they download to access illicit music or film files, for example, also provides access to other users to all the files on their computer, some of which may contain very personal and private information and it’s a great propagator of malware and viruses.

Many internet users find broadband speeds unsatisfactory, particularly during the heaviest use of bandwidth by file-sharers between the hours of 6pm and midnight, so consumers who use legitimate services will probably welcome the fall in illegal traffic, which significantly contributes towards congestion on the networks.

Those who rely on the creative economy for their livelihood, including musicians, directors, software developers, lighting and camera operators, make-up artists, costumiers, designers, producers, grips, writers and sound engineers to name just a few deserve to have their creativity protected. They are consumers too. If they are not properly rewarded for their work, our creative economy will suffer. This is not something our country can afford to risk. This is one of the fastest growing industries in the UK, 8 percent of GDP, and in many parts of the sector we justifiably lead the world.

We must not fall into the trap of accepting that an illegal and damaging practice has to continue just because it has become normalised among certain groups. Quite the reverse is true. It is the job of Government and Parliament to make sure that the public has access to and can enjoy the opportunities presented by a Digital Britain, that no section of our society is excluded from those opportunities, and that those who make it possible are properly rewarded for their innovation.

Ahead of a U.N. summit in Copenhagen next month, scepticism is growing that an agreement will be reached on a global climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, due to expire in 2012.

The protocol set targets aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which are believed to be responsible for the gradual rise in the Earth’s average temperature. Many scientists say that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is key to preventing climate change.

But authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner argue in their new book SuperFreakonomics that humanity can take an alternative route to try and save the planet.

“If the goal is to stop warming then geo-engineering solutions are worth considering because they are far cheaper, probably much more do-able and easily reversible,” Dubner told Reuters before a talk at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London.

Related vlog: How to become a freakonomist

-Jane Foley is research director at Forex.com. The opinions expressed are her own.-

A month or so ago, there was a lot of talk that risk appetite would be pared back over the coming months. This talk was built around relatively cautious expectations for economic growth in most of the G-10 next year.

These cautious projections still stand. However, it is interesting that the risk trade suffered only a brief decline following the shock rise in the U.S. unemployment rate to 10.2 percent and the surprisingly strong fall in the University of Michigan confidence index.

Comments this week from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warning about “headwinds” that still face the U.S. economy have led to some paring back of risk but with poor economic data unable to cause a reversal of the uptrend in equities it seems that the risk trade is yet to exhibit many signs of tiredness.

The ability of markets to cast aside weak U.S. economic data centres on the outlook for Fed rates. Weak data is feeding the notion that Fed rates will stay lower for longer and this, it seems, is feeding appetite for risk.

The ability of the risk trade to remain undeterred by weak U.S. data feeds the accusation that the Fed is facilitating the risk trade and the dollar remains a preferred funding currency.

While the USD may be acting as the preferred funding currency, low interest rates are affecting investment decisions everywhere. Latest data from the UK’s Investment Management Association (IMA) confirm a bias away from cash into higher yielding assets.

In each of the 6 months to September 2009, private investors have ploughed more than 2 billion pounds into funds. Not only that, but in September this year equity fund purchases overtook corporate bond fund purchases for the first time since 2007.

This highlights that despite fears that economic growth rates in the US, UK and Eurozone will remain below trend for the next couple of years, that the lack of return on cash is spurring savers to take more risk.

Savings rates in the U.S., UK and the Eurozone are on the rise. Individuals are saving more in response to fear of unemployment and also to make up for wealth lost during the economic crisis. While bond markets have benefitted a great deal this year from flows diverted from cash due to lack of return, the data from the IMA suggests that a trend that favours equities could be emerging.

The healthy recovery this year in major stock markets and gains in some commodity prices is no guarantee of future performance. Even so, it is feasible that these rises could be contributing to the decisions of many savers to increase the amount of risk in their portfolios (the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has rallied 61 percent in dollar terms from its March low).

If this is correct, then it is right to consider at what stage persistent low rates by the Fed and other central banks can be linked with the beginnings of asset price bubbles.

researchEMEA@forex.com

Scientists argue that rich nations must make drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous climate change. The way energy is used, priced and created would have to change in order to institute these cuts.

Ahead of elections in Britain, which must be held before June 2010, Dave Timms of Friends of the Earth shared his thoughts with Reuters on what the group thinks the next government needs to do in order to build a low-carbon economy.

-Steven Barnett is professor of communications at the University of Westminster and has written extensively about the Sky deal and cricket for the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. The opinions expressed are his own.-

David Davies’ review panel on UK sport’s “crown jewels” – the list of sporting events which have to be reserved for free-to-air television – has proposed adding significantly to the existing list of 10 events.

Most controversially it wants to see cricket’s Ashes Test matches, part of the package sold to Sky five years ago, back on mainstream television. Given its terms of enquiry, the Davies panel’s report was bound to be either lame or contentious. Thankfully, they have chosen contentious.

We’ll be hearing some cries of anguish from Sky over the next few weeks, but that’s to be expected. BSkyB’s hugely successful business model depends on exclusive access to sport, and you can’t blame Rupert Murdoch for understanding long ago the commodity value of exclusive live sport on television. He famously told an annual meeting of News Corp in 1996 that sport was to be the “battering ram” for expansion of his global pay television network.

And Sky does it brilliantly: three sports channels, pioneering innovations in coverage and much more domestic and international sport on offer than than ever before. But this array of sporting choice comes at a price – in excess of 600 pounds per year if you want it all. Most people don’t: pay TV in Britain is still a minority activity.

That shifts the focus of responsibility to the sports bodies – and this is where the real challenge lies. Can they be trusted to represent the wider public interest of universal audience access for their blue riband events?

Increasingly the answer is no, as cricket eloquently demonstrated. The county game was struggling and Sky made an offer in 2004 that no terrestrial broadcaster could reasonably match. Result: Test cricket vanished from most viewers’ screens, and a peak viewing figure of 7.4 million on Channel 4 when England won the Ashes in 2005 plunged to just 1.9 million this year on Sky – beaten even by the 2.3 million who were watching Songs of Praise on BBC1 at the same time.

Exactly the same happened in Ireland when rugby’s Heineken Cup switched from Irish national broadcaster RTE to Sky Sports 3 years ago and an audience of 255,000 fell to 47,000. When a sport migrates from free-to-air to subscription television, there is a simple algorithm: it will lose around three quarters of its audience.

Does it matter? In a debate dominated by sports governing bodies and the big beasts of pay TV, the arguments of ordinary sports fans tend to be drowned out. So here are three examples of the cultural damage of allowing major events to migrate to pay TV.

First, it removes major sport from exposure to the maximum number of people. Television fuels participation and aspiration, particularly of children. Public tennis courts are full during Wimbledon fortnight, and I have lost count of the number of eventual sporting champions who describe the moment they saw an inspirational performance on television which galvanised them into excelling at that particular sport. Even a few minutes of peak-time mass audience exposure can have an astonishing impact on generating popular interest.

Second, there is the shared national experience, where great sporting events create and cement a sense of national identity. Even non sports fans recognise a tangible feel- good factor that follows national sporting success. And many commented on how this year’s Ashes success was a damp squib compared to four years ago.

Third, those most likely to be deprived of access to these major sporting events are the most disadvantaged sections of society – pensioners, the low paid, the unemployed, the disabled. Do we believe as a nation that this is fair?

We will hear plenty of claims from sports bodies about the huge investment in grass roots initiatives being funded by television’s money, some of which will be true. But they all managed before Sky arrived, and there is a compelling response to this much-repeated argument from the other side of the world.

Australia has listed every rugby league and union test match, every Ashes test match and one-day international in Australia; every round of the Australian and British golf opens; Wimbledon and the Australian Open tennis championships; and even international netball matches. Not to mention soccer, motor racing, the Melbourne Cup and the Commonwealth Games.

That’s a population one third the size of ours which is hardly noted for its lack of sporting success or grass-roots participation. It’s a nation that understands the cultural significance of sport and the role of universal free to air television in driving that culture. It’s time we did the same in Britain.

- Phelim Kine is an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. The opinions expressed are her own. -

When 15-year-old Wang Xiaomei made the long trip from Gansu province to Beijing last year, she hoped to find justice for her family. Instead, she met with abuse.

First, Wang was abducted by plainclothes Gansu officials, who imprisoned her incommunicado for two months in a “black jail”—an illegal detention facility.

Two days before her September 13, 2008 release, Wang’s captors beat her so badly they knocked out one of her teeth. Wang’s victimizers have never been brought to justice.

Worse still, Wang’s experience—which stands in stark contrast to the Chinese government’s claims of fealty to the rule of law—is not unique. A new Human Rights Watch report released today, “An Alleyway in Hell: China’s Abusive ‘Black Jails’,” exposes the routine and severe human rights abuses perpetrated against detainees in these secret facilities.

Our research shows that Wang is just one of estimated thousands of people abducted off the streets of Chinese cities and held incommunicado for weeks or months. Inside these unlawful, secret detention facilities detainees are beaten, sexually abused, deprived of food, sleep and medical care, and subject to theft, extortion and intimidation at the hands of their guards.

And, as Wang’s case shows, children aren’t spared the dangers and indignities of black jail detention. These facilities exist outside of China’s official prison system, and are often located in state-owned hotels, nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals.

The former black jail detainees we interviewed were petitioners–people from mainly rural areas who come to Beijing and other cities in search of legal redress for violations including illegal land seizures and police torture. The petitioning system, which exists in parallel to formal judicial structures, is entirely legal, and explicitly permits people to take their grievances to the highest levels of government.

So why are petitioners being treated this way? Black jails emerged in 2003 after the Chinese government abolished laws permitting the arbitrary detention of any “undesirables.” But that progress was undercut by the introduction at the local level of guidelines that limit local officials’ prospects for promotions or raises if petitioners from their areas carried on their efforts to find justice in larger cities.

What might have been intended as an incentive to make local officials deal with local grievances became an incentive for those officials to keep petitioners off the streets and invest considerable resources in achieving that goal. Plainclothes thugs commonly known as retrievers, or jiefang renyuan, locate and abduct petitioners in Beijing and other cities for bounties as high as $250 per person. Operators of black jail facilities reap daily cash payments from local governments of up to $29 per detainee, helping to perpetuate black jail abuses.

Rather than crack down on these facilities, the central Chinese government denies that they even exist. In an April 2009 Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference, a MOFA official responded to a foreign correspondent’s query about black jails by insisting, “Things like this do not exist in China.”

In June 2009, the Chinese government asserted in the Outcome Report of the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission’s Universal Periodic Review of China’s human rights record that, “There are no black jails in the country.”

Such denials make a mockery of the commitment in the first-ever National Human Rights Action Plan that, “The Chinese government unswervingly pushes forward the cause of human rights in China.” The Chinese government’s credibility would be considerably enhanced by acknowledging that black jails do indeed exist, shutting them down, liberating detainees, and bringing the perpetrators to justice.

External actors also have a role to play. Many governments and international organizations fund Chinese legal reform projects, and they too should demand that the Chinese government put an end to these abuses and that their victims be fairly compensated.

No less a civil rights and legal aid luminary than U.S. President Barack Obama, who will make his first trip as President to China on November 16-18, has a golden opportunity to raise the cases of black jail detainees and explain that an independent judicial system in China is of significant consequence to U.S.-China relations.

He should also repeat to his Chinese hosts–and the Chinese people—his September 2009 message to the United Nations General Assembly: “True leadership will not be measured by the ability to muzzle dissent, or to intimidate and harass political opponents at home.”

-Jane Foley is research director at Forex.com. The opinions expressed are her own.-

November meetings of leaders from the Group of 20 industrialized nations may not have had exchange rates on the agenda, but the notes prepared by the International Monetary Fund included some meaty foreign exchange references.

The first is the view that although the dollar has moved closer to medium-term equilibrium it “still remains on the strong side”.  The second is the (widely held) view that the dollar “is now serving as the funding currency for carry trades” which has contributed to upward pressure on the euro.

The third was the acknowledgement that the Chinese renminbi has depreciated in real effective terms and remains significantly undervalued from a medium-term perspective.  To deal with the latter the IMF prescribed the usual recipe; namely that “exchange rate appreciation would help limit capital flows” and “facilitate a shift towards domestic consumption that is needed in many emerging economies, notably those with large external surpluses”.

None of the points put forward by the IMF on foreign exchange are ground breaking.  However, the fact that the IMF judged it appropriate to outline these issues ahead of the G20 meetings is suggestive of the economic and thus political relevance of these issues.  China’s exchange rate peg is clearly at the forefront of these issues.

Also significant is the IMF’s mention of the upward pressure on the euro, which could be seen as acknowledging that the euro (along with the yen) is bearing the brunt of the dollar’s downward adjustment.  By recognising that the dollar is “still on the strong side”, the IMF may be warning that the upward pressure on the euro may have further to run.

Now that the euro/dollar is back at 1.500, the market will again begin to wonder whether at some point the authorities may act to stem the appreciation of the euro/dollar.  Intervention in euro/dollar cannot be completely ruled out but it remains a remote possibility because it would avoid the real issue.  The dollar’s decline is being driven by inflows into higher yielding markets which is unlikely to be turned around by intervention in euro/dollar as long as the market is forecasting low Fed rates and as long as risk appetite holds.  The rise in the euro vs the dollar is merely a symptom of these flows but the appreciation of the effective euro (and that of the yen) is being compounded by the fact that as the euro rises vs the dollar it also rises vs the renminbi.   At present, the effective euro exchange rate is creeping back to its December 2008 high which represents an all time high.   Rather than seek to rebalance euro/dollar, officials should be increasing pressure on China to address its policy regarding its exchange rate.

It is not just the Europeans and the Japanese that should be worried about the impact of non-flexible exchange rate policies.  The World Bank last week warned that asset price bubbles in parts of Asia are being driven by a rapid increase in equity and house prices notably in China, Hong Kong and Singapore.

The World Bank advised that policy should be tightened by “removing some of the support for liquidity in domestic and foreign currencies”.  Calls for the breaking of some exchange rate pegs within Asia are becoming more commonplace and China’s size will mean that its exchange rate policy will garner most attention.

The issue of exchange rate flexibility in parts of Asia is promising to be one of the most dominant foreign exchange topics of 2010 and President Obama’s visit to Beijing this week could kick it back into the headlines.
ResearchEMEA@forex.com

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, sees a long, hard road back to the path we thought we were on before the financial crisis broke. Just how long is shown by  Chart 2 in Wednesday's Quarterly Inflation Report. The Bank's Monetary Policy Committee does not expect Britain's GDP to return to its peak, 2007, level until 2011, and there's an outside chance that even in 2012, the country's output will be no more than it was in 2006.

This "considerable period" of "sustained weakness of demand" is why the MPC's other fan chart, the "rivers of blood" projections of inflation, looks so benign. The best guess (sorry, "central projection") is plumb on the 2 percent target for the CPI in 2012. We all know, said the Governor, that inflation is going to jump in January, thanks to the combination of dearer fuel and rising VAT, but after that, it should slide gracefully back, wobbling around the target for the next three years.

Key to this projection is the belief that the UK economy could produce a lot more if the demand was there, and the report shows evidence of much effort to try and support this conclusion. Unemployment is one clear indicator of spare capacity, assuming some sort of match between the demands of consumers and the abilities of those without jobs.

More worrying, though, is the dramatic cutback in business investment, as companies have had to put survival ahead of expansion. Some have lost the battle, and others are sufficiently chastened to avoid becoming beholden to their lenders, even if it means passing up attractive opportunities.  The report points out that capital spending fell 10 percent in the second quarter, and the Bank expects it to fall further. Re-stocking should boost output, but it's hardly a sound basis for sustainable growth.

The Bank effectively assumes that whoever's in charge at the other end of town will adminster the necessary fiscal medicine: "stabilising the ratio of public sector debt to GDP will require a combination of a reduction in government spending and a rise in taxation as a share of GDP." This will subdue consumer spending, which will help keep inflation down, but even so, the central projection in the report looks ambitious.

Last year's sterling weakness has probably worked through by now, but the pound does not look conspicuously cheap. Commodity prices are uncomfortably strong, and companies will surely rebuild profit margins before trying to expand sales. Looming over all this, unspoken, is the vast, chronic trade imbalance that the West has with the East. As the Governor did not say: We have not even begun down this particular long hard road.

Welcome to our live coverage of the 1pound40 conference, a joint endeavour by Reuters and the Amplified network which brings together users of Twitter to discuss the idea that social media has evolved to the point that it can help solve real world problems.

Attendees will also be discussing whether the power of Twitter can be harnessed to improve the news and help re-engage a jaded electorate with the political process.

You can read more details about the conference and who is attending on our original blog post. We will be bringing you minute-by-minute highlights from the discussion (including video, audio and pictures) on the potential for social media. But you don’t have to be there to contribute — leave a comment on the blog below if you have something you want to say. To track the conversation about the event then follow the 1pound40 hashtag on Twitter.

You can also check out this Twitter list set up by delegates and contributors or follow an unmoderated stream of this on a second live blog on the right hand side of this page. Finally, you can also follow a visualisation of proceedings in this ‘conversation cloud’.

What do you do when you are trained as an economist, but find economics too complex?

Become a freakonomist, of course.

Steven D. Levitt, co-author of  the freshly published  SuperFreakonomics, decided to “take the tools of economics and apply them to the kind of questions that no self-respecting economist would ever want to be related to — like: does the name that you give your children affect their life outcomes; what are the underlying economics of prostitution; or, is your estate agent ripping you off?”

Levitt, who teaches economics at the University of Chicago, co-wrote SuperFreakonomics and an earlier book titled Freakonomics with New York journalist Stephen J. Dubner.

Before a talk at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London, Levitt explained to Reuters how he became a freakonomist.

Related vlog: A freakonomic view of climate change