Copywrong?

I’ve been looking around the Interwebs at diverse subjects like copyright protection and so on.

I visited the UK copyright service – They seem to exist in that borderland between governmental agency and free market economy. The advice is free, but the registration is actually quite expensive, considering you receive the same legal protection from mailing yourself something (despite their claims, it is considered just as effective by the judiciary that actually enforce the rules), although active registration numbers may put off a few big companies that think they can lawyer past the little guy.

Anyway I came across this  which is about registering websites for copyright. Yet another example of how the law lags so far behind the internet that they may as well be trying to legislate the usage of muskets against Spanish Man-O-Wars.

They think that a website should be as complete as possible before registering for copyright, and then all source materials should be bundled up in an archive of some sort and uploaded to them for registration. How early nineties is that. It seems that the entire concept of Web 2.0 completely passed them by, and this page was updated in 2009! I wonder whether when they started you had to print off the website and send them the documents?

If you update the site you’re meant to upload the details to them?! I won’t be registering my blog with them – that’s for freakin’ sure.

Man! How hard would it be for them to spider a site you selected themselves? You’re paying for this “service”. I mean, I could build a server-side php script to handle the spidering and a database to power it all in a little under a fortnight (including testing!).

Sometimes it just feels like those in charge not only don’t have a clue, but actively don’t want clues in case the cognitive dissonance created would impede their legislative procedure. You know the one:

1. Knee-jerk decision-making, without consultation and ideally directly counter to any advice they have received from think-tanks / consultants.
2. Leak decision to press.
3. Public outcry.
4. “Dukes of Hazzard” bootlegger U-turn. 
5. Stealth implementation of something worse under cover of the whole media $#!†  storm.