London, November 19th, 2009
News I Made Up Which Would Arguably Be Less Bad Than The Actual News. (2)
The Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson, today announced the creation of a new post to deal with the nuanced and difficult issue of copyright in the digital era. The Batshit Tsar will have a mandate to seek out anyone, anywhere who does anything using a computer and set them on fire.
Candidates for the post include Lord Duckhouse of Cobbham, Baroness Fishwicket (formerly BPI President Martin Cleep) and Brian Dubblehand-Pryce, Witchfinder General to the Court of James I & VIth, although there is some doubt over the availability of Mr Dubblehand-Pryce, as he is believed to have been dead for four hundred years.
Civil liberties campaigners have expressed alarm at the plan to make an offense of ‘downloading copyright material’. It is unclear how anyone will be able to use the internet ever again without committing a crime. A Department of Health spokesman said this would have the positive effect of getting people out in the open air.
“The Internet is a middle class, elitist phenomenon which is ruining our atomised society with a sense of community and cooperation,” he said. “This will put a stop to that, and to the development of the nascent public sphere which has given us so much trouble recently.”
The much-debated ‘three strikes’ policy will require a massive monitoring operation, trawling through the logs of anyone who uses a high-bandwidth connection to get large amounts of data to see if they are doing anything wrong. This sort of ‘fishing expedition’ is generally considered inadmissible in court, but since there will be no court for this sort of crime, the government is confident the issue will not arise.
“If we don’t do this,” the spokesman said, “we’ll almost certainly have an outbreak of witches by Christmas. There will be rains of frogs and giant panthers in Surrey, and even my tinfoil hat will not protect me from the brainwaves of Satan which are transmitted down the tubes of the Internet by demonic monkeys. The public has to be protected.”
Lorrie Fingerhubble, of the British Association of Giant Nocturnal Lizards, welcomed the news.
“I think this is absolutely splendid,” Ms Fingerhubble said enthusiastically from her secret undersea base in Regent’s Park. “It’s ideal for the government to be able to make arbitrary, draconian changes to the law which won’t work, will cost money, and will criminalise everyone. It’s a traditional approach to law in the UK: we make a rule no one can hope to obey and then prosecute people when we want to but not otherwise, creating a sense of lurking guilt and suspicion at all times!”
Asked whether the law might conceivably be misused to stifle democratic debate or to spy on people, the government spokesman said:
“Antelopes.”
