jonathan.rawle.org

This week has seen the disgraceful case of a woman, Linda Buchanan, being pushed onto a railway line by two young men, apparently after she had reminded them that smoking isn’t allowed on stations. Interviews the following day give a slightly different version of events, suggesting that Mrs Buchanan had spoken to them about smoking on a previous day, and that on Wednesday, the same two men had made obscene gestures at her as she walked past. She suggested they should grow up, at which point they pushed her.

The fact that smokers become so irritable when they are not allowed to smoke anywhere at any time, or when someone reminds them that they are breaking the law by smoking, is simply an indication of how they are addicted to smoking. They may not realise it, and claim they are simply angry at being “persecuted”, yet addiction lies at the core.

Of course, the “have your say” sections of online news articles have brought out some despicable views, such as people saying it “Serves her right for not minding her own business”. So there are people who think that asking someone not to smoke in an area where it is illegal, or even, as in this case, asking someone to grow up for making rude gestures, is a valid reason for pushing her onto a railway track where she could easily have been electrocuted or run over by a train. It isn’t even as if it was “not her business” – that would only be the case if the men were alone on the platform, and the lady had been driving down the street in her car and had stopped especially to speak to them. As it was, Mrs Buchanan was waiting on the platform, an area where smoking is illegal under the railway by-laws, where she had every right to expect to wait in clean air, unaffected by tobacco smoke. For most of the history of railway stations, people were allowed to smoke where they liked, and anyone who didn’t wish to breathe in the smoke had to move to another part of the platform. That was something non-smokers had to accept, as smoking was permitted. Now times have changed, and it’s no longer legal to smoke on the platform, so it is the smokers’ turns to face a slight inconvenience while waiting at the station.

Another way of looking at it is, if anyone really believes it is OK to push someone (even if not deliberately onto a railway line) for just asking someone not to smoke, why isn’t it equally as valid to take action when someone is smoking, or carrying out some other sort of anti-social behaviour? Equivalent actions could be snatching a cigarette, or throwing water over the person. Of course, none of these actions is acceptable. But how has society become such that so many people believe any sort of behaviour is OK, no matter how unpleasant or antisocial it is, and that the only thing that is taboo is politely asking someone not to do something that’s bothering others?

This doesn’t only apply to smoking, but also dropping litter, using loud, obscene and abusive language, harassing a lone woman, or playing music out loud instead of using headphones. The same people again will complain that the country has too many laws restricting what people can do, with too many on-the-spot fines. The reason is that people are too inconsiderate now, and take no account of how their actions affect anyone else around them. They believe they have a right to do what they want, never mind what that means for other people. Selfish people are the reason for more laws.

If we want to live in a pleasant, clean environment where people feel safe travelling on public transport, we need more people to stand up to yobs and louts. We need more Mrs Buchanans. The first course of action can be to find a member of railway staff, but failing that, I for one shall continue to remind people that smoking isn’t allowed on platforms (naturally explaining that I wouldn’t like them to be fined for their honest mistake); and I shall continue to politely call after people who have dropped something on the pavement, in case it was something they wanted, of course. There’s no need to be confrontational. But at the same time, we can’t allow out society to turn into one where yobs spoil places for everyone else just because no-one will stand up to them.

The EU Commission is proposing an extension to copyright on sound recordings, the same idea having been rejected by the UK government last year. At present, copyright on a recording lasts for 50 years, after which it enters the public domain. The proposal is for the copyright to be extended to 95 years.

Unsurprisingly, the proposal is being backed by big names in the music world such as Sir Cliff Richard, whose first recording will go out of copyright next year, and Sir Paul McCartney, with the Beatles’ first recordings currently set to enter the public domain in 2013.

It’s important to understand that this proposal concerns recordings, and not the copyright on original compositions or lyrics. Copyright on those lasts for life plus 70 years, in recognition of the creativity put into producing an original work. This is quite different from simply performing someone else’s work. A singer who is talented enough to write his own songs should be less concerned about the copyright on the recordings as he (or his estate) will continue to receive royalties from the work itself.

An actor on stage, whether in Stratford or the West End, will be paid for the performance, then that’s it. The same is true of a musician performing live. There is no further income after the performance has finished. When an architect designs a new building, he is paid a fee for the work. Neither he, nor the engineers and building contractors who actually build it, will receive royalties every time someone looks at the building, or from the people who use it.

This is just an attempt by the music industry, and from a few big-name artists, to grab even more money when they have made enough already. If the so-called stars want a pension, they should make sure they put aside some of their income to provide for them in old age, just as everyone else has to, instead of spending it on an extravagant lifestyle. I can’t imagine either Sir Cliff or Sir Paul is living on the poverty line. And as for the argument that they are doing this on behalf of all the small-time artists and backstage staff, the fact is that most of these had to sign away their rights to royalties to the record company in order to receive the modest session fee they were paid at the time.

Copyright has historically been a balance between the rights of those producing the works and the public, allowing artists to have a chance to profit from their work, while ensuring it can still be enjoyed and built upon in the way it historically always has been. The greed of those calling for the change in the law can not be allowed to destroy this principle. The new law would mean people could no longer share or enjoy old recordings that have long since been deleted from record companies’ catalogues, be they of rock and roll, or classical performances by long-dead conductors.

The proposal still has to be agreed by the Council of Ministers and European Parliament, and the latter in particular has been known to listen to the people on similar issues such as software patents. To help defeat the extension of copyright, please sign the petition against it.

In July 2006, another Wikipedia user left a message on my talk page to say that he had begun an article on renowned Leicester space physicist Ken Pounds, and noting that I was a Leicester physicist, invited me to contribute to the article. Although I was reluctant to write about someone I vaguely knew, the article as it stood wasn’t brilliant, so I decided to expand it. As when writing any other article for Wikipedia, I took information from a number of sources on the web and provided links to them at the end of the article.

A couple of weeks ago, the question came up of whether Ken Pounds was the first chief executive of PPARC. I couldn’t remember, but knew the answer would be in his Wikipedia article. I was quite surprised to find the article had been deleted. I checked the log for the article, and found it had been deleted by a Wikipedia administrator called Refdoc with the comment that is was a “blatant copyright violation”, and giving a link to a report by the Irish Higher Education Authority entitled Research Infrastructure in Ireland - Building for Tomorrow.

Initially, I suspected someone might have pasted a load of text into the article from the report, but wondered why Refdoc couldn’t have reverted to an older version of the article. However, when I checked the Irish HEA’s report, I discovered that they had actually copied the Wikipedia article word for word and used it as a biography for Prof Pounds, who is on the steering committee that produced the report. Thus the biography in the report uses my words to explain that it’s a “rare distinction” to be awarded an honorary degree by the institution one works at (or at least I think they’re my words – it seems the University have also been reading Wikipedia, re-worded in their case, for material promoting the Alumni Association Lecture 2008). The report also contains the slightly obscure statement that someone added to Wikipedia, that “one of [Ken's] many discoveries is that Black holes are common in the Universe.”

I know I wrote the article in summer 2006, shortly after I was contacted by the other user. I checked the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and indeed, it had archived the article in September 2006. From this archived version, it is clear that the text is identical to that in the HEA report. Yet the report was only published in December 2006! While I personally already knew the text was originally from Wikipedia, I thought the evidence I’d found would surely convince anyone else. Yet Refdoc refused the re-instate the article, accusing me of being a user with “poor respect for copyrights” and saying he had little reason to believe me. He clearly hadn’t looked at the internet archive version. That comes as no surprise, as a little investigation before he deleted the article in the first place would have revealed that the Wikipedia article existed before the HEA report. The Wikipedia edit history would also have shown that it was written and improved over a number of edits by different people, rather than copied wholesale from anywhere else. Therefore Refdoc is clearly not a particularly thorough administrator on Wikipedia.

I have now initiated Wikipedia’s Deletion review process, and at the time of writing there is a consensus that the article was wrongly deleted. Hopefully the article will be reinstated by next week.

This episode brings up an interesting point about Wikipedia. They have a strict policy when it comes to copyright, where copying directly from another source is not allowed. But as more and more documents copy text from Wikipedia, it’s going to become harder to tell which was the original source. I think the Irish HEA’s report probably violates the GFDL, as they are supposed to credit Wikipedia, and also to license any document that builds upon a GFDL’d document under the same licence. They haven’t done so, and while I’m sure that I and the other contributors don’t object to our work being used, failure to include an acknowledgement has ultimately resulted in it being us who were accused of breaching copyright.

As for Wikipedia administrators, candidates for that role will have to be prepared to put in a lot of work to investigate suspected copyright violations, as more and more will be false alarms. Anyone who isn’t prepared to do that isn’t fit to be an administrator. In the future it’s going to be more important to check the history of an article, and look for any other evidence to determine who has copied whom.

Now, I wonder how many of my other contributions to Wikipedia have been deleted while I wasn’t looking…

Update: the article on Ken Pounds was reinstated the same day.

Today the Chancellor finally announced what the measure would be to compensate people who have lost out due to the income tax changes. They are going to give all basic rate taxpayers an extra £120 by raising the personal tax allowance by five times that amount. That was the solution to the problem that I suggested nearly two weeks ago.

I’m glad the government have seen sense, and are rectifying their mistake in this way, rather than introducing some new, complex system of benefits or credits. They are also adjusting the 40% tax band so that higher-rate taxpayers won’t receive extra money. However, they aren’t going to lower the threshold so as so bring enough people into the band to pay for the tax cut at the lower rate. Instead, the tax cut is going to cost £2.7 billion.

Ominously, the BBC report that people will gain £120 this year. We should be under no illusions that this will be a permanent tax cut. Next year, the personal allowance won’t increase nearly as much as it would have done, and over time, further reduced increases in the allowance will mean that the £2.7 billion is eventually clawed back. But as no-one can know what the increases would have been without today’s announcement, they won’t be able to complain about losing out. The amount of tax collected will be the same in the end, but I suppose at least low earners won’t be hit with a big increase in tax all at once.

Unfortunately for the Labour Party – and Brown and Darling in particular – I don’t think this measure will do anything for their electability. They are already badly damaged by the original policy error. Maybe a change in leadership is needed before the next election.

Last week the government seemingly did a u-turn over the scrapping of the 10 pence rate of income tax, although it is far from clear what form the compensation will take for people on lower incomes who will lose out under the new tax regime.

It’s difficult to see how the government could have thought it a good idea to change taxes so that everyone gains except those who earn £15,000 or less a year, who will lose out by anything up to £150. This is obviously very unfair, and hits those people for whom £100–150 is a lot of money.

The desire to simplify the taxation system is a worthy one. However, removing one band of income tax wasn’t really the best place to start. What makes the tax system too complex is the system of tax credits, which is supposed to compensate people who have been failed by the system in the first place. Surely it would be far better to have a fairer base system of taxation, rather than having tax credits as corrections – which are so difficult to understand that millions of pounds go unclaimed each year. Unfortunately, the “compensation” which the government has promised people who have lost out following the abolition of the 10p rate will undoubtedly be yet another type of tax credit (if it materialises at all).

Perhaps a better solution would be to raise everyone’s tax-free personal allowance by £750. That would mean everyone would gain £150 that would otherwise have been paid in tax at the 20p rate. To recoup the loss in revenue, the government could lower the threshold at which the higher rate of tax is paid – the actuaries will have to figure out that one, as it requires knowledge of the distribution of salaries across the whole population. This solution would result in an equally simple system of tax thresholds (0, 20p, 40p) but be fairer in that those on the lowest incomes would pay a little less, and high-earners a little more.

Monthly bank charges would hit low earners

Also in the news this week was that UK banks have lost the first stage of the case against account penalty charges. The judge has ruled that the Office of Fair Trading can decide on the fairness of charges. As I have said before, if penalty charges are outlawed completely, the banks might respond by introducing monthly account charges, which would be bad for all customers.

As has been reported in the last week, people on low incomes would be hit hard by the abolition of the 10p starting rate of income tax. For those people, the loss of £100 or so per year is highly significant. Therefore, if they suddenly had to pay £10 per month simply for having a bank account, that would hit them just as hard. Yet that could be the result of the “crusade” against penalty charges. The result could be that people will be forced to close their bank accounts, dividing the population into two classes: those who can afford bank accounts, and those who can not. That seems far from fair.

It simply isn’t the case that people on low incomes currently pay penalty charges and those on higher incomes don’t. Many people on low incomes manage their money extremely carefully and avoid going overdrawn, just as their grandparents did before living off credit seemed the norm. It isn’t fair to penalise people just because others have been careless enough to incur account fees.

I still hope that a ruling against penalty charges by the Office of Fair Trading will not result in monthly account charges for everyone. However, if it does, we could see people on low incomes being hit just has hard as they have been by the abolition of the 10p income tax rate.