Ed Vaizey gets challenged over music cartel meetings and the DEA

UK MINISTER Ed Vaizey has shaken more lobbyists' hands in the last twelve months than any of his colleagues, and unfortunately for those who oppose the Digital Economy Act those mitts belonged to those working on behalf of music and film publishers, monitoring friendly ISPs and others representing the interests of copyright holders rather than the UK public at large.

There is nothing wrong with having meetings, and of course ministers representing their citizens should lend an ear to any parties that want to influence lawmaking bodies or high level decisions. However, according to the Open Rights Group (ORG) Vaizey might favour one particular kind of advice when it comes to lending his sympathetic ear, that is, the kind that comes from well entrenched interests that want to crush media content downloaders and impose draconian laws to do that.

Referring to a report from the Whoslobbying website, which has scraped together information about parliamentary meetings and found Vaizey the person to be most likely to be out of the office at meetings, the Open Rights Group has suggested that those findings are "concerning".

"The site, by trawling and scraping PDFs and other documents, has assembled lobbying information from across government and published it for anyone to view in one easy place," it said. "More concerning is their conclusion that Ed Vaizey is the 'most lobbied minister' in the UK in the period May-Dec 2010."

This high position might be explained by the minister's regular round table meetings, the group conceded. However, it added that this did not excuse who the meetings were with.

"[It is] very disappointing that no meeting with any consumer or rights group took place in that time. Those views were effectively excluded from these discussions," said the ORG.

"Copyright groups, publishers and others clearly have throughout this period been discussing policies including website blocking, default blocks on adult sites and the 'progress' of the Digital Economy Act."

The Open Rights Group said that it was important that the minister and the government listen to all vested parties because of the complicated nature of what was at hand. Something that perhaps could have prevented the Act from being written in the first place or, Plan B, written as something that was fair and workable.

"Digital policy is complicated and requires balances to be struck, which is why we urge Ed Vaizey to make sure that he regularly listens to the views of citizen, consumer and rights organizations," it added.

The Departure for Culture, Media and Sport was contacted for comment, but had not responded by press time. µ