A text transcription follows.
This transcript is for anyone with a hearing impairment or who for any other reason cannot listen to the MP3 audio file.
The following is the text spoken by OUT-LAW journalist Matthew Magee.
Hello and welcome to OUT-LAW Radio, where we hope to keep you up to date with the latest news and the most fascinating features from the world of technology law.
My name is Matthew Magee, and this week we run the ruler over the Conservative Party's intriguing alternative to central government piles of our personal data.
But first, here are some of the top stories from OUT-LAW.COM, where you can read breaking technology law news throughout the week.
Lawyer claims copyright in briefs
and
Businesses back Europe's electronic VAT plans
A US lawyer has claimed that copyright is violated when courts pass legal submissions on to a commercial publisher. The lawyer claims that the US Courts' behaviour undermines the hundreds of hours of work put into submissions.
An intellectual property law expert at Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW, said that an exemption in UK copyright law would be likely to protect such publication of writs over here.
Edmond Connor of California law firm Connor, Fletcher and Williams has written to California's Chief Justice and its Administrative Director of Courts to demand that they stop passing submissions to legal publishers LexisNexis and Westlaw.
Pinsent Masons' Iain Connor says that publishers would be likely to be allowed to make such material available in the UK.
He said: "Copyright exists in a writ or a court filing in the usual way because they are original works. However, the legislation contains a 'fair use' exemption for work done both for the purposes of judicial or parliamentary proceedings and the reporting of them."
A business lobbying group has welcomed European commission VAT plans to apply the same rules to paper and electronic invoices. The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) says that the changes will make cross border business cheaper and easier.
The Commission has proposed that any electronic document could be sent as a VAT invoice as long as it fulfils basic formal requirements, such as the inclusion of the business's name and address.
The ICC said that it welcomed the Commission's proposal that paper and electronic VAT invoices be treated in the same way.
A statement said the proposal is to replace the current limited number of implementation options with technology-neutral requirements, allowing businesses to choose how they prefer to make their electronic invoicing processes robust and trustworthy.
The ICC said that existing rules about e-invoicing and VAT have hampered the growth of cross border trade.
Those were some of the top stories from this week's OUT-LAW News.
Politicians have always fought about the collection and allocation of resources: what should be taken from whom and how it should be spent is the very bedrock of any ideology.
But as parties fight over an increasingly crowded centrist fiscal ground, a new split is emerging that could end up being just as important for British society as disputes over tax policy. The split is over your personal data and who should control it.
The Labour Government of the past twelve years has embarked on an ambitious program which aims to increasingly automate public services.
It says that the way to make service delivery more efficient is to know more about you and make sure lots of different departments and agencies have access to that information. At the most basic level it will replace a lot of repetitive form filling; at a more sophisticated level it will result in what they call 'joined up government', where knowledge about your circumstances reduces costs and increases efficiencies when giving you the help you need.
It all seems to make sense. But there is an alternative view brewing in the Conservative Party. It isn't yet official party policy but it is being discussed at ever-more senior levels. That alternative plan says: don't have the state keep all the data it collects, give that data to the people it refers to and let them manage and store it out of the state's hands.
It is a radical departure from current government policy. The man behind the idea, Conservative councillor Liam Maxwell, explains the very different way that he and other Tories are thinking about our data.
Councillor Liam Maxwell: One of the big issues that really sparked this off and really got us going when we started talking about this was the Gersham and Vaana Reviews that were conducted by Brown and Blair and Vaana put across this idea that the government should own a deep truth about every citizen and should be able to provide that citizen with the services that the government thinks they want, is really complete anathema to our political way of thinking. We believe the government is there to serve the people and the best way of serving the people is to give people what they do want, not what the government thinks they want and the best way of providing what they do want is to have a real time view of what people’s data is as opposed to some sort of brave new world view of what the government thinks they should have and that is the real difference between really what the current Labour government’s view of how IT should work where you should control everything from the centre and the conservative view which is that localism and right down to the level of the individualism is the best way to deliver effective public services.
Maxwell says that the big centralised government data projects are expensive failures, that we don't get good value for the sixteen and a half billion pounds that goes on public sector IT every year.
Councillor Liam Maxwell: When we actually looked at the figures we discovered it was sixteen and a half billion pounds of money each year which is spent on government IT. Which is more than one per cent of gross domestic product which is just too much and it just does not make any sense and we are not getting sixteen billion pounds worth of value for the amount we are spending. That’s the first issue. The second issue which we realized from the Thompson Report was that we need to have open data standards between departments and between the infrastructures so that government can use the same infrastructure and re-use it effectively across the piece.
Government IT is organised around the premise that you can hold all the information at the centre and it will always be correct and as we did our research, we asked people about the data that the government held because different departments hold different amounts of data. The information is rarely up to date and if you look to the way you would run an organisation you would not start from here, you really need to allow people to own their data and allow their data to be accessed by government but they should have control over their data and that is how the best internet e-commerce businesses work and we believe that is how the best government systems can work.
So what is his plan? Well, he has looked at the way e-commerce companies treat the masses of data they now hold on us and has said: let's do that.
Councillor Liam Maxwell: If you buy something from Amazon, let’s say. Amazon’s partners have a huge long list of people who will sell to you and if you buy something from one of their partners they give your information at that time to their partner because under your request you have asked that partner to send it to you. So people can have access to your data but you actually control your data, which means that your data is kept up to date, your address is always up to date, all the information is stored in one place. We are proposing that government focus on what it should look at, which is putting together effective applications for people; we are suggesting that the data, your information is held by any one of say six data providers. Could be Experian, could be BUPA for health records, could be Google, could be Microsoft, some large data provider and that is where your data is stored. When you access government services the government applications interface with your data through an open standard and so that’s how we envisage it.
These providers would still be paid from the public purse to hold this data for us, but Maxwell says that this would be cheaper than existing government information storage.
Councillor Liam Maxwell: Data hosting is very, very cost effective if you are looking purely at the data hosting. If you are looking how much it costs Google to host all of your data at the moment you are talking about, you know, single figure pounds. Whereas hosting all your data within the government at the moment is hundreds of pounds. So it is actually a much cheaper cost to do that per person. Central government will pay that bill. It would be several orders of magnitude cheaper than they are paying at the moment.
So what are the actual benefits? Maxwell says that if we held and controlled our own data we would gain practical benefits because we could correct errors, and we would engage more with any problems highlighted by the data.
Councillor Liam Maxwell: We would envisage that the benefits that this provides in that it can help you manage your health. It allows people to interface and manage their own health issues. We anticipate the people that will really use this first will be the worried well. Those are people who want to use the information to manage also and work and look at their health profile with it. We do envisage a lot more people moving over as they start using extra functionality which this can provide.
Maxwell's plan would not give people control over information related to crime or to national security, and he says that private companies would be accountable through contractual obligations in the same way as private companies currently are when providing IT services for the public sector.
There have been some nerves about the security of handing our most precious information over to private companies, not least, according to reports, among senior conservatives like David Davis.
Maxwell says that the risks of major security breaches don't increase but decrease with the wider distribution of data.
Councillor Liam Maxwell: I mean this is in comparison to a government that lost everybody’s bank details. There are security concerns which we would need to address very thoroughly but the whole idea of having the data distributed in such a way makes it much more secure to start with because you cannot go and do a clean sweep and to pick up a huge amount in one go. There will need to be very strong security around the interface and the interface management, but this is not a deal breaker, this is stuff which is, it is just a job to do to make sure that security is there.
The data in question would be tax and employment information as well as health records, and Maxwell said the scheme should be 'opt in', which means that nobody's data would be taken out of the government's hands unless they specifically requested it.
People can be notoriously slow to opt in to anything, though, but Maxwell says that even if only a handful of people move his project will be a success because the real cost savings are in the adoption of open standards and not just in the remote storage of data.
Councillor Liam Maxwell: The great thing about the idea is that it only needs one person to go over to a different data provider and that means that you have to enforce the open standards data approach which leads to the reduction in costs. The big thing is the standards. So this is the route to go, the open standards that will reduce government IT costs.
That's all we have time for this week, thanks for listening. Why not get in touch with OUT-LAW Radio? Do you know of a technology law story you think we should cover? We'd love to hear from you on radio@out-law.com. Make sure you tune in next week; for now, goodbye.