The economics of piracy

This is fascinating: Internet Regulation & the Economics of Piracy

Suppose the CEO of Wal-Mart came to Congress demanding a $50 million program to deploy FBI agents to frisk suspicious-looking teens in towns near Wal-Marts. A lawmaker might, without for one instant doubting that shoplifiting is a bad thing, question whether this is really the optimal use of federal law enforcement resources. The CEO indignantly points out that shoplifting kills one million adorable towheaded orphans each year. The proof is right here in this study by the Wal-Mart Institute for Anti-Shoplifting Studies. The study sources this dramatic claim to a newspaper article, which quotes the CEO of Wal-Mart asserting (on the basis of private data you can’t see) that shoplifting kills hundreds of orphans annually. And as a footnote explains, it seemed prudent to round up to a million. I wish this were just a joke, but as readers of my previous post will recognize, that’s literally about the level of evidence we’re dealing with here.

“Nothing else is worse than going to the cinema”

Luv & Hat is a funny blog by Stuart Heritage, who writes for The Guardian, and Robyn Wilder, who is a woman. Each post takes a single subject and one of the duo praises it while the other damns it. Today’s post on cinemas made me laugh.

Nothing else is worse than going to the cinema. Nothing else in the world. Having a nosebleed is better than going to the cinema. Falling down the stairs is better than going to the cinema. Catching a sexually transmitted disease from a zoo animal, then drinking a pint of someone else’s sick and then taking a naked tour of a wasp factory while a crying pensioner describes the last ten minutes of Requiem For a Dream to you in graphic detail is better than going to the cinema. The subtext of this paragraph is that I don’t really like going to the cinema very much.

“You’re all our bitches now”

Good news for the BPI: BT and TalkTalk’s appeal against the Digital Economy Act has been rejected. It turns out that the Act is perfectly fair and decent and nothing to worry about whatsoever.

Amazingly, I have an opinion about that.

“Shareholders and customers of BT and TalkTalk might ask why so much time and money has been spent challenging the act to help reduce the illegal traffic on their networks,” BPI boss Geoff Taylor said. “You’re all our bitches now.”

OK, he didn’t say that last bit. But it’s true all the same. If BT and TalkTalk don’t appeal, we’re stuffed.

Toy Story 3 made me blub

Don’t let the ridiculous range of Toy Story 3-themed adverts and product tie-ins – my favourite WTF so far is Toy Story 3 kitchen roll, and I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before someone brings out Toy Story 3-branded hammers, compost bins and surgical trusses – put you off; Toy Story 3 is a wonderful, magical film, and if you’re a parent you’ll cry like a baby throughout. Which can be a bit embarrassing.

Peter Bradshaw, in The Guardian, has a lovely way of describing it:

it’s an effortlessly superior family movie. We grownups, however, may have to gulp back our tears and somehow keep it together in front of the kids: just like the toys who revert to blank grins when their owners come back into the bedroom.

I saw it in 2D – it was my daughter’s first trip to the movies, and I figured the cinema experience was big and exciting enough without potentially scary 3D and fiddly specs – but I quite fancy seeing it again in three dimensions.

Remember that Digital Britain thing? Forget it. The government has

Me on Techradar:

Sometimes we think we’re living in Groundhog Day. “We’re going to cut off illegal downloaders!” the government will cry, before abandoning the plans. The next day, “We’re going to cut off illegal downloaders!” The next day… you get the idea.

Guess what’s happened today? That’s right! The government’s going to cut off illegal downloaders!

If you want to ban a film you ain’t seen, you ain’t no film critic

I was under the impression that a film critic’s job was to see films and then criticise them. How foolish of me! David sends me a link to this lovely piece in, yes, The Daily Mail:

You do not need to see Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (which is released later this week) to know how revolting it is.

I haven’t seen it myself, nor shall I – and I speak as a broad-minded arts critic, strongly libertarian in tendency. But merely reading about Antichrist is stomach-turning, and enough to form a judgment.

…If I were to see Antichrist, I don’t believe for a moment that it would incite me into copycat violent behaviour or make me a danger to others. But it would poison my mind and imagination, with explicit, ferocious scenes of sexual violence that would stay with me for ever.

Isn’t that good enough reason to ban it?

Movie magic

In among the not-entirely-surprising news that the new Lars Von Trier movie is a load of crap, I discovered this gem:

Last week, the Brazilian film Embodiment Of Evil opened in the UK, including scenes of somebody eating their own buttocks and a rat running up another character’s vagina.

Why not take the kids?

Cover me in axle grease and throw me to the sexbots

Sexy robots. Oh yes. Yours truly picks five lady robots, and T3′s Katherine Hannaford picks the boy-bots.

How good is Summer Glau? She’s so good that we’ll happily ignore Sarah Connor’s endless moaning and the fact that Glau is so thin her arms couldn’t contain a Duracell battery, let alone a robot skeleton. She’s gorgeous, and she rocks a short skirt in a way that – thankfully – Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t.

With photos, naturally.

Free costs money. Who’s going to pay for it? Er, you

Me, on Techradar:

We’re so used to the idea that everything online should be free that we don’t even think about it.

Of course the iPlayer should give us HD video for free. Of course Spotify should stream music for free. Websites? Free. News? Free. Video? Free. Software? Free.

There’s only one problem. Free costs money, and there isn’t enough of it.

The New Yorker on Watchmen

What a brilliant, brilliant review. Anthony Lane:

The bad news about “Watchmen” is that it grinds and squelches on for two and a half hours, like a major operation. The good news is that you don’t have to stay past the opening credit sequence—easily the highlight of the film.

As David Hepworth writes:

There’s something about a thunderingly negative review that makes it the most exhilarating of reading experiences. It might be as effective as taking a peashooter to a steam engine but the sound of that pea pinging off steel is nonetheless strangely warming. This particularly applies with huge blockbuster films because it helps to remind us that the bigger they are, the more likely it is that they are also absurd.