If not to buy Apple, what’s the substitute – Samsung? Don’t you know that Samsung’s products are from its OEM factory in Tianjin? Samsung workers’ income and benefits are even worse than those at Foxconn. If not to buy iPad – (do you think) I will buy Android Pad? Have you ever been to the OEM factories for Lenovo and ASUS? Quanta,
Compaq … factories of other companies are all worse than those for Apple. Not to buy iPod – (do you think) I will buy Aigo, Meizu? Do you know that Aigo’s Shenzhen factory will not pay their workers until the 19th of the second month? If you were to quit, fine, I’m sorry, your salary will be withdrawn. Foxconn never dares to do such things. First, their profit margin is higher than peers as they manufacture for Apple. Second, at least those foreign devils will regularly audit factories. Domestic brands will never care if workers live or die. I am not speaking for Foxconn. I am just speaking as an insider of this industry, and telling you some disturbing truth.

Is this really how we want our tech toys to be made?

Photographers who compose a picture in a similar way to an existing image risk copyright infringement, lawyers have warned following the first court ruling of its kind.

The images in question are here (PDF) if you fancy a look.

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.

There are two kinds of copying. There’s good copying, and there’s bad copying.

(This is a long post, so I’ve split it so it doesn’t overpower the entire home page)

Good copying doesn’t harm, and might just help. Good copying is when somebody enjoyed the book and passed it on to someone else, or when someone enjoyed it on Kindle and wants to convert it to a different format for a different device, or wants to print it out, or whatever. None of these things harm me, and they might just help: someone who enjoys Coffin Dodgers now, for free, might recommend me to someone who buys it, or they might buy the sequel.

My take on it is that I wrote Coffin Dodgers because I wanted it to be read. Of course I’d like to make some money out of it, but that isn’t my main concern (although unlike many other writers, I can afford to say that because I already have a job).

As Michael Marshall says in the post I linked to earlier on:

of course a little bit of this is not the end of the world and of course a degree of laxity with regard to sharing materials is part of how the net works and what makes it the extraordinary resource that it is

As I say, I don’t have a problem with it – anyone who’s spent any time at all hanging around this blog or reading my columns will know that I’m against draconian internet regulation, and that I think the claims of damage due to piracy are usually massively overblown.

The problem, though, is that there are bastards out there. Hello, bad copying.

Bad copying has a financial component: it’s when copies are provided for money, and the creator doesn’t get anything. The sites I’ve found offering Coffin Dodgers – or at least, claiming to; I’m buggered if I’m going to join up to find out if they have the book or not – run ads and charge for membership. It’s not much, but you can see why the copyright industries go crazy when they see sites linking almost exclusively to illegal content pulling in hundreds of thousands of pounds in ad revenues. I covered a case recently where, in just three years, the owner of one website made a claimed £147,000 from selling ad space around links to copyrighted content.

Piracy isn’t generally speaking an ethical decision, but a financial one: people pirate because free is cheaper than any price tag, and because they’ll get away with it. Personally I’m a fan of downloading leaked albums I’ve pre-ordered in CD format or on iTunes, or TV programmes I forgot to set the Sky+ for. I don’t think I’m being evil by doing this – I’ve paid for my pre-order, my TV licence and my Sky subscription – but I do think it would be hypocritical of me to whinge if somebody’s sharing Coffin Dodgers on a file sharing network or by email or IM. However, I don’t think I should applaud if somebody on the other side of the planet is making money at my expense.

In my case it’s the principle that’s annoying – I’ve sold two and a half thousand ebooks legally, which is nothing; never mind being on the radar, I’m not even in the same airspace as proper writers, so if even one person has actually downloaded Coffin Dodgers from a dodgy site I’ll be amazed – but I can see where the WE MUST SHUT THE ENTIRE INTERNET demands come from and why writers with proper profiles and serious numbers of readers get so pissed off.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I do worry that the copyright debate has become too polarised. It’s become about absolutes, total internet freedom versus total lockdown, and there’s much, much more to the copyright debate than that.

The purpose of copyright isn’t, as many people assume, to stop people copying things. It’s bigger than that. It’s about encouraging the creation of new and valuable things by giving creators, for a limited period of time, protection so that they can benefit from their efforts.

It’s been corrupted by never-ending copyright extensions, by rights-grabbing contracts and by the belief that if Mickey Mouse ever falls into the public domain, the skies will open and the four horsemen of the apocalypse will ride out, but that doesn’t mean that copyright itself is a bad idea.

Ian Betteridge put it very well a few years back:

We should always remember that copyright is an artificial monopoly granted because it has a beneficial effect for society as a whole, not privilege that’s designed simply to benefit a particular class or profession

I think the corporations have perverted that, and I think the internet has made it exceptionally difficult to enforce, but I’m not convinced that the answer is to just forget about copyright law altogether. We just need to differentiate good copying and bad copying, and to protect the former while trying to prevent the latter.

Easier said than done, I know, but it’d be nice if we tried.

The government is supposed to be on the side of laws, isn’t it? Copyright is a law too. If they don’t defend that law in the new kind of social space that the internet represents, where will the laxity end? What other laws will be let slide on the grounds that they might impede the rights of Internet users to do what the heck they feel like? What about your right to privacy? You care a lot about that one, don’t you? What makes it so desperately important for the government to defend your rights there, but not defend others’ rights to be paid for their intellectual property?

Amazon could probably afford to lose $20 million/year in their publishing arm just to put the other publishers out of business. I think that’s what they’re trying to do–throw money around in an industry that doesn’t have any, until Amazon becomes not only the only place where you buy books, but the only place that publishes books, too.

Copyright industries want the net regulated, and they’re willing to spend huge sums to make it happen: SOPA is a battle, but the lobbyists are waging a war.

You don’t fight that by turning sites black. You fight it by supporting the EFF, and the ACLU, and the ORG, and by lobbying your elected representatives, and you fight it it in the ballot box. In the last general election just 55% of 25-34 year olds voted, while turnout for the 18-24 age group was a pathetic 44%.

We need to do better, because the best way to fight bad laws is to stop clowns from getting into power in the first place.

According to somebody on Twitter, that’s akin to telling women of the 1960s to shut up and know their place. I’m a bit baffled by that.

If you’re anything like me you’ve been ripping CDs and buying downloads for years, and back in the day file sizes mattered – so you’d rip at, say, 160Kbps to get as much music as possible on your player. Now, though, space isn’t the issue it used to be, and if you listen on good speakers or good headphones you can hear the flaws.

The problem is that actually re-ripping all that music (assuming you still have the CDs) is an enormous job: as of yesterday I had 6,500 songs at lower bitrates.

That’s where iTunes Match comes in. It takes a while, but it works brilliantly.  Jason Snell explains how to do it.

Barnes & Noble said Monday that it will offer discounts on its Nook devices to customers who buy a digital subscription to People magazine and The New York Times.

For New York Times subscribers, it’ll offer a free Nook Simple Touch, a 6-inch e-reader that is priced at $99, or take $100 off on Nook Color, normally priced at $199.

It won’t be the last time an e-reader comes bundled with a digital subscription, especially as the devices are getting cheaper and cheaper. Tablets will inevitably follow – the Nook Color mentioned above is similar to the Kindle Fire tablet. I’m surprised Amazon isn’t giving free devices to its Amazon Prime members already.

The business model already exists: if you subscribe to cable or satellite TV, you essentially get the hardware for free; many mobile phones are free on contract, and so on. It isn’t hard to imagine somebody such as News International giving away a “free” Kindle Fire if you subscribe to the full-fat version of its digital service.

Despite all this “chronic” piracy going on, Adele’s album has sold more copies in a year than any album has ever sold. More than a Michael Jackson album managed in a year, even the good one. More than a Beatles album ever managed to whisk out the shops in twelve months. More, even, than the third Charlatans album sold in a year.

So, how come Adele’s album was not only immune to the chronic piracy, but thrived in a world so stricken? Had there been secret umlauts sewn into the hemlines of the choruses, rendering it impossible to torrent?

Were any of the many pirate-busting measures deployed? Did the pre-release circulate solely on a tape glued into a Walkman? Was every copy watermarked? Did a fleet of fake files get launched onto the internet to foil downloaders? Did Derren Brown hypnotise the world so that if they typed ‘Adele 21 free’ into Google they’d die?

Nope. The success of Adele’s album seems to be nothing to do with avoiding piracy, and more to do with sticking out an album that people liked and wanted to buy.

Worth remembering the next time you see the entertainment industry demanding new laws and filtering to fight the menace of piracy.ikoni

Videogames often allow us to live out fantasies, to be who we could never be with our saggy, regular-person frames and lives. A soldier fighting in a near-future war, with access to the finest in military hardware? Maybe I could be the squad leader? Maybe I could be the hero? Maybe I could be the one who’s allowed to open doors? But no, of course not, you are – as ever – the grunt, being barked at throughout, forced to do whatever the game/game characters tell you to, which is usually to sweep up after them and the party they’re having in front.

It fascinates me that this is the successful formula, the secret behind being the biggest FPS series of all time.

I’m really taken by children’s book apps, and you can get an award-winning one for free: the Jack and the Beanstalk iPad/iPhone app is available here. I haven’t tried this one yet, but it looks like fun.