Archive for February, 2005
Hunter S Thompson’s followers
In an excellent piece in The Guardian, Jon Ronson points out that many HST wannabes miss the point:
It is the morning after Hunter S Thompson’s suicide, and I am reading loaded magazine’s recent interview with Iggy Pop. It begins: “Iggy Pop! Shit man. I’m alone in a hotel room thinking I’ve overdosed on coke. Sweating. Thinking what the hell am I going to ask Iggy tomorrow afternoon. Two valium and 14 hours later I am sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont …”
And so on.
A great number of feature journalists, when starting out, want to be Hunter S Thompson. Unfortunately, many tend to want to be him in the wrong way. Reading loaded’s over-Thompson-inspired prose reminds me of the scene in Crimes and Misdemeanours when Woody Allen confesses to Mia Farrow that his love letter to her was plagiarised from James Joyce. “You probably wondered why all the references to Dublin,” he says.
New iPods
As ever, the rumour mill got a bit excited and the reality is a bit less dramatic. Here’s the lowdown:
iPod Mini now comes in two versions: 4GB for £139 and 6GB for £169. There are a few cosmetic improvements but not the rumoured colour screen.
The “proper” iPod now comes in three configurations: 20GB for £209, a 30GB iPod Photo for £249 and a 60GB iPod Photo for £309. The U2 iPod’s still on sale (£248.99), or at least it is on the UK Apple store.
Still no video iPod, though ;-)
Moral cancer
Lock up your children: the Traditional Values Coalition warns parents that letting your kids watch Shrek 2 means they’ll become crazed, crossdressing deviants.
DreamWorks is… promoting cross dressing and transgenderism in this animated film.
I have every sympathy with parents who worry about the increasing vulgarity, commercialism and violence of a lot of TV programming and movies, but this knee-jerk nonsense detracts from that. We’ve had cross-dressing cartoon characters since the days of Bugs Bunny (and of course, British humour from Monty Python to Little Britain has a good chuckle at blokes in drag) for one simple reason: it’s funny. Bugs Bunny in a frock didn’t bring down civilisation forty years ago, and a minor character in Shrek 2 won’t either.
Once again the self-appointed guardians of decency are getting their knickers in a twist (pun intended) over something that really doesn’t matter, but while it’s fun to laugh at them, it’s important to realise that such groups can be dangerous. Take our old pals Christian Voice, who are still upset about Jerry Springer: The Opera.
According to this story from the Independent [which is now pay-to-read, unfortunately]:
A leading cancer charity has taken the extraordinary decision to turn down a gift of up to £10,000 after coming under pressure from militant Christian opponents of Jerry Springer - The Opera, who told them it was not in their interest to accept “tainted” money from a charity performance.
Maggie’s Centres, based in Scotland, was to have used the money to help establish a nationwide network of units for cancer sufferers and their families. But, a phone call from the Christian Voice group led the charity to fear a religious boycott of its fundraising activities if it accepted the cash.
I do my best to avoid bad language on this blog, but… what the fuck?
According to the Independent, Christian Voice’s Steven Green said:
All I did was explain that if they carried on they would cause offence to Christians, who are known for being generous, and they would probably do far better to forgo the few thousand pounds they would get out of the performance.
Or to paraphrase: “Nice charity you’ve got here. We wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to it, would we?” Fearing a mass boycott by caring, sharing, compassionate Christians, the charity turns down ten grand of donations. Ten grand that would make a huge difference to cancer sufferers and their families.
I’ll stop now. I’m too angry to type.
[Update]
It seems the £10,000 figure was potential revenue; apparently only 300 people turned up to the £10-per-ticket show, which therefore raised £3K. Still, £3K to a cancer charity’s a lot of cash.
There’s now a discussion on MetaFilter about the story, and it’s likely to get lively.
More DRM madness
Over the last few days, BoingBoing has been highlighting some particularly loathsome examples of DRM craziness. HP seems to be responsible for two of the most ridiculous examples:
*shakes head*
Free fonts that aren’t awful
MetaFilter highlights an excellent new weblog about free fonts. It’s definitely worth bookmarking if you do any design for print or web.
Not a good time to buy an iPod
My wife called me earlier, looking for advice: one of her colleagues wants to buy an iPod and is dithering between the Mini and the iPod proper. My advice: don’t buy anything just yet, because the iPod rumour mill is exploding. Think Secret is suggesting a revamped Mini range could be announced tomorrow, while as the Unofficial Apple Weblog reports, things are definitely afoot with iPods in general:
There’s certainly something brewing at Apple HQ. They’re asking dealers to return their remaining stock of iPod photo models, both 40 and 60GB, as well as putting a return order on the U2 iPods.
In addition, Apple Insider reports that iPod photos are conspicuously absent from the planograms in Apple retail stores, though previously they were in good supply. They also report a Motorola executive had some loose lips about an upcoming Bluetooth iPod…
Hunter S Thompson, RIP
Sad news: legendary journalist Hunter S Thompson has killed himself.
Ned comedy
If you don’t live in Scotland, you probably haven’t seen this: it’s Justice Minister Cathy Jamieson announcing a get-tough policy on anti-social behaviour by neds (”Ned” is the Scots equivalent of “yob” or “chav”).
As a letter in today’s Glasgow Herald puts it:
It was comparable to the scene in the Pink Panther film when bungling Inspector Clouseau is busy interrogating the blind beggar about his “unlicensed minky” while all around him there is pandemonium as a bank robbery takes place.
[Photo from the Evening Times site]
Bad news for Napster
I mentioned a few days ago that the big problem with Napster To Go was the digital rights management technology that prevents you from keeping the music or burning it to CD. Now BoingBoing links to a strictly theoretical exercise that suggests you can turn a 14-day Napster trial into 252 CDs of DRM-free music.
I’m not sure whether the steps suggested are legal, but it illustrates - yet again - the problem with DRM: there’s always a way around it.
Breaking the law, breaking the law
I’ve been away for a few days, and in typical scatterbrained style forgot to set the video to record a programme I really, really wanted to see - so on my return I downloaded it from Bittorrent. That makes me a lawbreaker, but I’m not entirely sure why.
Let me rephrase that. I do understand why - copyright law - but I think the law is wrong. Had I remembered to set the video, I’d have recorded a programme that’s broadcast for free over the airwaves and watched it at a time that suited me; I’d also have skipped through the adverts. That’s perfectly legal. But because I downloaded it from Bittorrent so that I could watch it at a time that suited me, I’ve broken the law. What’s the difference? I haven’t deprived the broadcaster of any revenue, and I haven’t paid anyone for the download; while there’s an argument that free programming has an implied contract of “you get the programme for free if you watch the ads” I’d skip the ads whether the programme was on videotape or on my Mac’s hard disk.
The problem is that technology is accelerating but copyright owners’ attitudes remain rooted in the old way of doing things. It’s a problem that becomes more apparent when you consider my favourite TV programme, the US cop show NYPD Blue. Although Channel 4 has the rights to the programme it’s several years behind the US and doesn’t seem particularly keen to broadcast the remaining three series; the first two series (of 12) are available on DVD but the release of series 3 on DVD has been postponed indefinitely due to lack of demand. So the programme exists, but it’s unlikely to be broadcast here for a while (if at all), and it’s unlikely to appear on DVD.
Inevitably, the episodes Channel 4 doesn’t seem too keen to broadcast are available in their entirety, for free, on Bittorrent. So far I haven’t downloaded them, but the temptation is hard to resist. It is, of course, illegal - but if I download the episodes, who exactly am I hurting? The programme-makers have been paid, so I’m not depriving them of revenue; Fox, the network that owns the programme, isn’t going to release them on DVD as doing so isn’t viable; Channel 4 isn’t broadcasting the programmes, so I’m not depriving them of ad revenue… to my mind, while downloading the programmes is indeed illegal, it’s a victimless crime.
Rather than seeing such downloading as a problem, copyright owners should see it as an opportunity. The internet makes it possible to narrowcast rather than broadcast, so for example it would be cheap and easy to provide every episode of NYPD Blue ever recorded for download in exchange for a small fee. The copyright owner then makes money from something that otherwise would be sitting in a vault, gathering dust. Or it could be even simpler: lobby for some kind of flat tax on broadband connections and let the Bittorrent users swap to their heart’s content, with a royalty system to ensure that creators get paid for what gets swapped. That way the copyright owners make money without any expense whatsoever: the Bittorrent users provide the bandwidth and hosting, reducing the cost per download to zero. That would make the swapping of TV programmes a revenue stream rather than a threat.
Update, 18 February
Media Guardian covers a report about the epidemic of illegal TV downloading in the UK (free registration required). According to the firm behind the report, Envision:
“If TV companies were to offer episodes for download at a small cost at the same time as they air offline they could generate revenue in the same way that Apple’s iTunes does.”