Archive for June, 2005
Moving mouse
Advance warning: I’m going to be reorganising my web server a bit this week and moving the blog to a different domain name, so there’ll be a new address for the blog as soon as the housekeeping’s done. The RSS feed will have a new URL, too.
Naturally I’ll post when the move’s taken place and leave the archive intact too.
Later that day…
Please excuse the dust: Google Search, Technorati links and Blogrolling may be knackered for a bit. Hopefully, though, the new URL won’t muck up any existing links. But from now on, the blog’s at:
http://www.bigmouthstrikesagain.com/blog.html
And the Atom feed’s at:
http://www.bigmouthstrikesagain.com/atom.xml
Pop will sue itself
Industry watcher Mark Mulligan reports that the BPI, which represents record labels, is going after the MCPS/PRS Alliance, which represents music publishers, over digital music licensing fees.
The BPI has joined forces with iTunes Music Store, Napster, Connect, MusicNet, AOL, Yahoo and RealNetworks (OD2/Louedye are conspicuously absent) to take the MCPS/PRS Alliance to the Copyright Tribunal over suggested publishing rates for online stores which will be 12%, which is nearly double that charge for CDs…
…It’s hugely ironic that the BPI and its 300 odd member labels are taking this action when the license fees many of those members demand from online services are at such a level that by Steve Jobs own admittance it is nigh on impossible to make money out of selling a la carte downloads as a stand alone business. And of course the situation is worse in the UK than most, if not all, other markets.
Why Apple’s kicking Creative’s arse
Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber explains that Apple’s all-conquering iPod isn’t just about marketing.
This emphasis on simplification is at the core of the iPod success story. Fast Company recently talked to designers and executives at six companies producing rival products to iPods. Creative Technology CEO Sim Wong Hoo, for example, quite obviously does not get it all.
Punning headline about smoke and ire
Scotland’s Parliament decides on whether or not to ban smoking today, and if they vote in favour of the ban - which they will - it’ll come into force next Spring. This morning’s news programme on BBC Radio Scotland reminded me of why I’m in favour of the ban and contemptuous of the people behind it: having listened to the health minister’s views (at one point he dismissed all criticisms, evidence etc with an exasperated “THIS IS ABOUT PUBLIC HEALTH!”) I’d really like to hold him down and shove 100 lit cigarettes up his arse.
I bet he’s in favour of ID cards too, the cock.
Who are all these people in my way?
David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest (which, one day, I might even finish) gave a fantastic speech to graduating US students. It’s long but well worth reading:
I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
[Via Metafilter]
Cash machines really do screw the poor
Most sensible people already realised as much, but today’s Evening Times has a nice bit of proof showing the way cash machine charges screw the people who can least afford to be screwed. In the Hyndland Road bit of Glasgow’s West End, an area that’s home to people in the range between “doing quite nicely, thanks” and “we wipe our backsides with £50 notes”, 9 out of 10 cash machines are fee-free. In Shettleston Road, Britain’s poorest parliamentary constituency, 6 out of 10 cash machines charge.
MGM, Grokster and the future of file sharing
The US Supreme Court has spoken, and it’s bad news for Grokster and Streamcast: they can be sued because their users have been breaking copyright. However, on first reading of the verdict it doesn’t seem like the end of file sharing; rather, the judges have ruled that if firms’ marketing efforts are based on encouraging piracy, then those firms can be sued if such infringement occurs.
In other words, they haven’t made P2P illegal - but they have made it illegal to sell P2P apps with the message “hey! Use this stuff to download illegal stuff!” That would make Grokster bad, but wouldn’t necessarily be bad news for BitTorrent (although it’s probably bad news for bittorrent hubs).
I’ll no doubt post more when I’ve had time for a proper read of the verdict.
Update, 28 June
The verdict could have been seriously bad news, because one of the things being considered was the Sony Betamax precedent from back in the 80s. In the Sony case the courts ruled that if a technology had “substantial, non-infringing” uses - such as recording programmes so you could watch them later - then the manufacturers couldn’t be held liable for any dodgy uses, such as video piracy. Had the Supreme Court overruled the Sony judgement, it could have been disastrous: for example, we all know people put illegal music on their MP3 players; with no Sony, Apple could have been sued for that. People use computers for piracy. Microsoft, or Dell, or whoever, could have been sued for that.
Thankfully the judges didn’t reverse Sony. What they did do was qualify it: essentially they’ve said “sure, there’s the Sony thing, but you can’t consider these things in isolation. You need to look at the big picture.” So substantial non-infringing use is no longer sufficient defence for P2P firms; they also need to demonstrate that they haven’t been trying to build a business on copyright infringement.
So what does this actually mean? In the short term, probably not very much. The RIAA, BPI et al have gone after individual file sharing users partly because of the difficulty in prosecuting the P2P firms, but I’d be surprised if the lawsuits stopped as a result of the Supreme Court verdict. What’s more likely is that there will be a fresh barrage of lawsuits against P2P developers, and a continuation of the legal assault on teenagers, grandmothers, nuns, orphans and puppies.
In the longer term, things could get messy. As the EFF puts it, “this decision relies on a new theory of copyright liability that measures whether manufacturers created their wares with the ‘intent’ of inducing consumers to infringe.” As Ed Felten writes in Freedom To Tinker, “Legitimate technologists will still worry that a well-funded plaintiff can cook up a stew of product design second-guessing, business model second-guessing, and occasional failures of copyright compliance by low-level employees, into an active inducement case.”
Sometimes the “intent” is obvious, so for example we’ve seen countless firms selling P2P software on the basis that they give you access to lots of illegal music. However, intent is very much in the eye of the beholder: was Apple’s “Rip. Mix. Burn” slogan inducement to infringe copyright law? I’m sure there are record company executives who think it was. As ever, the real winners in this case will be lawyers.
What the papers said
Some interesting tech stories in the Sunday papers this weekend: the ID card fiasco bubbles on, and there’s a terrifying story about the Operation Ore porn crackdown.
ID cards first. I won’t bother linking because there’s far too many stories, but to summarise: the cost could now be as high as £16 billion, EDS - the firm behind the tax credits disaster, a company that couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo - is almost certainly going to be involved, the cards may revert to a Chip and PIN system because biometrics aren’t reliable enough, and our personal data may be sold to private companies to help defray the soaring cost of the whole ridiculous scheme. The government has responded by sticking its fingers in its ears and chanting “Nah nah nah can’t hear you”.
Remember Operation Ore, the international crackdown on illegal porn? According to a terrifying report by Duncan Campbell, some of the alleged predators caught up in the case may have been innocent. He writes:
The men on the list are accused of having paid for child porn through Landslide, a website that operated in Texas from 1996-9. So far, about 1,200 cases have resulted in convictions. The public has been led to believe that a huge number of unsavoury — and possibly dangerous — men have been brought to book.
…my investigations and work as an expert witness in a number of Operation Ore cases have led me to believe that the evidence has been exaggerated and used unacceptably.
Too much coffee
Bill Hicks used to joke about his smoking and say that he was a two lighters-per-day man. I think I may be the coffee equivalent: I’ve just burned out yet another coffee making machine, which brings the coffee machine death toll for 2005 to three. If I were my new coffee machine, I’d be scared.
When the internet Sucked
It’s ten years since Suck.com launched. Eek!
It was snarky and sarcastic about topics that were too square to be snarky and sarcastic about anywhere else. For the ground-level tech drone stuck at a computer, it provided the perfect daily respite. It was quickly located, easily digestible, and if you could suppress your laughter, it looked just like working…
I was like, ‘Um, I don’t know what to do. What if I just photograph the contents of my desk drawer and put that up? Would that be okay?’ and they were like, ‘Yeah, that’d be great, actually.’”
The link is to a very long (but for Suck.com fans, illuminating) look at Suck’s history and the early days of “proper” web publishing.