Stories

Parliament must listen to the blogger in his pyjamas

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Parliament may soon be debating whether to legalise incest, reclassify insomnia as a mental illness, microchip all children at birth … or give pantomime actor Richard Griffiths a Knighthood. That’s if opposition leader David Cameron has his way. A Conservative Party task force examining democratic participation proposes that online petitions should help set the parliamentary … Read more

Rob Lewis on MusicStation

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MusicStation, the service that aims to give unlimited mobile access to music worldwide for a small weekly fee, finally went live today.

The success of the venture, from British start-up Omnifone, will tell us a lot about whether punters are prepared to pay for digital music, rather than scoop it up for free. MusicStation is a Rhapsody-like service customised for mobiles: there are no extra data charges over the £1.99 weekly subscription, which goes on your mobile bill, and “file sharing” is encouraged – at least with other MusicStation users.

Omnifone has signed up the big four labels, made inroads into the indie sector, and has 30 carriers around the world. Today sees Norwegian-based Telenor, with 80 million subscribers, push MusicStation out first.

Founder and CEO Rob Lewis said the aim was simply giving people a service they can’t do legitimately today:

“Customers are forced to do this illegally now. We’re trying to give very easy access that’s intuitive, doesn’t need credit cards or wires, so they can discover and recommend music among themselves,” he said. “And artists get paid.”

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Public jeers at Ofcom’s Nathan Barley quango

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Ofcom has published the public consultation responses to its PSP concept. And they don’t make comfortable reading for the regulator.

The PSP, or Public Service Publisher, is a new quango that would cost taxpayers between £100m than £150m a year – handing out money to new media types for interactive websites, and other “user generated content” gimmicks. Ofcom loves the idea – and gave the task of investigating it two new media production houses who would stand to gain handsomely from the new gravy train.

Unsurprisingly, they thought a Nathan Barley Quango, or NBQ, was a splendid idea.

The public responses should be sobering, however. Most are skeptical of the need for the new quango, while many more are completely indifferent. And some are very scathing. Step forward, W Jackson:

As a self-actualizing media node, I welcome this redistribution of government funds from provincial luddites to new media ‘creative’ Sohoites.

Cool Britannia lives! The creative industries initiative was good but didn’t radically empower young creatives and their 360-degree thinking. Unleash the collective wisdom of new media and see us swarm!

If Tony had done this when he first got in (and I know how hard you tried, Ed) then thousands of people could already be employed – let’s use those redundant factories to turn out polyphonic ringtones.

Critics – like Orlowski at The Register – will complain that this is pork-barrel politics for tech. utopians. That this has no relevance to’ ‘ordinary’ people and their lives.

Well, I’ve had enough of that patronising rubbish. I’ve launched a post-ironic web brand – nar.ciss.us – that was created using the competitively-priced labour of redundant industrial workers. It shows that anyone can ‘get’ asynchronous java – even people from the North.

If anyone wants to brainstorm this – then twitter/IM/SMS/Skype/email me. I’m up for an ’emergent conference’.

Ed Richards’s initiative ‘gets’ new media on so many levels. Let’s flashmob this bitch up to escape velocity.

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Google at CISAC

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Google gave a keynote speech to the biggest global gathering of authors’ societies today. The internet advertising giant is embroiled in several areas of copyright litigation. Publishers and authors object to its mass scanning project, Google Books. News agencies and publishers have sued it over its use of links and excerpts in Google News. And Viacom is suing Google for using infringing clips on YouTube.

So the audience at CISAC’s Copyright Summit was presented with Google’s EMEA chief Nikash Arora. Would he tell the authors he felt their pain? Would he speak a language they understood?

Not likely. Arora may as well have chosen to speak in Klingon. He was also the first non-government speaker at the summit to avoid answering questions from the audience. Instead, we were treated to a stage-managed 15 minute Q&A which avoided the tricky subject of litigation all together.

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“People misunderstand me from all directions” – Lessig at CISAC

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Professor Lawrence Lessig is used to hostile audiences – but he faced the most prickly and feisty gathering of 500 he’ll ever address yesterday in Brussels.

CISAC is the body that represents the collectives who gather up the royalties on behalf of authors, composers and songwriters – and this week it’s holding its first ever Copyright Summit.

A lot of money passes through these collectives’ hands – they distributed €4.3bn back to authors in 2004 in Europe alone. But these pots of money, so painfully clawed back from large media conglomerates, are distributed amongst very many original creators. So as you can imagine, Lessig – who extolls amateur “user generated content” and litigates against professionals – was always going to be in for a rough ride from people who barely scrape a living from their own creativity.

What was the audience really vexed about? Well, when Lessig talks “rights”, he means the right to specify how a work is used by other users of digital computer networks. This doesn’t include the right to be paid, which is why everyone is here in Brussels this week. This pits a very American kind of individualism – the right to express oneself, dammit! – against a very European tradition of collective action.

In particular, the audience is keenly aware of this tradition of rights won through collective bargaining. Any weakening of this movement for authors’ rights is regarded in the same way as a striking union member regards a strikebreaker: as scab labour. Yet Lessig styles himself at the vanguard of a “movement”, too, which riles them even more: the creatives see this as not only undermining them, but pinching their slogans and clothes.

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Miliband goes mad for Web 2.0

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David Miliband, the environment minister tipped to be the next Labour Party leader by a friendly Westminster press, says “a new spirit” is afoot in the UK, brought about by Web 2.0.

Miliband said the web had polarised debate into competing extremities, where the truth was decided by whoever shouted the loudest. Traditional engineering values, where things work, had been replaced by a “Permanent Beta” mentality where the vendor tries to escape its responsibilities by selling the company before it has to fix its own bugs.

He also lamented the devaluation of expertise in favour of what he called “a permanent idiocracy”. He painted a picture of high streets decimated by home shopping, and an atomised and fragmented society that could only express itself by blogging into the digital ether. The political class, Miliband concluded, had a duty to temper this dark side of technology.

Impressive stuff, or what?

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Miliband goes mad for Web 2.0

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David Miliband, the environment minister tipped to be the next Labour Party leader by a friendly Westminster press, says “a new spirit” is afoot in the UK, brought about by Web 2.0.

Miliband said the web had polarised debate into competing extremities, where the truth was decided by whoever shouted the loudest. Traditional engineering values, where things work, had been replaced by a “Permanent Beta” mentality where the vendor tries to escape its responsibilities by selling the company before it has to fix its own bugs.

He also lamented the devaluation of expertise in favour of what he called “a permanent idiocracy”. He painted a picture of high streets decimated by home shopping, and an atomised and fragmented society that could only express itself by blogging into the digital ether. The political class, Miliband concluded, had a duty to temper this dark side of technology.

Impressive stuff, or what?

Of course he could have said all that – but unfortunately, he didn’t.

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Paid video has look and feel of dead duck

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Forrester Research has predicted that video download services such as iTunes will peak this year, unless consumers change their habits. Forrester analyst James McQuivey calls them a “temporary flash” but a “dead end”. He forecasts a sharp ramp in revenue this year, from $98m to $279m, powered by what he calls “media addicts”. But these … Read more

Govt IT 2.0: self-nominated for glory

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Although the New Statesman magazine’s annual New Media Awards (NMA) don’t quite match up to the EFF’s annual Nepotism Award – nothing quite does – they’re still a rich source of humour and embarrassment. Getting an NMA is the equivalent of getting an orange at half time from the coach of your village football team, … Read more

Free music has never looked so cheap

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For the major record labels, yesterday’s deal between EMI and Apple doesn’t herald a new beginning, but the beginning of the end.

From next month, EMI will distribute much of its repertoire without DRM through Apple’s iTunes store. Independent labels have been distributing DRM-free songs for three years, avoiding the lock-ins created by competing hardware manufacturers. But EMI is the first of the “Big Four” majors to recognise that artificially recreating the inconveniences of physical product in a digital form isn’t good business.

Let’s leave aside the many gotchas in the announcement, such as the price increase which takes the cost of an unencumbered song to almost $2 (that’s the UK price converted to US dollars, folks), the absence of the Beatles’ catalogue, and the continuation of DRM as “on by default”.

Let’s also leave aside the mutual panic which brought Apple and EMI together yesterday. EMI is in financial free-fall, it’s unsuccessfully tried to find a buyer for several years, and it’s now so desperate it will try anything. Apple is under regulatory pressure not only to modify its DRM consumer lock-in but, along with EMI and the labels, faces an EU anti-trust probe into its pricing. Both companies jumped before they were pushed.

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