Stories

Furious freetards blitz the wrong SOPA

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Angry copyfighters barraged a small Scottish food certification agency with abuse last week – in the belief they were protesting against hated US anti-piracy legislation.

The Scottish Organic Producers Association – whose website is at sopa.org.uk – was perplexed when it found itself on the receiving of dozens of nasty and illiterate emails.

Remarkably, nothing about the site’s design – including pictures of sheep, vegetables, Angus cattle and fruit – did anything to suggest to the furious freetards that they’d got the wrong SOPA – or that something might be not quite right.

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We can ditch the laws when the Valley’s snotty web teens grow up

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stop-sopa

I am going to propose something that may sound radical, but really isn’t. Legislation like SOPA ideally isn’t necessary in an ideal world, and this idea comes about through voluntary agreement. The Stop Online Piracy Act was proposed because of a tragic impasse, a lack of agreement between two powerful and deeply entrenched sides. Although one side has moral force on its side, being ‘right’ doesn’t mean it’s going to ‘win’. Like a classic game theory tragedy, both sides are losing.

To understand why I shall tell you a story. If management sages and internet gurus annoy you – it’s a story you might enjoy.

When he died in 1903, the prolific Victorian journalist and author Herbert Spencer was thought to be one of the cleverest people in the land, and England’s greatest philosopher. Such was his reputation, there was a clamour to bury him in Westminster Abbey. But in reality, Spencer was a hard-working clot, whose reputation fell more sharply and quickly than that of a disgraced fraudster.

Spencer knew all the right buzzwords, but was loathe to read past the first chapter of a book. Spencer even carried ear-plugs in case he was exposed to interesting new ideas, as he feared intellectual stimulation might keep him awake; he often inserted the ear-plugs midway through a conversation. He masked all this, and his books were phenomenally popular, because he stuck to opaque but calming generalisations. Rather than resolve a matter, his generalisations allowed him to waffle around it. (He also heaped on masses of detail to sidetrack the reader). When the novelist George Eliot complimented the old man on the lack of wrinkles on his forehead, Spencer replied that he’d never encountered anything that ever puzzled him.

Spencer may have been the Victorian Malcolm Gladwell, or Tom Peters, or Tim O’Reilly. Generalisations are a great way of avoiding looking at what’s really going on, and tackling a subject with arguments from first principles. Social media has turned this kind of showy avoidance of reality into a massive multiplayer game. Twitter is an ocean in which armies of cliches swim pass each other. You can even badge your avatar to remove any doubts in the audience about nuances in your position: ‘STOP SOPA’ being the most recent. SOPA has indeed been stopped, or fatally gutted.

While the legislation is now moribund, the underlying concerns behind SOPA haven’t gone away. No amount of bloviating is going to resolve this. The main provision of SOPA (and PIPA) is website-blocking, which has no friends here at El Reg. But SOPA will return next year, and the year after, until the issues have been tackled head on. The STOP SOPA stickers will return. It’s all avoidable and getting quite tedious.

The internet has a problem

In the Panglossian worldview of Silicon Valley, everything is perfect on the internet, it’s the best of all possible worlds, and any tinkering with this robs humanity of its last Utopian hope. This is a view of the world that actually owes much to religion, or the desire to recreate the certainty of religion. It’s faith-based, and isn’t a view grounded in reality, especially the reality of doing business. On the internet, fame may arrive quickly, but financial reward doesn’t follow. It’s the only area of business where this is true.

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Perhaps there’s no ‘Third Ecosystem’?

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There’s a whiff of something – it isn’t desperation, more like earnest exasperation – around Microsoft’s phone business these days

Humiliatingly, Nokia was forced to deny rumours last week that it was planning to break up and sell its crown jewels to Microsoft. Normally a company can remain impervious to Twitter-born gossip, particularly from a known antagonist.

Acknowledging the rumour simply gives it a chauffeured ride around the internet. But not this time: the ‘Microsoft buys Nokia’ story fulfils so many conspiracy theories, thousands of people wanted it to be true.

And the notion of Microsoft buying a hardware company and ripping up its licensing business has become much less outlandish after Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s phone business. Ah, but that was desperation, I hear you say; the Chocolate Factory had miscalculated its IP strategy catastrophically, and it had to grab what patents it could at almost any price.

But there’s a whiff of something – it isn’t desperation, more like earnest exasperation – around Microsoft’s phone business these days. Redmond has got an excellent product, for the first time, and people who have a Windows Phone love using it. But there just aren’t many of those folk around. The phones aren’t shifting. Christmas has come and gone, and while we wait for some reliable channel figures, Nokia’s flagship seems to have made almost no impact on the UK market. It’s the phone that leaves no footprints.

 

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Parody is illegal, say barmy bureaucrats

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put_that_parody_downThe IPO chose Office Party Friday last week to unveil 15 more proposals on intellectual property reform. This is traditionally the most alcoholic workday of the year – and ministers might need another stiff drink as they digest the surprises that ideologically fanatical bureaucrats have been preparing for them.

 

Among the proposals is the suggestion to make copyright opt-in, which means the UK will be breaching European and international law, and the strange notion that parody and satire are illegal in the UK. Traditionally the civil service is not supposed to set policy, but carry it out. The advice they give ministers is expected to be dispassionate and weighted. But this is the Intellectual Property Office. It’s carjacked the policy bus and is driving it at the UK’s creative industries, freelance sectors and creative amateurs too. These fifteen documents fully reveal the IPO’s hand.

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BT’s gift to Google: A patent war over ads and Android

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It’s open season now. BT is the latest company to sue Google, alleging patent infringement, but this latest barrage extends beyond Google’s Android software – it touches to other Google services too. These include maps, music, social networking and its advertising services, including Adwords, claims BT.

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The bureaucratic elite and the Google Review. The story continues…

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It’s also a stealth project – ECL was omitted from the Executive Summary that only hurried politicians and the media ever read

The Business Department BiS has launched a copyright consultation, inviting views on the recommendations raised in the "Google Review", as the "Hargreaves Review into IP and Growth" became known.

Hargreaves was tasked with looking for changes in UK IP law that could stimulate economic growth. Ian Hargreaves’ review featured significant input from the IPO, formerly the Patent Office, which was once at the Ministry of Fun, but is now an ideologically supercharged hothouse within BiS. Hargreaves and the bureaucrats faced two significant challenges.

One is that the small and medium-sized businesses that try and create wealth using the patents and copyright systems have a very different view of the "problem" than Google does, or a bureaucrat does. Patents are ruinously expensive for a clever inventor to defend, and many can’t afford to do so. Copyright can’t be cheaply or effectively enforced online – a big problem for the entire supply chain in various sectors from photographers and visual artists, to independent film makers, to labels – to name just a few.

When digital SMEs were actually asked what they thought of the IP landscape, they were quite emphatic. Only 10 per cent thought copyright was unfair, 7 per cent said it stopped them innovating, and only 5 per cent thought the UK copyright regime stopped them innovating. Large majorities of two-thirds or three-quarters thought copyright fair, and encouraged innovation. These figures, by the way, are from a report included in Google’s submission, created at Google’s expense… [pdf].

Over half of SMEs want better enforcement of their rights as inventors and creators. 52 per cent of SMEs said the costs of IP enforcement deterred them from using the system. It might have been expected, therefore, that Hargreaves would focus his time on enlightened enforcement suggestions, making policing cheap to stimulate growth.

But any attempt to enforce IP brings out the Chicken Little crowd, honking furiously that the sky is falling in on them. To enforce copyright online risks destroying the Unicorns’ natural habitat: the cybernetic meadow.

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UltraViolet: Hollywood’s giant digital gamble

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Hollywood’s big plan to update the industry for the digital era – UltraViolet – comes to the UK on 26 December, the consortium behind it has revealed. It will be an inauspicious start, represented by just one new movie release, but there’s no mistaking the ambition of the project. Three years in the planning, UV is Hollywood’s attempt to get right what the music business has got woefully wrong, and it isn’t unreasonable to describe it as the biggest shift in thinking in the history of the movie industry.

Since the launch of VCR systems in the mid-1970s, consumers have merely bought a limited licence to watch a movie. New formats have been an excuse for Hollywood to get us to repurchase the content. But digital networks have made a nonsense of that notion, and enabled a huge new range of diverse devices and formats.

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The fabulous Muvizu

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Tech startups that can truly be considered game-changers are rare – especially in Shoreditch. The more hype that the Silicon Roundabout “leisure startup” scene receives, the more painfully apparent it is that the emperor has no clothes – see these comments for example. Which is a pity, for less attention is paid to genuinely creative … Read more

Synthetic renewable oil: what’s not to like?

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Craig Venter

“Rely on the sun and the other eco-friendly things that Mother Earth has given us. We need to stop being dependent on the corrupting effect that is oil now!”

– HuffPost Super User “ProgressivePicon86”

The next energy revolution is coming – and promises the biggest disruption since the industrial revolution.

Today we assume that oil is a finite resource. The “Peak Oil” argument, for example, is not that it runs out, but that conventional sources run down, and it becomes prohibitively expensive. This obliges us to think about re-ordering society. The other assumption is that the exploitation of fossil fuels creates the rapid release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, changing the climate. Along with this, too, are arguments for re-ordering society. But with the next generations of fuels, these assumptions go out of the window. Policies based on these assumptions lose their relevance and appeal.

This promises a fundamental change in how we think about man, industry and nature. Just as Karl Marx anticipated a future of machines, where manual labour had been replaced by automation, we need new political thinking.

Replacing oil, however, isn’t so simple. The problem is that oil is a terrifically energy-dense material, and useful in many other ways. Entire industries are founded on the byproducts alone, such as fertilisers and plastics. We tend to take this for granted.

But what if oil could be created in your backyard? Or by your children as a school project? What if we thought of oil as a renewable energy? What if it was a low-carbon renewable? With cheap hydrocarbons it becomes just that, and within 15 years much of our oil will be produced this way: it’s simply an open bet on who’ll get there first.

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