Joe's Jottings

Category: The Media

The Dr Johnson License….

I appreciate that this is likely to be one of those posts that will annoy some folks, but, here we go. A couple of days ago I was invited by two or three separate people to join Facebook Groups and sign petitions against the UK Digital Economy Bill. Now, I believe that we need a Digital Economy Bill like I need a hole in the head; what we actually need is less red tape and a more hands off approach from Central Government to let entrepreneurs get on with the job without requiring a chit from a bureaucrat to go to the toilet. However, I didn’t sign any petitions or join any groups; why? Because the total pre-occupation of everyone was whether it’s right to have a legal structure in which it’s possible to remove or restrict someone’s Internet access if they’re guilty of or accused of sharing copyright materials.

There are some truly stinky parts of that bill, like there are with most pieces of New Labour legislation – but I want to look today at the filesharing issue in a wider sense.

Let’s start with the ‘The Internet is an essential part of modern life and it shouldn’t be possible to be cut off from it.’ argument. Bollocks. Water is essential. A roof over your head is essential. Electricity and Power are pretty important. And yet you can lose all of these by simply not paying your mortgage and utility bills, ultimately resulting in being thrown out of your house and living in a cardboard box. If that’s possible, why on Earth does anyone living in the real world and not in Second Life think that your Internet connection should have some sort of God-given right of protection? And as for essential – quite a few people manage quite happily without an Internet connection, thank you very much.

In the context of this argument, what the Internet HAS done for some people is to allow them to access, free of charge, a large tranche of media that they would have had to borrow off of their friends 20 years ago. The actually physical act of borrowing and copying probably restricted copying in that few people had the brass neck (or stamina) to borrow 20 CDs from a friend and copy them in one sitting, for example. The Internet is, no doubt, an essential tool for people in ripping off media. I’ve heard most of the arguments, and there are some good points on both sides of the debate. Rather than re-hash the usual debates, here are a few observations to provide food for thought for anyone approaching this argument with an open mind.

We have a number of open licenses like Creative Commons, Open Source, etc. Why shouldn’t it be possible, therefore, for a creator of software, film or music put their material out through a proprietary license that requires payment to use the material? After all, I am restricted with what I can do within the GNU licence, for example; I have to allow other people to copy the material – it’s part of the GNU licence and I am more than happy to play along with that. If you want to have a recording of a film, then you should surely, by the same logic, abide by the license of that film. Typically pay money and don’t copy it. No one is forcing you to adopt that license – you have the choice not to buy the DVD. Similarly with Open Source; if I don’t want to pass on my source code to other people, I choose to write my own code and not use the GNU license. I can see no difference.

I’d be interested to know how many people who regularly engage in file sharing of copyrighted materials have ever created something non-trivial and original and have tried to sell it. I may be wrong but a quick poll of folks I know (outside the professional digerati) would indicate that the answer is ‘not many’. Perhaps to have experienced running a small business that deals with created works like software, or publishing a book, etc. might change people’s attitudes a little. Same argument as above; if I wish to place material I create in the public domain or under GNU or CC, then it’s my right to do so, and your right as consumers of media to take advantage of my action. If, on the other hand, I choose to publish under what I might start calling the Dr Johnson License (‘Only a fool writes and doesn’t get paid for it!’) then you have a right to not purchase what I produce, and I have the risk of not seeing my works go out in to the world. If you make an illegal copy of my work, then I have a right to pursue you to make you abide by my Dr Johnson License – just as the creators of software licensed under the GNU license can pursue someone who breaches that license under the law.

I’ve heard the argument of ‘try before buy’ and it’s a good one. Which is why I have a Spotify account – legal music downloading, free of charge, some advertising, no actual physical ownership of the music outside the service even if I pay a monthly fee (which removes the ads). I have to say that I find the latter a pain in the rear – there are some advantages to having physical ownership of the files – but then again, it’s THEIR license and I choose to go with them or not. It’s an imperfect system. If you download stuff on a ‘try before buying’ basis, then perhaps the case could be made to allow you to download any piece of media with a built in duration, that renders the media unplayable after, say, 30 days unless you buy it – the act of purchase then generates an unlock code. The argument has been expressed that downloaders tend to be purchasers of music – again, I’m yet to be convinced. Anecdotal evidence from people I know would suggest that whilst they may purchase material, the value of that that they download illegally vastly exceeds that which they purchase.

To all the freetards, can you explain why wrong for me to put the material I’ve created out in to the world, want to be paid for it, and take action when I’m not? I am exercising my personal, creative freedom to want to be paid for my work. If my view of my own value is wrong, don’t pay me – but don’t copy either.

December 8, 2009
Playing the game of War

One of my ‘guilty secret’ films is the 1982 John Badham movie ‘War Games’, in which a teenager inadvertently starts the countdown to World War 3 by hacking in to a military computer system. He thinks he’s playing war games, but the computer thinks that it’s the real thing and starts counting down to a real missile launch. At the end of the film, the youth and the computer’s inventor manage to convince the machine to stop it’s attempts to launch the missiles by telling it to try out various game scenarios in which the result is always the same – mutual destruction. The computer, smarter than most politicians, remarks that nuclear war is an interesting game; the only way to win is not to play.

Shame General Jack D Ripper didn’t get the message….(left)

I was reminded of this film the other morning when I read on the BBC’s web site that a couple of Swiss human rights groups have published a paper in which they protest that it’s possible to commit war crimes in many modern computer games. Now, the fact that this is deemed newsworthy in a world in which war crimes of varying magnitudes are committed every day of the year is quite depressing of itself; perhaps these chaps need to look up from playing ‘Call of Duty’ and see what’s happening and what has happened in the last 15 years in the world – not just in Iraq and Afghanistan but closer to ome in Sarajevo and Kossovo. Seriously, the fact that games are discussed in this context brings little credit to academia and belittles the true war crimes that go on. Does this mean we should re-visit films like ‘Platoon’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket’? Should we ban ‘Star Wars’ with it’s depiction of whole planets being zapped out of existence? Do we purge episodes of Star Trek and Stargate from our collective media experience because of their story lines?

There is little evidence to suggest that playing these military oriented games desensitizes young men; many Western soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan will have played games like these and are still traumatised by what they see. War crimes have been a feature of warfare from days immemorial; we can go back to places like Lidic and Malmedy in World War 2, the use of gas warfare in Iraq in the 1920s to subdue local guerillas, etc.

The academics comment that the games ‘permit’ war crimes to be carried out in the game scenarios; I wonder if they’re suggesting that the games should somehow prevent this. Some games do have game play that ‘punishes’ such activities in terms of the chance of ‘winning’ n the game, but are the academics suggesting that the games actually forbid activities that are war crimes in the real world? I hope not….and here’s why.

The gamers have free will within the context of what the game allows them to do. They will almost certainly behave in a way that they wouldn’t behave in real life, and I do think that most people playing ‘Call of Duty’ will realise that there is a difference between Xbox mediate pixel slaughter and real world combat. If the activists are suggesting that the ability to commit a war crime in game is more likely to encourage people to do the same thing outside of the game, then there are two options; some sort of modification to the game play that punishes such activities in the game by a modification of the game scenario, or some sort of total block that restricts the course of action of a player in these scenarios. Now, if the academics believe that gamers might suffer from blurred reality when they commit a game based war crime, logically they must also believe that that other game events also might affect their view of reality.

So….where the game scenario is loaded against war crimes, a player may take the decision that they can do it anyway and live with the game consequences. There is no moral judgement here by the player; they’re operating purely within the game mechanics and dealing with the consequences of their activities in a game theory scenario rather than the more complex world of free will and morality. By the academic logic, the gamer would behave in a similar way in real life, ignoring the morality of the decision in favour of some vague ‘live with the consequences’.

The second scenario is even worse – by the logic of the academics it would appear that a gamer attempting a real world war crime will be somehow prevented from doing so by a kind of ‘deus ex machina’. That hand of God? Friendly aliens? Just in time intervention from a superior officer? Who knows….

Whether folks like it or not, a game is a game is a game. Whilst I find some game scenarios morally repugnant, if you accept that the lack of controls in war games to stop people doing certain acts may encourage them to do those acts in real life, you also have to accept that the ability to do any action in a game will encourage that act in real life. The result, therefore, should be to ban everything with the exception of ping-pong. If you don’t accept this, then you need to leave well alone and accept that freedom of will in the game world reflects freedom of will in the real world, and that what truly matters is the character and moral compass of people.

November 26, 2009
Exclusion 2.0 – is daft jargon necessary?

I just came across this on my Twitter feed – a reference to a ” ‘Future of the web’ Turtle” at Open 09. Yup – a turtle. After some Googling about and learning more than I ever wanted to know about our green, aquatic co-travellers on Planet earth, I eventually went to the Open 09 web site where I found the following:

“And in the true spirit of social media, the content of the sessions will be decided by the delegates contributing to what will happen on the day via the OPEN 09 blogs. The blogs are the virtual spaces where the themes for sessions – we’re calling them ‘Turtles’ – will be debated and decided. We’ll be adding more Turtles that focus on particular areas of the creative industries.”

Ahhh…that explained it. A blog for a session / seminar. Cool. So why call them turtles? This seems to be an increasing habit amongst the more bleeding edge practitioners of web development to create a new (and often meaningless) lexicon to describe what they do.

Sorry, guys, but this is the sort of meaningless jargonny media-waffle that just produces an exclusive air around a lot of these sorts of events. My own impression is that the same people attend the round of conferences and seminars, chucking ideas around, hatching turtles, but rarely communicating what the Hell is actually happening to the rest of the world.

I earn my crust through web and software development. As I said to a potential client / colleague yesterday – I’m a ‘meat and potatoes’ sort of developer. My clients expect me to deliver reliable, working systems within budget that add value to their business. For many businesses, Social Media is still something that swallows up their bandwidth rather than adds to the bottom line, and I’m not sure that this sort of jargon helps us get any sort of message across.

My view of jargon is that it’s used by people of a shared culture to reduce the amount of communication necessary to get a particular concept over to their co-practitioners in an agreed form. This fad simply makes it looks like we’re trying to keep these sorts of events as ‘parties for the cool kids only’ and that cannot be good.

Or that we’re trying to hide the fact we have nothing relevant to give businesses – which is even worse.

November 10, 2009
Book Review – ‘Fantasy Island’ by Dan Atkinson and Larry Elliot
No, nothing to do the 1970s TV series with Ricardo Montalban as a bloke who made wishes come true on an Island with a combination of technology, actors and smoke and mirrors. Although….. Nope, this is a review of a book by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, published by Constable in 2007, ISBN Number 978-1-84529-605-6. Before the NuLab apologists come scuttling out to bleat that Dan Atkinson is a writer with the Daily Mail, and so is biased, I’d suggest they read the book anyway and follow up on the statistics therein. One final warning – this is a scary book for anyone who cares about the state of the UK after 12 years of NuLab Governance and it will almost certainly make you very angry indeed.

The book is well written – I digested it in two sittings – although the statistical bits (not too many) and the explanation of why the economy is going to crap out may require a couple of readings. It’s worth noting that this book was written before the recent financial meltdown, which it predicts to a great degree.

In the book, the authors examine the rise to power of the new Labour philosophy, and then highlight in 7 chapters the ‘big lies’ that have turned Great Britain in to the ‘Fantasy Island’ of the title, where we can have endless debt with no comebacks, enjoy highly paid jobs for which we are unqualified, have limitless growth without environmental impact and where the state machine is apparently being made leaner whilst increasing in size. All being paid for by jobs in the ‘creative economy’. Oh, and how we can project military force around the world and play the part of a super-power whilst cutting back on defence expenditure. Some of us have been banging on about the impossibility of this for some time now – I wish that I’d encountered this book a couple of years ago as it pulls together all the material one needs to take a good hard swing at New Labour and the Blairite nightmare.

The 7 core chapters deal with the following issues:
1. Britain’s debt timebomb – well, that one went off in our faces around the time this book was published.
2. Reliance on the Creative Economy – some statistics on the true value of the ‘creative economy’ to Britain make it clear that it was indeed bullshit to rely on it. Having spent time working in the film industry in the early 2000s, I can definitely concur – the UK film industry, for example, is one where, in 2000, over 60% of films made in Britain stayed unreleased after being finished and where film-makers made films that they thought punters should see – the cultural colonialism of North London. By 2004, the balance of payments credit due to film was a paltry 160 million. At least it was a credit – that due to TV was in deficit to the tune of over 300 million. Music is also in a mess. If we follow the NuLab plan we may be relying on ‘The X Factor’ winners to get us out of the hole….
3. Shrinking Prices AND increased living standards – the fantasy being that we get our cheap toys and non-essential goodies at the EXPENSE of our standard of living.
4. Failing Public Sector – deals with issues such as educational ‘grades inflation’ and how the PFI has allowed the private sector to cream off lots of money without any real improvement in productivity.
5. The Workforce – attempting to keep unemployment down whilst ploughing in lots of new legislation – resulting in a highly exploited workforce with lots of outsourcing.
6. Defence – increasing military commitments as the US’s bagman, whilst reduction in real terms of defence budget to suit New Labour doctrine.
7. Environment – trying to con us all that we can have everything AND not screw up the planet. Although New Labour aren’t alone here.
Not very pleasant reading – although there is a chapter that offers a couple of alternative paths to take. Learning to be frugal is something we’re likely to have to get used to over the next few years, anyway, so that will be easy medicine to take – the vast majority of us have no real alternative. And one other thing after reading this book – it reinforces the old saw that Labour are not fit to govern – which is a dreadful thing for those of us who once had such hopes for the Left in the UK.

It’s a worthwhile book to get a feel for how we in the UK have been royally screwed in the last 12 years. Regard it as a companion piece to Nick Cohen’s ‘What’s Left’ – but please don’t read them both in the same sitting and blame me when your head explodes…

At least on the TV show, all ended well for the people who’d bought their fantasy. Just where are the two guys in the white suits when we need them?
November 9, 2009
The ‘Why should I give a fuck?’ award for today goes to….
OK – first of all apologies for the title. It’s just that the trivial background behind this post made me very angry this morning. I may just be having a grump, heading for a cold or suffering from fast-food overdose, but I guess I’m allowed to throw a strop occasionally.

So, what was it that generated the bile? It was the headline on ‘The Sun’ newspaper. Something about ‘2 Brits win Euro Lottery’. Like I said in the title ‘Why should I give a …?’ Genuinely. This matters to the people who won, their families, possibly their communities. It’s not really a matter of national importance worthy of large headlines on the same day that other news stories include:
- The shooting dead at Fort Hood of 13 people and the wounding of 30+ others
- The possibility that all of the new proposals for managing MP’s Expenses will not be introduced
- The UK Government is saying that it’s unlikely that a legally binding climate treaty will be worked out at Copenhagen
- Three ex-Chief of Staffs have criticised Gordon Brown for his support of UK troops.
But what’s more important, according to the tabloid press, is 2 anonymous Brits winning a lottery. I suppose that I should be grateful that it’s not being held up as another great British victory over the perfidious Europeans to match Agincourt, Waterloo or the Battle of Britain!

Unfortunately I expect to see more of this sort of thing as the months unfold this winter. It’s going to be a hard one; we’ll continue supporting a regime as bent as a hairgrip in Afghanistan, we’ll continue being in recession here at home and we’ll no doubt continue witnessing the political establishment carry on trying to worm out of it’s responsibilities. The Media will rise to the occasion with lots of stories like this, a good few about our new (apparent) National Treasure Cheryl Cole and almost certainly a good number of stories like that about Philip Laing and this latest pair of Chav thugs. Oh, and don’t forget The X Factor and the rest of the ‘reality’ shows.

Years ago, I guess we might have considered this to be a modern application of the old Roman method of keeping the Proletarians happy by liberal application of pannen et circuses – bread and circuses, with cheap credit supplying the bread and the media providing the circuses. One thing is definitely certain today – the media is able to provide circus entertainment by the bucket full with reality TV, lottery winners, ‘national treasures’ and a good few examples of throwing folks to the lions.

It’s a shame we haven’t got bread any longer, though – I do wonder how long teh circus will keep the punters distracted when the bills start piling up and the larder starts getting bare.
November 8, 2009