superficial.net

It can’t have escaped any self-confessed pirate’s attention that The Pirate Bay founders were recently found guilty in their recent court case.

For quite some time the defendants had been adament that the service they were providing didn’t amount to copyright infringement because they weren’t hosting the material themselves, and had even gone as far as to regularly taunt the various copyright authorities & studios to “take us to court and see what happens”. Well, they finally got their wish.

At this point I should probably point out that I’m not squeaky clean myself – I’ve got active subscriptions on more than one private torrent sites, an unlimited-download Usenet account, and a multi-terabyte media PC in my living room. That said, unlike a lot of people it would seem, I’m not an idiot.

Anyone with any common sense can see that the notion that you are completely unburdened from any legal responsibility when you just enable people to download copyrighted material illegally is completely untenable.

Let’s cover off those oft-posted straw men and misconceptions shall we:

1. If TPB are legally responsible for copyright infringement; then so are Youtube, eBay, etc.
   No. Whilst it’s true that Youtube, eBay and co are guilty of hosting copyrighted material or counterfeit goods respectively from time to time – it’s not their raison d’etre. The fact it is possible for people to upload copyrighted material to Youtube is something that can’t possibly be stopped automagically, likewise the freeform nature of eBay listings means it is easy enough to one to disguise counterfeit goods as legitimate items.

   The key difference here is how these companies handle the isolated cases where it does occur. Both Youtube and eBay adopt a proactive attitude to removing infringing items from their respective services, and they work with the relevant copyright/trademark licence holders in this regard. The TPB however went completely the other way – they ignored all requests for cooperation with these bodies.

   Fundamentally though it’s all about intent. The whole premise of TPB is to provide a search engine to find copyrighted material, the fact royalty-free material can exist on it by virtue of the unrestricted nature of the Bittorrent medium is just coincidental. In that respect they are the antithesis of Youtube or eBay when it comes to copyrighted works.

2. Google searches (e.g. filetype searches, etc) can be used to find copyrighted material ipso facto Google enable copyright infringement!
   Again, no. The fact Google searches can find copyrighted material is an unintended byproduct of the flexibility of their search engine and one that they can’t reasonably or technically be expected to be able to control.

   At the end of the day it is possible to co-opt many technologies and systems to carry out illegitimate activities (e.g. posting non royalty-free images on Flickr, reposting a novel to a blog, etc) but it does not automatically follow that the companies that are involved in this are complicit in it, unlike the TPB founders who – even when presented with individual cases of infringement – told the respective bodies to “jog on”.

3. So if Ford sell me a car and I kill someone with it they’re responsible!
   This is the worst straw man by far, yet it comes up in debates on this subject with alarming regularity. It is so bad in fact that I’m not even going to bother rebuking it suffice to say that anyone who earnestly believes that a company that sells you a car is somehow liable for you ram-raiding, driving into someone or any other driving offence is an idiot.
4. DRM sucks, if you support this you’re pro-DRM, stop living in the past, information is free! (etc)
   It doesn’t follow that just because you can’t see the TPBs position as legally tenable that this automatically means you’re pro-DRM, although like the previous example it’s a pretty common straw man. Also it pays to remember that DRM in all its forms exists because of the prevalence of copyright infringement, so in that regard pirates have no one else but themselves to blame for it existing.

The bottom line for me on this subject is that if I’m honest and objective about it I am not really surprised by this verdict (ignoring the punitive damages & jail time) and whilst it will mean nothing in terms of stopping TPB or anyone else carrying on as normal, it certainly is a wake up call for anyone under the delusion that simply providing a tracker or starting a similar site to TPB of their own absolves them of any responsibility.

I’m not really a big fan of car shows but Japfest 2008 was quite an experience. I was asked to bring my car so it could go on the stand of a company who was selling ICE (In Car Entertainment) equipment. As it turned out there were some perks to going….

No doubt Fletch will not approve.

I haven’t celebrated New Years Eve for quite a few years now. Even going back 5 or 6 years I don’t think it was particularly relevant in my life other than the implicit expectation that friends would be out drinking – perhaps a little bit more than usual – and would give a random stranger a hug to the tune of Auld Langs Ayne as the clock counted down to midnight. Personally I can’t stand it.

The big problem I have with New Years Eve is one of conformity, it’s expected by family and friends that you celebrate it and if you say you aren’t planning to do anything at all then you’re looked upon in abject horror. “You’re not drinking?” they say, looking at me like I’ve just told them the World was square, “it’s the dawn of a new year!”. What’s the big deal about the crossover to a new year? My life isn’t going to change overnight, the things that get me down in life are still there the next morning, and no one sticks to New Years resolutions – tokenistic as they are – least of all me.

That’s not to say of course that if NYE happens to fall on a night when I would normally be out drinking & socialising anyway that I make a point of not going out, I’m not pig-headed enough to think that making a stand means anything, but when I do go out and it happens to be NYE there is a palpable tension in my blood as the time approaches the “magic 12 o’clock”. I just want to crawl under a rock as soon as the cult-like countdown chanting starts, when people cross their arms and pretend to like eachother for an hour or so.

Which brings me onto the iPhone.

The iPhone launch in the UK was a lot like the NYE experience. You couldn’t avoid it even if you wanted to, and there was a pretentious countdown on the O2 site and elsewhere on the web with Apple fanboys whipping eachother into a frenzy as the clock counted down, even going as far as to reserve posts in threads for comments about their new purchase. The BBC and other reputable outfits covered it – adding to the annoyance factor – proving that Apple really are the master puppeteers when it comes to PR. A queue outside Regent Street was featured on many news bulletins (probably because it was business as usual with no queues pretty much everywhere else) which talked about fans “rushing” to “snap up” the “must have phone”.

I don’t like the iPhone, and I struggle to remain passive in the face of people praising it. It’s a seriously deficient piece of hardware, with a draconian contract (18 months, 200 mins/200 texts for £35 a month!) to boot. When I look at the iPhone I wonder if Apple had an internal competition to see how many bare-essential features they could remove before the traditionally meek Apple fanbase started squeaking in protest. No MMS, no 3G, audio-only bluetooth support, no 3rd party apps (nothing unsanctioned by Apple anyway), you can’t even send an SMS to more than one person at the same time, the list goes on and on. Tell that to an Apple fanboy though and they’ll be quick to reply that it’s “all about the experience of using an iPhone, the UI is unparalleled”. Whilst it’s true the iPhone UI is well designed, it’s a flawed argument. Ironically it’s the reverse of the same argument that people bring up when comparing Microsoft Vista to XP – Vista has bells and whistles but does things differently/wrong to XP, but few people leap to the defence of Vista, or Microsoft for that matter.

The fact is the iPhone lacks a great many things that people take for granted now with phones, especially in Europe. Whilst it may be possible to send pictures (on a woeful 2 megapixel camera no less) via email, who actually does this? The whole point of MMS is for sending those drunken pub/club snaps to someone you know, who probably doesn’t even have an email address and certainly wouldn’t be checking it if they’re out too. Sending images over email is “just as effective as MMS”, if you believe the fanboys. Bleh.

iPhone fans are also quick to point out that things like MP3 ringtones & 3rd party apps are possible by jailbreaking the phone. I’m sorry but that doesn’t count. Just because it’s possible to kludge something to work, doesn’t mean that it meant to do it by design. Apple didn’t intend for users to use their own ringtones or 3rd party apps, the standard firmware doesn’t support it so it’s irrelevant to mention it in the context of a pro/con argument. It’s a bit like saying a toaster can cook sausages if you force them in, so why would anyone in their right mind buy a frying pan?

The only thing I’m prepared to credit Apple with is that they’ve set the cat amongst the pigeons as far as the other manufacturers are concerned. They have led by example on the UI front and shown that it is possible to do things in a more user-friendly fashion, hopefully Nokia and co will learn a few tricks for their next offerings.

Common sense tells you that you should ignore people who buy into things (hype) like this, but I find it impossible not to get irate about it. I simply cannot comprehend or rationalise the value of owning the device given what it does (or more importantly doesn’t do) and how much it costs. Yet, read any techie forum and there will be Mac zealots on there who talked about the buildup to buying it, talked about the trip down to the shop, even posted images of the bag, receipt and sealed iPhone box – like they were making history. It’s a phone for Christs sake. A phone, and not a particularly impressive one either.

The biggest frustration? Knowing that no matter how rationally you put negative points across you just know an avid Apple fan is just going to retort saying “you just don’t get it” or words to that effect. How do you reason with people like that?

Long time no update, been busy etc…

Found a rather nasty hidden feature on my Sky+ box yesterday – turns out if you record a programme and then change your package at a later date, if you no longer have the channel on which the programme was originally recorded – you can’t watch it! Doesn’t matter that the entire programme is recorded on hard disk (therefore there’s no technical reason why you couldn’t watch it), when you try and watch the recorded programme you’re just presented with the screen you usually get when you try and watch the channel live (i.e. “please call this number to get robbed blind”).

To cap it all off, to punish you for daring to change your package the Sky+ box actually locks out all the controls when you start trying to watch the programme, you can’t even cancel it. The only way out is to switch it off at the mains.

Nice one Sky.