Feargal Sharkey needs little introduction. A chart-topper in his own right, and as the lead singer of one of the greatest pop groups of all time, The Undertones, he subsequently crossed into regulatory and policy work – constantly agitating for musicians, songwriters and performers. At the start of the month he joined British Music Rights, which represents music publishers, composers and songwriters – and an important counterweight to the BPI, which predominantly represents large record companies.

With the music and broadband businesses at a historic crossroads, Feargal gave us a glimpse of some of the closed-door discussions we might see next.

[ full interview at The Register ...]

Take that, pigopolists! A novel idea has been proposed to take the fight to the RIAA and the BPI. Since P2P filesharing has a discovery element which permits people to discover new music at no cost – why shouldn’t filesharers be compensated for filesharing?

The idea was floated on the Open Rights Group discussion list earlier this month.

“Studies point to filesharing as a driver for *increased* music sales (among the heaviest downloaders). Possibly filesharers should start trying to recover promotional costs from the music industry?” asked anti-copyright campaigner Rob Myers.

“The music industry should be thinking about business models in which it pays commission to filesharers,” echoed one poster.

It’s an intriguing idea, one which turns conventional ideas of “compensation” on their head.

However, ORG’s Becky Hogge told us that this emphatically didn’t reflect official ORG policy.

We also ran the idea by former Undertones lead singer Feargal Sharkey. Sharkey recently took the job of chairman of British Music Rights, a group that acts as a counterweight to the BPI, representing songwriters and composers. Feargal’s reaction?

“Fantastic!” he told us.

“The obvious thing is who’s going to provide this compensation? Shall I assume it’s the original songwriters and composers who don’t make much money as it is?”

“That’s one of the most fanciful and non-practical ideas I’ve heard for quite some time. But God bless them for making me laugh and cheering me up today!”

So alas, this might be a hard sell outside the Republic of Freetardia – where music is free, and compensation is always someone else’s problem.

Houses shook across much of Britain as the country experienced its biggest earthquake for thirty years early this morning.

Impressively, within ten minutes of the tremors, CSEM (EMSC), the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, revealed the cause: a 5.4 magnitude quake with an epicentre 10 miles north east of Lincoln, in the East Midlands. (Within an hour, this was revised to a 4.9 scale quake).

CSEM even saves you the from converting latitude/longtiude co-ordinates – it’s integrated with Tele Atlas data, via Google Maps.

Despite the availability of real-time information, the instant news media fell back on, er… “calls from viewers”. The BBC and Sky’s radio and rolling news hurried to bring us what we already knew – that a great big earthquake had happened, somewhere in Britain.

A resourceful night operator at BBC News took a break from cutting and pasting these reports (“there was a really loud bang” – Jemma Harrison, 22, in Greater Manchester) to find the US Geological Survey’s website – which (naturally) carried rather less accurate information than the real-time sensors in Europe.

CSEM had quake information within 10 minutes:

(At time of writing (90 minutes later), BBC News had raised somebody from the British Geological Survey out of their beds, who had in turn gone to the web, and confirmed the CSEM information. This confirmation replaced the reference to the US Geological website. That’s one way of getting the news out…)

It’s tempting to conclude that the moral of the story is one of new technology baffling hacks: “why can’t the media use the internet better?”

But it’s worse than that.

One Laptop Per Newsreader

Publicly funded science, which is supposed to operate on our behalf, did its job – by making available real-time information available within ten minutes of the quake. Not all of it worked – alas, our own British Geological Survey, a member of the EMSC network, doesn’t publish real-time monitoring information. But it shows what we get for our money, when scientists aren’t concocting disaster fictions of their own. Which with gullible politicians and quangocrats in charge, is how they get research grants today.

The science network did rather better than the publically-funded media, which demonstrated how badly it has lost the plot. The 24 hour news hacks long since forgot how to do even the most basic research, and now fall back on telling us what we already know.

What’s the point?

[some interesting feedback at The Register - see end]

Two major labels have been served notice of a fresh antitrust investigation, a music business newsletter reports today. MusicAlly’s daily Bulletin suggests that the as-yet-unlaunched TotalMusic service, currently backed by Universal and Somy BMG, has prompted notices from the US Department of Justice. The report suggests all four major labels have been contacted.
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