It’s very, very timely – and even if you don’t follow Nokia, mobile or telecomms it’s a fascinating exercise in business analysis and organisational studies. Enjoy.

Read more at The Register…

A study correlating economic and political changes in China’s Middle Kingdom has found that warmer climate benefited society. By contrast, a fall of temperature of 2C was correlated with conflict and famine.

“The collapses of the agricultural dynasties of the Han (25-220), Tang (618-907), Northern Song (960-1125), Southern Song (1127-1279) and Ming (1368-1644) are closely associated with low temperature or the rapid decline in temperature,” say the academics led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

Historical studies are problematic in two ways, and you have to be careful not to fall into one of two obvious elephant traps. One is that politics very much determines whether a society gets out of a pickle or goes into a decline. So deterministic views such as Jared Diamond’s in Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse tend to underestimate this capacity for change.

The other (not entirely unrelated) trap is that we’re no longer at the mercy of nature, and thanks to technology have tamed it to a significant degree. We don’t have a “peak wood” or a “peak whaleblubber” crisis today. Even the IPCC grudgingly admits as much. “The marginal increase in the number of people at risk from hunger due to climate change must be viewed within the overall large reductions due to socio-economic development.”

Well, obviously. Although slight increases in temperature (and CO2) result in higher productivity, wealth remains a much bigger factor. It’s poverty that makes people miserable, not the climate. And lifting a couple of billion people from messing about in the mud, and into a modern, largely urban, technological society effectively removes them from the risks our great-great-grandparents used to worry about.

The idea that tiny changes in climate (either way) cause catastrophic effects, against which we’re powerless, is really the last in a line of medieval superstitions.

As Roddy Campbell writes here, if you’d asked people in 1900 what would happen if temperatures rose by one degree, you’d have got the same prognosis you hear from the “bedwetters” today: “hunger, war, migration, desertification and water shortages in 2010… Pretty grim, wouldn’t you think?” Yet here we are, and life expectancy is higher than ever. The fear of science and technological innovation runs so deep with some people, that self-flagellation is always preferred.

Even significant long-term falls in temperature – such as the ones we can expect quite soon – can be made tolerable by adaptation and technological innovation. Nigel Calder this week revisited the study of Milankovitch cycles he published while editor of Nature in 1974.

The extrapolation suggests that the next ice age began five thousand years ago and it’ll get quite chilly in the next 120,000 years.

“This ice age looks like a relatively slow starter,” Nature reported. “The theory, though, is of widespread snow that fails to melt in the vicinity of 50°N in summer, so that large areas of North America, northern Europe and the USSR will have to be encrusted with ice sheets during the next few thousand years.”

On the other hand, the Sahara would return to being warm and wet, as it was during the last ice age, and would be fertile again.

Even life above the 50° line (which includes the whole of the UK) need not be grim. I suggest a row of nuclear power stations at Hadrian’s Wall, discharging warm water around the coastline and inland via a heating/irrigation network. That should keep things toasty.

“It’s not a whitewash, but it is inadequate,” is Labour MP Graham Stringer’s summary of the Russell inquiry report. Stringer is the only member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology with scientific qualifications – he holds a PhD in Chemistry.

Not only did Russell fail to deal with the issues of malpractice raised in the emails, Stringer told us, but he confirmed the feeling that MPs had been misled by the University of East Anglia when conducting their own inquiry. Parliament only had time for a brief examination of the CRU files before the election, but made recommendations. This is a serious charge.

After the Select Committee heard oral evidence on March 1, MPs believed that Anglia had entrusted an examination of the science to a separate inquiry. Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia Edward Acton had told the committee that “I am hoping, later this week, to announce the chair of a panel to reassess the science and make sure there is nothing wrong.”[Hansard - Q129]]

Ron Oxburgh’s inquiry eventually produced a short report clearing the participants. He did not reassess the science, and now says it was never in his remit. “The science was not the subject of our study,” he confirmed in an email to Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit.

Earlier this week the former chair of the Science and Technology Committee, Phil Willis, now Lord Willis, said MPs had been amazed at the “sleight of hand”.

“Oxburgh didn’t go as far as I expected. The Oxburgh Report looks much more like a whitewash,” Graham Stringer told us.

Stringer says Anglia appointee Muir Russell (a civil servant and former Vice Chancellor of Glasgow University), failed in three significant areas.

“Why did they delete emails? The key question was what reason they had for doing this, but this was never addressed; not getting to the central motivation was a major failing both of our report and Muir Russell.”

Graham Stringer

Stringer also says that it was unacceptable for Russell (who is not a scientist) to conclude that CRU’s work was reproducible, when the data needed was not available. He goes further:

“The fact that you can make up your own experiments and get similar results doesn’t mean that you’re doing what’s scientifically expected of you. You need to follow the same methodology of the process.”

“I was surprised at Phil Jones’ answers to the questions I asked him [in Parliament]. The work was never replicable,” says Stringer.

In 2004 Jones had declined to give out data that would have permitted independent scrutiny of their work, explaining that “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”

This policy is confirmed several times in the emails, with Jones also advising colleagues to destroy evidence helpful to people wishing to reproduce the team’s results.

“I think that’s quite shocking,” says Stringer.

Thirdly, the University of East Anglia failed to follow the Commons Select Committee’s recommendations in handling the inquiry and producing the report.

Stringer said, “We asked them to be independent, and not allow the University to have first sight of the report. The way it’s come out is as an UEA inquiry, not an independent inquiry.”

Stringer also says they reminded the inquiry to be open – Russell had promised as much – but witness testimony took place behind closed doors, and not all the depositions have been published.

How independent was the panel?

Muir Russell’s team heard only one side of the story, failing to call witnesses who were the subjects of the emails – Stephen McIntyre of Climate Audit is mentioned over one hundred times in the archive – who may have given a different perspective. Nor was any active climate scientist supportive of climate change policy but critical of the CRU team’s behaviour – Hans Storch or Judith Curry, let alone the prominent sceptics, for example – summoned. Stringer feels their presence would have provided vital context.

University of East Anglia Vice Chancellor Edward Acton

The panel included Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet and a vocal advocate of mitigation against climate change (in 2007 he described global warming “the biggest threat to our future health”) and Geoffrey Boulton a climate change advisor to the UK government and the EU, who spent 16-years at the University of East Anglia – the institution under apparently ‘independent’ scrutiny.

In several areas the CRU academics were given the benefit of the doubt because a precedent had been set – often by the academics themselves.

The British establishment has a poor record of examining its own conduct. The 1983 Franks Report into events leading up to the Falklands Invasion exonerated the leading institutions and decision-makers, so too did the Hutton Report into the Invasion of Iraq.

For Stringer, policy needs to be justified by the evidence.

“Vast amounts of money are going to be spent on climate change policy, it’s billions and eventually could be trillions. Knowing what is accurate and what is inaccurate is important.”

“I view this as a Parliamentarian for one of the poorest constituencies in the country. Putting up the price of fuel for poor people on such a low level of evidence, hoping it will have the desired effect, is not acceptable. I need to know what’s going on.”

Climategate may finally be living up to its name. If you recall, it wasn’t the burglary or use of funding that led to the impeachment of Nixon, but the cover-up. Now, ominously, three inquiries into affair have raised more questions than there were before. ®

The University of East Anglia’s enquiry into the conduct of its own staff at its Climatic Research Unit has highlighted criticisms of the department and staff conduct – but clears the path for the individuals concerned to carry on.

The CRU played an important role in writing the UN’s IPCC summaries on climate science, so the issue is far from a parochial one. The most serious charge is poor communication; Sir Muir Russell even calls for “a concerted and sustained campaign to win hearts and minds” to restore confidence in the team’s work.

Russell was appointed by the institution to investigate an archive of source code and emails that leaked onto the internet last November. The source code is not addressed at all. His report suggests that the problems were of the academics’ own making, stating that they were “united in defence against criticism”. Yet the enquiry found that despite emails promising to “redefine” the peer review publication process, and put pressure on journal editors, staff were not guilty of subverting the IPCC process, and their “rigour” and “honesty” were beyond question.



Leading academics were called for written and oral evidence before the Russell enquiry, and in many cases the report accepts their account of events. The subjects of their criticism were not invited, not were climate scientists critical of their behaviour. For example, in their capacity as IPCC gatekeepers, the academics are cleared of excluding critical evidence, and yet bending the rules to include supporting studies. To reach this particular conclusion, for example, the report finds a criterion: a “consistence of view” with earlier work. The earlier work here was in fact produced the academics under scrutiny. So, having compared the CRU academics’ work against their previous work, and found it to be consistent, they are cleared of malpractice.



Despite the gentlemanly and clubbable tone, the report nevertheless has deep systemic criticism of the institution and the team’s processes. UEA “fell badly short of its scientific and public obligations”, according to one review panel member, Lancet editor Richard Horton.

It criticises the team’s decision to curtail a temperature reconstruction at 1960, and splice on an instrumental temperature record, without explanation, noting:

“The figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading in not describing that one of the series was truncated post 1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data.”

There’s a selective approach to criticism of scientific techniques – officially, Muir Russell says it doesn’t examine the validity of scientific arguments. But as you can see, in places, it does. On the issue of the Yamal reconstruction, CRU is cleared but the related issues of basing the reconstruction on a limited sample of proxies, and using techniques which exaggerate and validate outliers (basically, one tree) is not addressed.



What did the CRU crew do?

The Climatic Research Unit is one part of the picture, an important one, but not at the heart of climate theory. They’re not physicists, and they don’t do the physics upon which competing explanations of how the climate works stand or fall, once measured against observation. So in that sense, ‘Climategate’ isn’t a ‘Climategate’ – it isn’t a Scopes Trial of the global warming theory.

But CRU does two important things that shape our understanding of the present and the past. CRU is one of a small number of bodies that calculates global temperature readings (of where we are today), and is probably the pre-eminent body that performs historical temperature reconstructions, quite literally writing or re-writing history. And its importance is magnified since the leading academics are also lead authors of the UN’s IPCC reports – the vast volumes policy makers like to cite as their scientific justification, but rarely read.

In the absence of a strong physics story, this temperature work became hotly contested. The biggest bone of contention is whether modern, post-1850 warming is anomalous. If it is, then the likelihood that we were in strange and uncharted territory is much greater. If it isn’t, then consequently, the need for “urgent political action” – involving sweeping changes to industrial policy and social policy – became weaker.

The father of modern climatology, HH Lamb, founded CRU in 1972, and the building the academics work in takes his name. When Lamb contributed to the first IPCC report in 1990 the historical temperature record looked like this.



By 2001, it looked like this.



What Climategate is largely about, then, is whether the academics were justified in making that Medieval Warm Period disappear.

Unfortunately, none of the three ‘independent’ reviews have grappled with this. The absence of anomalous warming doesn’t, as some skeptics say, make the problem go away. But it takes the issue back onto the blackboard, back into realms of the potential threats. It certainly removes much of the impetus for a sweeping and urgent political program of mitigation.

Yet in the academics’ own words, we learn that the recent burst of warming, while real, is far from unusual.

One of the leading CRU academics, Keith Briffa, wrote [3] that:

“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter…

“For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”

In an interview in February, CRU director Phil Jones agrees that recent warming isn’t statistically significant, and is matched by previous periods in the instrumental record – such as 1860 to 1880.

The sensible end of the climate debate hinges on how much of a lasting consequence an increase in CO2 has on the climate system. Some prominent scientists who as recently as 2001 were lead authors for the IPCC don’t dispute there’s an effect, but maintain that once it’s worked itself out, the effect is small.

Proponents of large positive CO2 feedbacks have pointed to various ‘fingerprints’ which are absent, or refuse to manifest themselves. Greenhouse gas warming was supposed to create a telltale warming of the troposphere, but instrumental readings show no such evidence. More recently, they have posited that CO2 must have caused warming, but this is still trapped in the oceans. This “missing heat” has yet to be found, and in the Climategate archive we find US scientist Kevin Trenberth expressing frustration: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” adding that “we can’t definitively explain why surface temperatures have gone down in the last few years. That’s a travesty!”

For Trenberth, if we had better instruments, we’d find the heat. For skeptics, the heat might not be there.

By the mid-2000s the issue had become so politicised the academics were acting like a “priesthood”, in the words of environmental writer Fred Pearce, no friend of the skeptics. As Jones wrote in an email: “Many of us in the paleo field get requests from skeptics (mainly a guy called Steve McIntyre in Canada) asking us for series. Mike and I are not sending anything, partly because we don’t have some of the series he wants, also partly as we’ve got the data through contacts like you, but mostly because he’ll distort and misuse them.”

In a sense the CRU team are carrying the can for the physicists’ failure to do the science.

Read more at The Register

 A hundred years ago, the socialist utopians had a vision of what they called “a world without want”. The Zero Carbon Trust published its vision of Britain in 2030 earlier this month, and it’s one where people’s “wants” will substantially increase. Particularly anyone wanting, say, a lamb chop with rosemary and garlic, or a Shepherd’s Pie.

The Trust wants British livestock be reduced to 20 per cent of current levels, and since shipping in frozen meat is carbon intensive, and verboten, you’ll have to do without. Or be a Lord to afford one.

This one example is just one of the random miseries to be inflicted on the population as part of the Trust’s proposed “New Energy Policy”, a collection of ideas assembled with the scattergun enthusiasm of the Taliban. I know it’s the end of the month, and everyone’s ignored this document – but I urge you to download it – all 4MB of it.

Let me give you another example of how what was once an idealistic progressive impulse can turned into what we might justifiably call an “austerity jihad”. After 1917, Trotsky had grand plans for mass transit – this would no longer be the preserve of an elite. The proletariat would travel far and wide, at low cost, and in great comfort. Not only that, but he envisaged room in Soviet train carriages for a string quartet. And a lectern. Travel would broaden the mind, Trotsky believed, in so many ways.

But back to the Zero Carbon Britain of 2030, we see that all domestic air travel will be banned, and all travel they deem unnecessary will also be impossible. This is not a group that thinks of Maglev Trains, speeding between London and Glasgow at over 300mph are a good idea. Mobility will pretty much return to C17 standards, where you had to hitch a lift from a passing horse.

Here’s the odd thing.

Both the utopians then, and the carbon cult now, both think of themselves as bright progressives, essentially doing the world a favour. But one had a vision of the world as a fascinating place waiting to be explored and graced by the human touch, and of humans as curious creatures, and where imprisoning the mind was as much of a crime as imprisoning the body. The other merely sees us as quite nasty carbon-emitting units, where the mind is entirely absent.

The goal of the Zero Carbon Trust, as you would expect, is not an increase in human curiosity or fun, but that we all collectively… er, “emit” nothing. The policies then naturally fall into place – for to emit nothing, we must do nothing.

Let’s look at a few examples.

To get to a Zero Carbon Britain means reducing electricity consumption … by half. In turn, this means the end of modern industrial society – production of tangible goods would largely disappear. With nothing to sell, so would sales, marketing and support jobs. With nobody working nobody would have to move about. It all fits together. Hopefully you now see the genius of the plan. The minor issue of how the UK would then create any wealth (to pay for the feed-in tarriffs, for example) is completely ignored – in fact, there’s no indication of what people would do, other than mend broken windmills.

Another big Trust idea you’ll be glad to hear is to “decrease the thermostat/air temperature”. Another mandate is decreased living areas. So we’re going to have to live in even smaller houses. Which are a lot colder.

The extreme environmentalist’s conception of a human, then, is a strictly materialist one: it’s indistinguishable from their conception of an amoeba: humans have no autonomy, no free will, no curiosity, and they have an inability to feel pain. For their part, the Bolsheviks had a pretty brutal approach to property and dissent: for them, too, the ends justified the means. But the difference between the old utopians and the new, eco-driven ones, is striking. You couldn’t wish for two greater contrasts.



You’ll be happy for your daily electricity ration

And powering this exciting vision of Britain in 2030?

Well, over half of the energy will come from Offshore Wind, reckons the Trust. And for backup when the wind doesn’t blow? The answer is: “some biogas is used as additional dispatchable [sic] generation to back up the grid,” Not surprisingly, no numbers are attached. But Germany, which went big for wind, building around 20,000 bird-slicers, has set about building five new coal-fired stations as backup.

If you’re concerned about things environmental, biodiversity or future fuel supplies, it’s less than useless. Costs are glossed over, and consequences ignored. Although it’s the product of over a dozen universities and think tanks is little more than a list drawn up by a student, or some demented trainspotter in his shed, writing down a list of “Things I Hate”.

It’s been ignored by the press as cranky, which it obviously is. But future historians, sociologists and anthropologists will find a lot of material in the ZCT report.The idea of creating one great Unit of Measurement – of all human activity – and using it as a brutal political proxy, will astound people for decades to come.

The politics of climate change is really a Dead Duck now – the mitigation policies are unsellable to a democratic electorate at any price – and as the realisation sinks in, the movement behind them is fragmenting in lots of interesting ways. These aren’t being reported, so let this be a tentative first step.

On the extreme fringe are people who really like whittling sticks by candlelight – the DIY crowd, who in the 1970s spent every waking moment planning for a post-apocalypse. Or making TV dramas about it. These are people who quite happy bartering goods, while keeping an eye on their investment portfolios and PEPs. This sort of chap was satirised in the sitcom The Good Life: Self-sufficiency in potatoes then, “energy security” now.

Single males are overly represented in this group: they can DIY everything they need, why shouldn’t everybody else?

Then there are people who are quite happy to go along for the ride, so long as it there’s money behind it. This includes large chunks of academia (the ZCT is a good example – over a dozen institutions were involved in producing Zero Carbon Britain 2030), the bureaucracy (eg, recycling officers and sustinability quangos), and individuals with a canny eye for a hand-out. They can fit a solar panel to the roof, grab a subsidy, and hope to ride the gravy train as long as is feasible. Even George Monbiot has pointed out that feed-in tariffs are a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the middle-classes (the middles classes with solar panels, natch).

So the second group, the freeriders, are people who really aren’t deeply ideologically committed, but are perhaps able to persuade themselves that (say) manmade global warming or Peak Oil is really worrying, or that resources are finite, so long as the money keeps flowing.

There’s an important difference between the Jihadists and the Free-riders, though – and that’s the necessity or quantity of humans suffering necessary. I note that even the Malthusian chief scientific advisor to our Department of Energy and Climate Change, David MacKay (author of bloggers’ favourite Without Hot Air), doesn’t see misery as necessary.

Both groupings will have to face the same, fairly unpalatable realities quite soon, however.

The policies of carbon mitigation are now unsellable – they mean political suicide. In an election year it makes all the difference: Obama wisely won’t touch it, the only Republican behind climate change has turned turtle, and it helped cost the Australian PM his job. Politicians will still use it as an excuse for taxes – the Tories dropped anything to do with climate mitigation but still used it as justification for increasing air taxes. But the fact is, the more people realise that mitigation means misery and costs – there’s no way of disguising either – the less popular it becomes.

Did anyone really think it would work – one great unit of measurement, one (and only) one measure of how much things in life are worth? Or was it just a pose – a way of saying you’re more caring and compassionate and earthy than the chavvie chap next door, with his Plasma TV?

The professor is the director of Edmond J Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard, and he’s no ordinary professor. It’s Lawrence Lessig, the copyright activist turned crusader for political transparency, and scourge of corporate lobbying. So the extent to which gambling interests have supported two of Lessig’s favourite causes may be one of the strangest stories you have never read.

In Fall 2006 the United States passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which made it illegal to take bets from the USA. It effectively put the world’s largest gaming market out of reach for online gambling companies. As well as traditional casino operations, the legislation affected the the burgeoning internet poker industry – the fastest-growing sector of internet commerce.

The gaming industry, worth $12bn a year, pushed back hard, and lobby money started to appear in the oddest places. One destination was iCommons, the for-profit offshoot of Lessig’s Creative Commons registered in London, which describes itself as “a project-based incubator organization”.

Shortly after the gaming legislation was passed, iCommons received three large donations. Two were from newly-formed and secretive offshore trusts, the while the third was from the founder of PartyGaming, Russ DeLeon.

The first of the trusts was called IETSI, the International Electronic Trade and Services Initiative (IETSI) which made a substantial $1m donation to iCommons. IETSI describes itself as promoting e-commerce regulation, operating under Manx regulation, with a website registered in Gibraltar. But who was it a lobbying vehicle for? On its website, in addition to the Lessig vehicles its only other declared affiliation is with the Remote Gambling Association, the voice of online gambling.

The other donation was from the Kasuma Trust, a Gibraltar-based charitable trust devoted to at-risk children, educational work… and internet initiatives. Kasuma was set up by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari in early 2007.

The first of those two names may ring a bell.

Today, Dikshit is one of the richest people in the world, after co-founding PartyGaming plc in 1997, which originally offered roulette and blackjack software written by Dikshit, but switched to poker in 2000. PartyPoker.com quickly became the largest and most lucrative online poker site.

Dikshit was employed by Ruth Parasol, the former ‘porn princess’ who co-founded internet porn pioneers Internet Entertainment Group with Seth Warshavsky. IEG routinely overbilled its customers, former employees allege. (Its CTO provided an affadvit testifying he was asked to program the billing systems to overcharge.) Today, Parasol is married to PartyGaming boss Russ DeLeon.

In December 2008 Diskhit confessed to being guilty of Wire Act offences, and negotiated a staggering $300m fine to the US authorities. This January, he sold his remaining stake in PartyGaming. The two-year jail sentence theoretically hangs over him.

The million-dollar donation was substantial, effectively giving iCommons financial security for five years. This is confirmed in the regulatory filings of Creative Commons, which declared that iCommons had “secured sufficient independent funding to be spun off as an independent organization”.

So the poker industry had been kind to Lessig. What did they get in return?

Enter Charlie Nesson.

Nesson Dorma

Harvard Law professor and academic celebrity Nesson had plucked Lessig from obscurity and helped turn him into an overnight academic superstar in 1997, when with an endowment he set up the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law. Half of Berkman’s first-year budget of $5.4m went on procuring and supporting Lessig, WiReD magazine later reported. A kind of techno-utopian think tank, Berkman has become the template for America’s burgeoning cyberlaw industry – copied worldwide, and generously funded by consumer electronics and internet companies with their own agendas, such as weakening creators’ rights.

(The participants will never put it in quite those terms, for example iCommons filings describe its mission as “promoting practices and tools that encourage liberal permissioning of rights”.) When Lessig launched his Creative Commons organisation, he explained it was largely with the help of Berkman.

Nesson suddenly discovered a hitherto unknown interest in poker, which became a very public obsession. Prior to this dramatic ‘awakening’ in 2007, we can find no blog post where Nesson shows any interest in poker or gambling. But after it, he can talk about little else.

Nesson suddenly discovered a hitherto unknown interest in poker, which became a very public obsession. Prior to this dramatic ‘awakening’ in 2007, we can find no blog post where Nesson shows any interest in poker or gambling. But after it, he can talk about little else.

In March 2007, Nesson created an organisation called the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society (GPSTS) to promote the use of poker as a strategic “teaching tool”. Nesson also formally joined as a “member” of iCommons. Lessig also spontaneously discovered a hitherto unseen interest in poker – and became one of the founder members of the GPSTS board.

(GPSTS.org and IETSI.org were registered within days of each other, both in Gibraltar.)

According to an announcement, GPSTS was “organized both as a for-profit and a non-profit corporation. Revenue from the for-profit entity is committed to the non-profit GPSTS Foundation to support open education and iCommons.”

Nesson swung the weight of Harvard behind the issue, and perhaps for the first time, poker lobbyists began to make their way through the hallowed doors of the institution. “It was an impressive crowd consisting of some prominent lobbyists and lawyers for the gaming industry,” recounted one attendee of a Harvard Law School meeting in April 2007, convened by Nesson.

Nesson was also busy locally. He hosted a rally of online gambling supporters outside the state Massachusetts state house and testified against the legislation. He lobbied Governor Deval Patrick.

Nesson and Lessig’s GPSTS had engaged with the Weiser Group, a lobbying company (pdf) working for Russ DeLeon.

In January 2008, Nesson even appeared on Stephen Colbert’s talk show challenging the Presidential Candidates to a game of poker.

We asked Professor Lessig to disclose fully all his meetings with the gaming lobby. Lessig had made a keynote speech at the GIGSE conference in Montreal in May 2006.

“I met Anurag [Diskhit] exactly once in London at his request to discuss ways he could contribute to supporting a free Internet. I’ve met Russ two or three times, but have had no contact for sometime.”

“Since those contributions, I in fact have promoted no public policies related to online gambling.”

Pick-and-Mix

But did the poker lobbyists get their money’s worth?

That’s a hard question to answer. Although its founder preaches the gospel of transparency – Lessig sits on the boards of Maplight.org and the Sunlight Foundation – the organisation he founded does not practice what it preaches. Creative Commons does not disclose a list of its donors. This makes it hard to tell whether the poker industry still sees Lessig as a financial connection worth maintaining. What is not in dispute is that by 2007 the poker lobby had an energetic champion in Congress – Barney Frank – so deodorising their reputation by hiring star academics was less important.

In 2007 Lessig announced he was giving up his copyright work to focus on “corruption” in the US political process. His inaugural ‘Change Congress’ lecture harshly criticized academics as acting as “shills” for lobbyists. Ironically, ChangeForCongress has yet to disclose its donors either.

We reminded Professor Lessig of Dikshit’s guilty plea for wire fraud, and asked whether he felt iCommons should repay the donations.

This is what he told us:

“IETSI has been convicted of nothing. And as the terms of Mr. Dikshit’s plea did not include any request or suggestion that funds he had contributed be returned, the answer to your question is no. Whether iCommons will is something you need to address to iCommons.”

Perhaps it’s naive to expect academics to uphold the values they preach. Academia is a vast industry in its own right, and the poker money trail is a way of what the commercial world would call “realising synergies”.

Even “Ethics Centres” aren’t immune.

Google has always linked to other people’s stuff, and stayed out of retailing bits itself. Over time it’s blurred that line, without ever really crossing it. This was a line that Microsoft never really crossed either, although Windows Marketplaces were announced, then came and went phut, as regularly as Service Packs.

Now we can confirm that Google is gearing up for a Music Store – CNet’s Greg Sandoval hears this could be upon us as soon as the autumn, it may decide this high-minded distinction is no longer one worth preserving. The rumours strongly suggest Google will be integrating music into search – no surprise, there – but there’s plenty of speculation that it will go the final step, and retail the music directly.

Let’s put aside for a moment the China experience, where Google – with the full blessing of the major labels – launched a free MP3 download service, entirely supported by ads. This was a very unusual situation, where China’s dominant search portal Baidu was serving up MP3s without a license, hosted on an ever-changing network of obscure domains that nobody else could reach. Rights holders aren’t about to repeat the experience here – and with a market of willing buyers, there’s no reason why they should. So disregard it as a precedent.

The reason for Google’s reluctance to sell digital bits is pretty obvious: its market dominance as a search engine puts it directly into competition with online retailers, and puts them at a potentially crippling disadvantage. If Google is the first port of calling for getting to stuff on the web, why would anyone find a second? Google takes you directly to the checkout. It spells the end for any online retailer without massive scale, and the brand and resources to match.

But you can see the thinking, here, even if you don’t approve. For some time Google has eyed the rise of price comparison sites with some irritation. What value do they add, a Googler might ask? Most are little more than crummy pseudo-editorial sites, in the pocket of the largest vendors. Surely a classic case for intervention by algorithm. Well those price comparison sites are already earmarked for extinction and few will mourn their passing – they don’t really add much value. But then again, that doesn’t mean Google will be pushing out the bits itself. It may simply subsume price comparison into its existing apparatus.

And once again, a Googler might ask – why on earth go the extra step? It’s not as if the Chocolate Factory wants to sell you lawnmowers or TVs, the high-margin end of Amazon’s business. It’s only an MP3. In terms of scale, the world’s music is somewhere between 25 million and 35 million MP3s, but then only a small proportion of that really matters to a mass market retailer – you’ll recall the study that showed that of 12 million songs in (what we assume to be) the iTunes catalog only 3 million sold a copy in one year. Google has plenty of capacity and bandwidth – why not remove the extra step and sell it directly?

It has demonstrated how. Three weeks ago Google unveiled a section of the Android Market that sells music. (Yes, the Android store is Google’s only example of selling bits itself.) From the China experiment, Google knows who to call. Whether it wants to is another thing. For any global operator acquiring rights is a world of pain – the music business is still territorial, and the fragmentation of music publishing rights means it can take weeks or even months of work simply to find who owns what. This is not a problem an algorithm can answer.

Google is now so large it could probably buy the entire sound recording industry for small change – certainly less than a quarter’s revenue. Even if it does, the licensing headache doesn’t go away. So it will certainly be more effective for Google to employ an intermediary to sort this out.

If Google were to employ the same ruthless approach to music as it did with books, Google Music could be a serious challenger not just to every music retailer on the planet, but every producer and rights owner too. We’ll have to see if the company has been chastised by the experience, in which governments eventually turned against the landgrab. I suspect it hasn’t.

Then there’s the quiz shows. When it comes to reading out infonuggets from pieces of card prepared for him by TV researchers, Fry is the master. And more recently, his pioneering new media work on Twitter has put him at the forefront of an elite group of British comedy talents (including Graham Linehan and Peter Serafinowicz) who have found fame by telling us when they’re stuck in a lift, or about to have lunch. Once upon a time, comedy writers and performers had to be funny, as a minimum requirement. Now, the Twittering comics have now smashed that glass ceiling.

But Fry risks throwing away this incomparable legacy, built up over a lifetime, because of a weakness. And it’s a weakness every bit as reckless as Oscar’s love for Bosie.

This month Fry is the face and voice of the digital radio scrappage scheme. This is not, as you might imagine, the opportunity to trade in some piece of digital junk in exchange for a more modern audio gadget. Many of us have at least one unloved and unused DAB radio somewhere in the household – and perhaps your heart (like mine) soared at the prospect of a trade-in. Perhaps for one of these, which is very nice indeed. Or one of these.

Alas, the scrappage scheme is a retrograde step – the product of backdoor arm-twisting by a handful of desperate men. We’re being asked to trade in an FM radio for a DAB radio – rather like trading in a perfectly useful Mini Cooper runaround for a mule with an attitude problem.

The deficiencies of DAB are well known enough not to need reiterating. Over 90 per cent of the UK listens to radio and declares the current arrangement satisfactory. DAB is yesterday’s technology, devised in the 1980s, it’s been rammed driven through by ‘platform owners’ such as the big commercial radio players. It has terrible power consumption (worse than modern IP chipsets), and the sound quality hasn’t lived up to the promises made.

DAB is also a top-down technology, as opposed to internet radio, which requires only a home PC to crank a station into life, and thanks to open internet standards, has global reach. No proprietary chipsets, or government licenses are required to make yourself heard. Your WinAmp receiver is as good in Mozambique as it is in Manhattan. DAB radios, on the other hand, stop working once you cross the Channel.

And as for the viability, it’s desperate. One operator recently told us he may as well put the broadcasts on a CD and mail them out in an envelope – it would be as cost-effective as a DAB license.

DAB, in short, is one of the great technology car crashes of modern times. Now it’s a car crash with Stephen Fry telling us there’s room for one more car at the back.

Now if this ludicrous campaign was fronted by say, Rula Lenska or Alan Hansen or the Krankies, or some other technology-illiterate, hand-me-the-cheque B- or C-list celeb, we wouldn’t be too surprised. But for Fry, a man who enjoys a reputation for being discerning about technology, to endorse this campaign is wrong and damaging on so many levels.

What on earth is he doing propping this up?

For someone supposedly tech-savvy, let alone a ‘National Treasure’, Fry could be using his influence to cajole and enlighten – campaigning for internet radio, or even more modern digital radio broadcast technology, such as DVB-H or DAB+. At the very least he could warn the British public about the pitfalls of investing in DAB today, rather than leading them down a dead end.

How could this happen?

It’s simple. It’s Stephen Fry’s indiscriminate love of a voiceover cheque. And it’s the ruin of his reputation.