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An interview with Andrew Montford. Choice quote:

“You can throw away the bits that don’t give you the right answer. It’s an advantage ‘unique to climatalogy’”

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Artist Shepard Fairey is facing a Grand Jury probe for falsifying evidence in a copyright case. Fairey was suing Associated Press over the use of an copyright image Fairey had used as the basis for a popular Obama election poster.

To the dismay of the Boing Boing crowd, Fairey turned out not to be a "copyfighter", but a freetard fraud. Fairey lied about the photograph he’d used, falsely submitting a similar AP photo from the same event, rather than the identical one that truly provided the basis for his derivative works. He maintained the fiction for eight months, before admitting the deception in October.

AP has asked for damages to go to its emergency relief fund.

Other artists have noted Fairey’s tendency to plunder the history of radical and revolutionary art for personal profit – he has a clothing line – without adding anything new along the way; Fairey simply scans or traces the original, usually badly.

"Simply reproducing the work of others robs you of your imagination and form-making abilities. You’re not developing the muscularity you need to invent your own ideas," designer Milton Glaser wrote in Print magazine.

"It largely ransacks leftist history and imagery while the artist laughs all the way to the bank," wrote artist Mark Vallen in a withering essay entitled Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey, that you can read here. " It is machine art that any second-rate art student could produce."

But it’s also a case of the biter bit – Fairey uses intellectual property legislation aggressively.

In 2008 year Fairey set his legal team upon a graphic designer Baxter Orr who created a derivative work on Fairey’s ‘Obey’ poster design (originally ‘Andre the Giant Has a Posse’), itself a derivative work of course.

There are many harmless and very entertaining pages on the internet devoted to speculative history, some of which are devoted to Moses’ Ark of the Covenant. It was apparently some kind of electrical apparatus. Possibly involving fusion. It performed magic. It transformed the destiny of people who used it wisely.

Now I doubt if you’ve read anything or seen anything in the last few days about Apple’s next computer that is very much more rational. Only most of this output has been written not by UFOlogists, but by grown-ups – professionals in fact, who are paid not to be stupid. It’s the most interesting thing about any new Apple device: the childish and idiotic inflated expectations that precede it. But you’ll have noticed that even by the standards of idiocy set by Big Media, the professionals have excelled themselves this time with iTablet speculation.

The reason is that they don’t just want one to play with, fanbois or gadget fans. This time, they fully expect Apple to save their jobs. That’s quite a big difference. (The New York Times let slip that Apple had a new platform for publishers last year.) So the result has been awful. Like holding up a highly-reflective idiot in front of an idiot mirror – the result has been infinite recursion of stupidity, as far as the eye can see.

I was again reminded of childish and idiotic expectations of technology yesterday, reading a lecture by the G-Whiz-driving editor of The Guardian newspaper, Alan Rusbridger.

Rusbridger had come to attack Murdoch’s paywall strategy, only he didn’t go quite so far as to say they were stupid. He admitted that from a rational business perspective, charging for some content online was the right thing to do – and The Guardian was doing it. But he had to "balance" this by a pledge that he had to make everything open and a free for all, because that was the nature of the technology.

Technology to the rescue

Examine this passage, and marvel at how the technology itself is both a religion and a progressive movement, all in one:

people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about an ability to hear previously unheard voices; about respecting, including and harnessing the views of others. About resisting the people who want to close down free speech.

The Guardian is a beautiful physical product, but the people in charge don’t expect it to be around in a few years. So any editor who defied these online imperatives would be swept away by the tide of history. That isn’t rational: it’s a faith-based view of the world, with technology as the religion.

Apple, like Google, has become a religion for media people. Jeff Jarvis’ book self-consciously asks, after the popular Born Again evangelical bumper sticker, What Would Google Do? It isn’t just newspaper people who are expecting Apple to deliver them from a sticky fate. It’s people in the music and movie businesses too. They’ve looked enviously at closed locked-down platforms like the Xbox 360 and PS3, and wondered if something could allow them to flourish, too.

Maybe it wouldn’t have to be quite so locked down – or at least, not with the same high ground rent that Sony seeks. But if only they could get valuable subscription revenue from a new ‘platform’, all would be well. So something will step in and save them.

The Hollow Men

Yet executive in entertainment and news over the past decade have made this much more difficult; the media’s crisis is one of its own making. Over ten years, they’ve hollowed themselves out. Newspapers are now excellent lifestyle magazines, delivered in instalments on a daily basis. Their capability to provide us with something we didn’t know, or couldn’t find out, or give us new ways of thinking about something, is just not there any more.

Ten years ago you could be sure a broadsheet transport correspondent both knew his field technically and knew the business landscape, while a health correspondent could put the complex into context. I’m not even sure there are any transport correspondents any more, while the other specialists – if they are there – simply reprint press releases from industry, or from the tight-knit hairball of government, academia and pressure groups. A newspaper today is like Google News with the news taken out.

us not to give them our money. They also neglected physical formats and decided to ‘compete with free’ by giving away the crown jewels for nothing, although perhaps not to the same extent. But we now see Spotify lauded for (apparently) "reducing piracy", when its return is negligible.

For these industries to rescue themselves, they don’t need Steve Jobs. They simply need to stop being idiotic. Nobody ever put a gun to a newspaper executive’s head and instructed them to ruin their business. Take away the utopian religion and they can start to be rational again.

Now I appreciate there are subtleties here a broad brush can’t capture. Every newspaper proprietor wants to drive the competition into the ground. Murdoch uses aggressive pricing. Echoing the US city newspaper monopolies, Rusbridger has already mooted a future where public subsidies fund ‘quality journalism’. A translation of that is "we’re a commercial basket case, please give us a tax handout". I find it hard to believe that with the nation utterly broke, politicians will look upon this request with sympathy. What I can say with certainty is that they’re not going to call it correctly.

Looking back at my own tech predictions, as well as other people’s, there’s a consistent theme. My worst call in the past ten years, for example, was expecting smartphones to become much bigger and broader than they have. I should have anticipated physical constraints, crappy UIs, and dodgy and late network infrastucture.

But I downplayed all of these in my estimates, because I wanted them to succeed. I thought it would be a good thing if they did succeed. But things don’t work like that. Oops. Epic Fail. Similarly, sky high expectations of Linux were powered by the deep desire that Microsoft go away. Linux is very good now, and better than ever – but the expectations were pure wishful thinking.

Because media people think Apple’s iTablet will save them, you can safely disregard everything that’s been written, or will be written, by large media companies about the launch tomorrow.

An answer to the music industry’s woes slipped into the IFPI Annual Report last week, but its significance went unnoticed. Before I get to it, though, here’s a poser.

“We screw the struggling artist, and pay the suit,” Nick Carr mused recently. Carr was examining a contradiction: information has never been less free, it’s never had as much as much value attached to it. Once you add up your Sky Sub, mobile broadband bill, and the many other information services, we pay a fortune for information, most of which is entertainment. He continued:

“It’s a strange world we live in. We begrudge the folks who actually create the stuff we enjoy reading, listening to, and watching a few pennies for their labour, and yet at the very same time we casually throw hundreds of hard-earned bucks at the saps who run the stupid networks through which the stuff is delivered,” he wrote.

elsewhere and you’ll find people saying they make a point of principle not to pay for entertainment digitally, because entertainment companies are wicked. The principle is that two wrongs make a right, which makes withholding the payment justified. Maybe even morally superior to paying.

But as Nick points out, we all actually pay a fortune to suits – they’re just different suits. They’re suits at large telcos, advertising middlemen (eg, BT) and service companies. The answer seems simple.

If you’re a copyright business, then to appease the copyright militants, you must pretend that you’re not. You must say you’re in plumbing, or infrastructure. Or anything, actually. For the world’s biggest record company, Vivendi, this will be a case of returning to one’s roots. Universal’s parent Vivendi began life as Paris’s first monopoly water supplier – it only changed its name from CGE and spun off the water and sewage businesses in 2000. And look, we can mention sewage and The X Factor in the same sentence without berating the obvious.

But I digress.

If the music business has suits, it must be the IFPI, and last week the international trade body for sound recordings published its annual global music survey. IFPI pointed to $4.2bn of new digital business since 2004, but of sales down 30 per cent overall. In some markets, sound recordings are truly in the tank. Spain started very late down the digital route, and digital sales there are negligible – overall sales have crashed to a third of what they were in 2001. In Brazil, which has been nurtured by the Berkman crowd as a laboratory for its post-copyright cybernetic utopia, full price sales of CDs by new artists are down by 80 per cent. I bet those artists are sending thank you emails to Messrs Lessig, Zittrain and Nesson as you read this. They’ve liberated them from the chore of being paid!

I have no doubt that most people lie in the middle ground between enforcement against fill-yer-boots infringement, and introducing new services which make enforcing casual infringement unnecessary. That’s a great big blurry middle ground, and it means fulfilling the anything anytime but-at-a-price pledge. But the IFPI emphasis is still heavily on enforcement. IFPI puts the blame for the 30 per cent fall in revenue firmly on wholesale casual infringement. IFPI notes that only 8 per cent of internet users frequently buy music. That’s a shocking indictment of the music business: it’s lost a lot of regular customers.

Worse was to follow when examining some of the comments by Rob Wells, CGE’s head of water transportation facilities management (as we might have to call him), but better known today as Universal’s head of digital. Two of Rob’s comments confirmed that doing business digitally is a bit of an oxymoron.

"We’re closer to ‘the utopia’ where a million people pay €1 rather than ten thousand paying €10,", he said. I’m not sure why that’s a utopia, it sounds more like a stealth tax: and when a million people suddenly realise they’re losing a pound by stealth, then that’s a million people with an added resentment against music. It’s an example of customer-phobia – a prejudice against customers.

Even more worrying were Rob’s bullish comments about Spotify, which is doing so well it, er… can’t afford any more customers. Rob called it "sustainable", defining sustainable as money going to Universal. A sustainable business is one in which revenues exceed outgoings, and using this more conventional definition, it’s evident to world+dog that Spotify is anything but sustainable. (UMG has an investment in Spotify.)

Alongside Spotify, the IFPI report features a sequence of losers: there’s Nokia’s Tero boasting about Comes With Music, some ropey scheme in Denmark which (like Spotify) gives people a reason not to buy music (to become ex-punters), and so on. It’s really a sorry sight. But salted away on page 10 is a graph showing how various creative ‘industries’ cope with digital. The games business sees 32 per cent of its revenue from digital sales.

Now piracy is rampant in games, so it shouldn’t be doing quite so well. What has the games business tried that the music business hasn’t? Well, it’s tried enforcement, and it’s tried DRM. It’s got (some) closed platforms, which must help a bit. Not so many people complained when the Xbox 360 door was closed recently: modders accepted it and got on with gaming. But none of these individual factors explains why it’s a sector that’s expanding, not contracting.

What games developers have done is create gaming "experiences" that are shared – that wouldn’t be possible without the network connection. Participants are paying to share their gaming time with a particular service. There are music services where you can sort of share, but it’s not much fun. With Spotify, Omnifone, it’s more theoretical than practical – and you certainly can’t keep the music you share. That’s really lousy. By refusing to monetize sharing, the music business has failed to give people a positive reason to pay for music.

The Lords this week discussed new compensation for copyright holders this week – including a voluntary ‘Hail Mary fine’ payable by file sharers, instead of suspension – but nobody noticed.

It was late on Wednesday night, and the Lords were six hours into their fourth session this month discussing the Digital Economy bill. Lord Lucas moved Amendment 156, giving an infringer a choice:

[It] requires the payment of an additional fee by the subscriber for the maintenance of unrestricted internet access, which is to be remitted to a licensing body established under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Lucas said he anticipated a more progressive licensing regime, similar to the performance right on compositions, which is non-exclusive:

"No one stops a person performing, but if they do perform, they have to pay a fee… Given the fact that someone is having a technical obligation imposed on them, it seems that they might choose to pay a fee to such an agency, which would go to relevant copyright holders. Terminating, suspending or limiting someone’s internet access just does someone harm."

Read more at The Register…

As celebrities met at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro last week to weep for Gaia’s disappearing ice, NASA has quietly scrubbed the claim that the world’s second largest ice mass in the Himalayas will have disappeared in 25 years.

The Google cache still shows the bogus NASA claim:

But on the revised page, it’s beat a retreat:

(Thanks to Charles W. for the evidence.) The IPCC is manfully sticking by its 2035 prediction – which, it turns out, it heard somebody say down the pub. Note that the illustration NASA uses is of Mount Kilimanjaro – a poster child for Manmade Global Warming since Al Gore’s 2005 film An Inconvenient Truth. Last week, showbiz celebrities including Jessica Biel and Lupe Fiasco headed for the summit of the African mountain to "raise awareness" of environmental issues. And what did they do when they got there? People magazine quotes UN’s Elizabeth Gore.

"I walked over to Jessie and gave her a big hug. The two of us embraced and we just cried. Every single one of us was in absolute tears."

Look, luvvies – that’s not going to help. Salt melts ice. And the last thing you should do if you’re raising awareness about diminishing drinking water, is make the drinking water less drinkable. Two footnotes to the glacier coverage. The scientist who made the claim off the cuff a decade ago in New Scientist has been given a job by the chairman of the IPCC, R K Pachauri, at Pachauri’s institute, TERI.

And like us, bloggers have noticed the irony of New Scientist magazine worried by the prospect that "rumour and doubt" may cause damage to "the image of climate science". The pop science mag was responsible for spreading the rumour in the first place – via veteran eco worrier Fred Pearce. Pearce, the blog Climate Resistance notes, is the author of a dozen alarmist books on global warming – and more on water, acid rain and other environmental scares. What might be an unfounded bit of hearsay to you or me is a potential career opportunity for the committed eco campaigner.

The term long since ceased to mean anything – it now means anything you want it to mean. But as a rule of thumb, advocating Neutrality means giving your support to general Goodness on the internets, and opposing general Badness. Therefore, supporting Neutrality means you yourself are a Good Person, by reflection, and people who oppose Neutrality are Bad People.

This is a wonderful thing, and the beauty is, it’s all so simple. It’s like the Good Guys Wearing White – the Bad Guys oppose Neutrality. And because Neutrality is anything you want it to be, you have an all-purpose morality firehose at your disposal. Just point it and shoot at Baddies.

But best of all is that you get to define the Baddies, raise a lynch mob, catch them and hang them – before somebody has had a chance to ask "Where’s the harm, exactly?".

This time the accusation of Neutrality Violations is being turned on copyright holders, minority groups – and anyone who wants a network to run the way they want it to.

Rights for some, but not all

Now you may be thinking that it’s strange that in an age when we keep being told that thanks to technology "we’re all creators", creators’ rights must go out of the window. Surely these digital rights should be being strengthened – as new sources of money are available to the talented, and as old middlemen melt away? Has a technology ever been invented that when allied to copyright, makes creators less independent, or poorer? Not until now.

But not everybody sees it this way. Copyright messes up the smooth running of the networks, it’s a spanner in the machine-driven cybernetic utopia. It also costs network operators money – paying the pesky talent who create the stuff that generates the demand. And it’s impossible for a machine to do: an algorithm is unable to spot and nurture creative talent, in the way a studio boss or a publisher or a label could find and nurture acting writing or performing talent. The machine can’t compute that. And of course, the machine can’t create art: when algorithms are set to write a composition (or when, say, Cory Doctorow attempts to create readable prose) you can tell instantly something is missing.

So Google’s front groups such as Public Knowledge and FreePress – they fly under the flag of "citizens groups" or "consumer rights" groups, but are really two of Google’s most potent arrows in its lobbying quiver – are now deploying the morality firehose on copyright. Anyone policing the internets for copyright infringement will be violating neutrality, say the groups. Therefore it shouldn’t be permitted. Presumably the same logic can be applied to policing the internets for anything: a paedophile "neutrality" maybe being violated somewhere – which would be awful. It’s economically and technically illiterate of course, just as you’d expect. Nobody at Public Knowledge or FreePress has ever done a day’s honest toil at a business in their lives – their prejudices are evident. But the groups have also rolled out ethnic minorities, alarming them that without Neutrality, they’ll be erased. The National Hispanic Media Coalition, for example, is standing right behind the Neutrality firehose. But imagine these two examples.

How ideology busts the citizens’ networks

In the first, a community of citizens in a small town – let’s call it HappyVille – decides to mutually own and operate their town’s network. In order to defray the cost of buying bandwidth, they grant the HappyVille Co-Op Network a video-on-demand service. Punters pay HCN their $3.50 a movie knowing that the profit generated maintains the pipes. In order to keep the HappyVille citizens who prefer to get their copyright content illegally, however, they create a fast lane that goes only to TVs, for delivering the movies. This keeps the Torrenters happy, too. The HCN serves one happy town.

But that could be illegal under Neutrality rules. It would only take one bitter or ignorant ideologue in HappyVille to complain to the FCC and remind regulators that the Neutrality rules were being broken. Asking "Where’s the harm?" would not be a valid question. The Co-Op has committed a crime against Neutrality: Go string them up.

In the second example, let’s imagine that a diaspora of Latin Americans decide to start their own ISP. They club together to buy cheap international traffic back to Central and South America. Subscribers to the ISP enjoy cut rate VoIP calls to family and loved ones. It offers a community alternative to the scalping rates of large telcos. But voice traffic on an IP network is highly susceptible to latency and jitter – and one relentless Torrent seeder can cause problems. And as above, that one Torrenter can complain to the FCC that Neutrality Crimes are being Commmitted. So let’s close the joint down. No more cheap calls for you. That’s how the advocates seem to like it. One guy with his trousers around his ankles can invoke a virtual national lynch mob.

Ask Whitey; he knows best

There’s something uniquely distasteful about the sock puppet "citizens" groups evoking citizens rights to deprive citizens of choices. Some Progressives have always viewed ethnic minorities as little more than an opportunity for a photo shoot, and then forget about them for the next four years. This is all that, but it’s worse, too: it’s patronising and misleading them. It insults their intelligence. Whitey still decides what kind of networks they are permitted to run. The internet was so much easier before the technology utopians (abetted by Google) decided to write the world’s first technical rulebook for the internet.

When there was no rulebook, you could do what you want technically – and your network either succeeded or failed, according to the laws of physics, or the laws of business. Now you have to pass some arbitrary political correctness test, adminsiered by Comic Book Star Guy. Ain’t life grand?

You have to admire "Neutrality" itself though, and more and more each day. This metaphysical, metaphorical firehose can be anything an authoritarian wants it to be. It allows people who want to be in politics but who can’t do politics (in terms of vision, persuasion, coalition building, honesty) to wield tremendous power. It may not last, since it’s almost certainly unconstitutional, and the consequences leave everyone (except you-know-who) worse off. But it’s a great example of net nerds flexing their muscle.

Of course, out of the ten subject areas, the one labelled ‘online copyright infringement’ has attracted the most attention from their Lordships. Lord Mandelson made a number of modifications acknowledging these concerns this week – including some substantial changes to the processes. It’s the procedure rather than the principle that is vexing the Lords.

Nobody – not even those who support the Bill – is entirely happy with the procedures. Yet there is no great grassroots outpouring of opposition. While 500,000 people may have paid 79p in one week to register a protest vote for the Christmas Number One single, fewer than 500 have signed up to the Open Rights Group’s “Message to Mandelson” campaign – and some of those are supportive. We spotted one ‘Go Mandy’ from a major record label staffer and another urging his Lordship to bash the ‘freetards’.

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The amendments would grant copyright holders injunctions against websites and service providers similar to the US DMCA act – but with no ’safe harbour’ provision to verify whether the claim is merited, according to documents seen by The Register.

The BPI amendments would introduce an entirely new Section 97B of the 1988 Copyright Design and Patent Act, and would be granted when an ISP had refused to take down infringing material. The Secretary of State would have the ability to review and amend the provision "by allowing the injunctive relief available to the Court to evolve and to keep pace with technology".

As it stands in draft form, the Digital Britain bill would compel rightsholders to identify and notify infringers, in a "graduated" response, ultimately ending in temporary suspension of Internet access. The revised Section 97B, if passed, would dramatically switch the burden from rights holder to publisher.

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