Kim Dotcom

I have not come to mock the rotund self-promoter, but rather to talk about what might happen if its users were to throw themselves at the service to share copyrighted content. But first, a history lesson.

One criticism of the monetarists during the Thatcher years was that they “knew the price of everything and the value of nothing”. It’s a magnificent phrase: a withering encapsulation of the view that value doesn’t merely reside in a price. It also strongly implies that these individuals were guilty of philistinism.

This condemnation was a response to some radical changes. After many years in which the supremacy of technocratic planning had been unquestioned, Britain in the 1980s saw supply-side reforms introduced in many areas. These were intended to reveal a pricing signal. John Birt’s Producer Choice at the BBC – which gave programme makers the power to buy services from outside the BBC – was one example, and internal markets at the NHS were another.

Enthusiasts for the changes argued that while the new systems coughed up occasional absurdities, the internal markets put a price on goods which ultimately allowed resources to be used more efficiently than a central planner could anticipate.

People responded to the pricing signal by thinking about how they used things. They began to use things more cleverly, and source alternate supplies, for example. The “value of nothing” was a response to the fact that “somethings” had a value beyond the immediate market price signal. For example, we might want to subsidise a good or service (like transport, or coal power) for a long-term benefit.

Now let’s wind forward to today. Something quite remarkable emerges.

Paul Sanders of music business Consolidated Independent and State51 is a savage but constructive critic of the music industry. We quote him with permission.

Of course Dotcom’s Mega isn’t original – Sanders points out – because storage company Wuala has used a similar business model for several years. Wuala is a personal file-sharing service bundled with LaCie hard drives. Originality is not the point. Look what all the “locker services” are actually doing, he points out:

he points out, with an analogy to illustrate:

All these businesses do is take something digital and reduce the value of it to the value of storage. That’s not particularly smart. Imagine, perhaps, a food market where everything cost a dollar a kilo. Suppliers would soon learn that they needed to produce at 50 cents, or find another way to do business.”

Indeed, a market where food was flat-priced would soon be bereft of Blue Mountain coffee beans, and have lots and lots of turnips. The turnip producers would be delighted. But not for long.

“Consumers would have a feeding frenzy while the fun lasted. With music it might take another few years, but [these locker services have] nowhere else to go if [they set] out down this path.”

The error that characterises so much copyright rhetoric emanating from the utopian camp is one of wishing away value, or pretending it doesn’t exist. There are so many dubious, and at times outright bogus arguments here I won’t dwell on them. There is little disagreement that if we abolished intellectual property tomorrow there would be a huge party – resulting in a welfare benefit. But not for long. Then the trouble would start.

The question is whether there is greater long-term benefit in realising the value that isn’t being tapped: future economic growth from trading rights, and this is a question with only one answer.

People pay for what they like – and do so happily. They’ll pay for any daft bit of convenience. Getting to people to pay for things is not the problem.

I am not aware of any study that shows anything to the contrary, that weakening or removing tradeable rights is good for the economy. (The UK’s Intellectual Property Office attempted to do so last year but the report justifying the move was so paper-thin – the projected benefits have been subsequently revised down by 97 per cent, once real economists had a look at its sums). So the smart move is not to destroy value, to flatten it – but to try and innovate a bit to unlock it.

“Smart in this world is aggregating, organising, and then delivering compelling services on top of storage and metadata. This is something Kim Dotcom has denied himself the opportunity to attempt,” says Sanders. “It’s not game over for copyright as we need a tool to build contracts and incentives around in the added-value world.”

Much of this is plain common sense, and something you already know. (An interesting side-argument is that ‘white hat’ companies such as Spotify similarly flatten and destroy value – which is why refuseniks like Black Keys and Adele don’t put their music into the service.)

But here’s the punchline. There’s an irony here we should mention. Many of the same people who opposed the markets in the 1980s because they didn’t value things, now argue that things shouldn’t be valued at all.

Internet utopianism entails a rejection of economics, a compression of all value to a flat price which may be low, and is often zero. Such arguments are advanced with a quite bloody-minded insistence. Partly as a consequence, the digital economy today isn’t much more advanced than Somalia’s real economy. Perhaps these utopians are being philosophically consistent, in a sense: they didn’t like markets then, and they don’t like them now. But they’ve come to resemble what they most hated, philistines who reject value – and it’s quite an ugly sight. ®

First published at The Register.

A House of Lords committee this week declared that British taxpayers must foot the bill for an internet that nobody wants – unless perhaps they have a second home in the country.

Some observations by the committee may be accurate: Britain’s broadband is slower than its rivals. But this doesn’t seem to be what vexes our noble and learned friends. Observations don’t amount to a rational argument – what the Lords are making is a very radical proposal. Huge and open-ended taxpayer funding must be committed, they argue, to build a national utility. One that will largely be used by sheep.

As every one knows, the nation’s finances are in a dire state. The national debt is increasing. So what’s the economic argument for new public spending? The peers won’t say: their report almost completely avoids making the economic case. To our knowledge, no study, public or private, has ever shown any benefit to UK plc from expenditure on rural broadband infrastructure. The committee has a glimmer of understanding how much this will be – citing a four year old Broadband Stakeholder Group study estimating the cost of building fibre to the home to every home as £28bn.

We say ‘almost completely’, because a figure for economic benefit is mentioned – it’s just doesn’t support the argument. The Committee says this:

Studies undertaken by McKinsey, Allen, OECD and the World Bank [showing] that a 10% increase in broadband penetration results in a 1% increase in the rate of growth of GDP.

The source is Arqiva, coincidentally one of the companies first in line for handouts, and is a little misleading. What McKinsey actually states in its 2009 survey (“Mobile Broadband for the Masses” (2009) ) is this: “a 10% increase in broadband household penetration delivers a boost to a country’s GDP that ranges from 0.1 percent to 1.4 percent.”

We know the relationship isn’t linear, and isn’t even necessarily causal. Infrastructure spending where there’s no internet at all can bring economic benefits. But by the time you get to 90 per cent penetration and above, it’s not the same game any more. Benefits from internet investment typically accrue to the provider, and of course, pirate websites operating in foreign countries. But in remote areas there are too few potential users to make the investment worthwhile.

Instead of making an economic case, the Lords attempt to deploy several moral arguments to justify the spending:

“Reaching the remainder, however, as the ‘final third’ of the population, requires Government support or a socially corrosive digital divide will follow,” they claim. Corrosive? Really?

The Lords report is also contains guff like this:

“…a future where appliances in our homes and at work, like fridges and desktops, are connected and enabled as interactive multimedia devices, and far more beyond, bringing benefits to society.”

There is certainly a case for the state spending money to protect its citizens more efficiently than they can themselves. In theory, national armed services should be more efficient than people clubbing together ad-hoc to operate their own. There may also be a case for spending money out of general taxation to guarantee some level of health and welfare. These are all moral arguments. The moral case for a table that plays Hollywood movies, or a fridge that accesses Betfair.com is not clear: these are really luxuries.

Rural broadband is not a market failure, it represents the contours of a successful market. Just as not everybody wants a power shower, not everybody wants the internet. The Lords insist they need it, which prevents them from confronting reality. What the Lords Committee failed to recognise or tackle is that refuseniks might not consider the internet attractive, and have very good reasons for doing so.

This leads the Lordships into some strange cul-de-sacs.

For example, the report cites an observation from a witness that “most people watch their televisions in fixed locations from fixed sets. Actually, spectrum’s great wonder is its ability for mobility”. The Lords then make this leap: “As such, it might be argued that spectrum’s current use for fixed, broadcast purposes is wasteful.”

On this basis, they recommend that the spectrum used for PSB (public service broadcasting) instead be given to mobile internet providers, so that we could watch TV using an extremely expensive and inefficient infrastructure. In other words, a public resource which is used, very effectively, to provide something people want, should be turned over to do be used for something very inefficient, that people don’t want.

Why? The answer is the same as all the others offered by the Communications Committee: it’s the internet. This is indistinguishable from religious zealotry.

Given this ideological approach, the Lords completely ignore the effects of subsidies on the market so far. This is a question on which the taxpayer is entitled to some answers, whether the money is spent directly by the Government or funnelled through Europe.

It would appear that a lot of private rural broadband activity has seized up, as large companies – knowing that subsidies are an offer – await the sweeteners. Why spend capital on something now, when you can be paid to do it in twelve months time?

But this is not addressed.

Earlier this summer, MP Graham Jones threw down a very interesting observation in the House of Commons. He noted that Lancashire County Council was spending £32m on super fast rural broadband. “The reality is,” said Jones, “much of Lancashire’s rural hinterland is a playground for the wealthy.”

“Not only do the demographics suggest that upgrading from broadband to superfast broadband will not bring jobs, the geography does too. It’s fine for new businesses that are media intensive, have no product to shift and don’t meet clients, but the question is, how many will fit that category?”

In other words, splashing cash at rural internet infrastructure merely benefits the wealthy.

Here, we must banish the cynical thought that members of the House of Lords are likely to have at least one – possibly more than one – part-time home in a rural area.

Do sheep really need Twitter? And must we pay for their Tweets?®

How can we begin to unpick the tangled mess that the technology and creative industries have created?

There’s certainly no shortage of blame to go around. In the past every new wave of technology has delivered healthy creative markets – but today this is no longer happening.

Just 20 years since the birth of the internet economy, with the advent of the worldwide web, it’s worth asking why. It’s time we looked afresh at where both industries went wrong, and how they can get on the right track again.

Much of what follows will highlight key mistakes made – but before we do that, we need to put them in some historical context. What worked in the past is a fairly reliable indication of what can work again in the future.

The current impasse between technology and copyright sectors is certainly an odd one. Historically, war is the greatest driver of technological innovation of all, but in peacetime it’s the demand for culture and entertainment that spurs the most innovation. People want to see and hear stuff, and are prepared to pay for it.

The cash generated is ploughed into more entertainment – even creating new art forms. (Recall how the first movie dramas were starchy, filmed theatrical plays.) This creates more investment in technology so people can enjoy the entertainment in a better way. Round and round it goes.

At the heart of this virtuous circle, copyright has been the obscure back-room business-to-business mechanism that keeps the players honest. Creators demanded that their industries engage with the new technologies to create new markets, which returned more money for their talent.

As a result technology innovators needed to attract talented creative people, and induce them to produce stuff for their kit: recording their music on long-players rather than shellac, or printing their movies in Technicolor™. So the two sides need each other. Technologists’ incentives were simple: create more amazing gear to deliver the best of other people’s stuff. And each wave of innovation grew the market, and ensured the creators and workers were richer. Remember: No innovation has ever made creative industries poorer.

Unfortunately, the truth of this historical mutual dependency gets forgotten today because the incentives aren’t lined up. Investment decisions in technology services are made without a thought for the health of the creative people who generate the demand for the goods. Creative investment decisions either don’t take advantage of the technology, or are hamstrung in a way that leaves the potential of the technology untapped. Things are also complicated by another factor we’ll call the Unicorn.

I’ll open the catalogue of errors at chapter one, the music industry.

Late, Later, Last

The music industry’s yellow brick road of mistakes are encapsulated in one story – a story the former Napster attorney Chris Castle told us.

In 1997, Castle was representing a startup that needed a music licence from a major label. The label exec returned his call with this: “You know what? We’re going to take our time getting into this space. We’ve decided we’re going to be last to market.”

Last to market? You read that correctly.

The attitude convinced Castle it was time to move to Silicon Valley. At the original Napster, and subsequently at Shawn Fanning’s next venture Snocap, Castle tried to make peer-to-peer sharing of paid-for content legal – a tale that is little-known and one that David Lowery reminded us of in his recent El Reg interview. Pay attention, dear reader, this will become quite important.

Being slow to bring attractive legal goods to the marketplace was probably the biggest single mistake the music industry ever made.

Napster took off in 1999, but that was four years before Steve Jobs bludgeoned the labels and dragged them to the table with iTunes. That delay wasn’t catastrophic – few users in 1999 had broadband – but the mistakes continued.

Songs that people bought at Apple’s store didn’t work on any other manufacturer’s device – or at least not reliably and not for long. The major labels were obsessed with controlling the movement of their legitimate product, even though the internet was deluged with illegitimate tracks and even toxic copies planted by the labels’ own anti-piracy teams.

Much like the compulsory FBI warning at the start of DVDs, which torrent downloaders never see, this punished the legitimate purchaser and gave the freetard the better user experience.

What a way to run a railroad.

The book publishing industry has fared better so far because it didn’t wait so long to get involved. As this article by Listen.com founder Rob Reid at the WSJ notes, both music and book industries saw a 20 per cent fall in sales, but books have made up the dip with ebooks.

“Selling things to early adopters is wise,” concludes Reid. It’s not the full picture, of course, as Nick Carr counters here: books aren’t music and the fungibility of music means the industry was always “basically screwed”. But engagement with the technology, rather than hanging around on the sidelines, is undoubtedly a factor.

A new essay was published this week called Copyright and Innovation: The Untold Story by Michael Carrier, a professor at Rutgers School of Law in Camden, New Jersey. It quoted music technology companies and music business executives, and catalogued many industry errors. Professor Carrier noted, for example, that Napster “unbundled” the album package long before iTunes did.

It starts to get interesting when, as a “counterfactual”, the professor mused that when music labels’ copyright attorneys closed down Napster they lost an opportunity to monetise peer-to-peer file sharing. He wrote:

If the Napster decision had come out the other way or the parties had reached an agreement, it seems almost certain there would have been more innovation in the digital distribution of music. As discussed above, respondents explained that the decision:
(1) had a chilling effect on innovation,
(2) limited developments in technology such as filtering,
(3) stifled “different delivery mechanisms” that would have led to new ways for consumers to access music, and
(4) resulted in numerous missed opportunities.

Professor Carrier is correct in suggesting that taking down a centralised peer-to-peer service made counting product usage, and therefore monetisation, more difficult. But it didn’t make counting impossible. And he appears to be entirely ignorant of what happened next.

The labels were prepared to experiment with legitimising and licensing file-download apps LimeWire and Kazaa, and the new wave of decentralised services that followed Napster. In Wayne Russo, they found a pirate operator prepared to take the offer and run with it. But ultimately nobody followed the well-worn route from outlaw to statesman, from pirate radio operator to major player. Fanning’s Snocap kept trying to turn the black market into a white one and eventually gave up. In 2008 the Snocap assets were flogged off to Imeem; the following year MySpace picked up the Imeem assets for peanuts.

(In 2009, the UK’s cable operator Virgin Media came close to launching the world’s first legitimate peer-to-peer file sharing service, but by then the lawyers and risk management suits had won out over the business innovators, and Virgin Media put the project on ice at the eleventh hour.)

There is no mention in Carrier’s study of the Snocap saga – which is intriguing in itself. Did he not know? Or did he know and feared that the episode would disrupt the story that he had decided to write, one that so many people, evidently, want to read? What the professor presents instead over 60 pages is the copyright skirmishes reduced to a simple moral fable: the good guys wear white, and the bad guys wear black. Quite why the prof wanted to carve out such a simplistic tale, in spite of the evidence, is a mystery we will get to in a moment. The Unicorn has yet to make its appearance.

Let’s recap. We see that both sides are nervous and unwilling to engage in the market. The pirate operators valued their outlaw pinup status to which the lustre of victimhood was soon added. They were unwilling to exchange the internet infamy they’d gained on the margins for wealth. Unable to turn a black market white, the music industry had little option but to prosecute the pirates.

On the music side, the industry has changed from nervously seeking to control the movement of its legitimate product (via digital rights management mechanisms, aka DRM) to nervously seeking to control the wholesale and retail markets through its investment strategies. It offers “most favoured nation clauses”, and grants licences in exchange for equity in new music services. Transparent accounting is a thing of the past. Rather than encouraging a vigorous market, the major labels pick winners and losers by setting barriers to entry that are just a whisker on the side of legitimate.

So keep all that in mind as emblematic of interests not being aligned to mutual benefit. Here’s another bang-up-to-date example, from the other side of the fence.

A rocket to nowhere

Recently we’ve seen the first fruit of Google’s investment in consumer electronics. But Google has decided not to challenge the stalwarts of the television industry with any new creative material or any new way of enjoying that content. The Google TV takes £300 out of your pocket but doesn’t give you anything you can’t find on your laptop… and you still need a television. The Nexus 7, a tablet computer, doesn’t have anything worth watching either.

And if that’s odd – meet the Google Nexus Q. It’s a beautifully futuristic sphere-shaped media streamer that only plays Google media, through Google services, and what’s kicking about on the “open web”. Like YouTube! In essence, the Nexus is a kind of DRM dongle for content that doesn’t have DRM, and will never need DRM, because it’s worthless and will never need “protecting”.

So Google has designed a range of products around a broken supply chain.

This is rather like Google designing an affordable household rocket that doesn’t go any faster than a bike nor any further than your cornershop. What on Earth is the point of building a rocket to do that? Answer: there isn’t one.

If the copyright industries are timid about using technology, and engineer themselves around it, then here’s the most-lauded technology company on the planet just as timid about using creativity. Cosy entertainment arrangements are not being challenged here (the faddish buzzword is “disrupted”) as they historically have been by waves of technology.

What tech companies ought to be doing is offering a helping hand to people who can better represent creative talent. Where, for example, is the internet’s alternative to satellite and cable? There is nothing intrinsic to first-run movies and the world’s most popular football offering, the English Premier League, that should make them a staple of Sky’s schedules now and forever. The exclusive rights to broadcast these will go to whoever puts the most cash on the table. Verizon, with its fibre broadband network, looks like a bet and it has disrupted cable, but it’s an exception rather than rule.

So while most people are familiar with “music business fails to innovate” headlines, the boot’s now on the other foot. Google has the cash but not the desire to innovate, and instead designs for breakage.

Enter the Unicorn

I’d promised the Unicorn would make an appearance, and no attempt to describe the stand-off can give a faithful representation without it.

The Unicorn is the naive hope that something, somehow, will turn up. The Unicorn stamps its hoof on the Guardian’s business strategy, and embosses hyper-local journalism business plans. The Unicorn does a little dance when someone insists you can have a market without property rights being enforced. And the Unicorn clops its hooves approvingly whenever people muse about “business models” but ignore the continental-scale misalignments between the industries we’ve seen in the preceding examples.

And whenever people ignore that vast gap between potential market value and the amount of money actually entering the internet economy – the Unicorn throws a party.

Needless to say, Unicorns are frequently seen flying over Shoreditch.

After 20 years of pretending the internet economy is some fragile newborn, let’s be honest about the sheer size of the failure that’s upon us. The markets are either sickly or don’t exist, and an enormous amount of money that should be flowing both to innovative internet companies and creative industries isn’t.

Essentially it’s a world where cash doesn’t willingly change hands in anything like the quantity it should. Piracy plays its part, but it surely can’t be the entire picture: only a third of internet users infringe copyright.

While you have to sympathise with legitimate businesses operating in an environment where punters can wander into the illicit shop next door, without fear of sanction, what about the two-thirds of broadband users who simply aren’t putting their hands in their pockets? Where’s the strategy to extract our cash and leave us happy?

It’s not as if the public propensity to pay for creative goods has suddenly ceased – but it’s platforms such as Sky that are the beneficiaries, rather than hopeless klutzes of the internet economy. Apple has created content markets and demonstrated how much economic growth comes from making copyrightable stuff enjoyable. Apple certainly shows the way, in contrast to Google’s advertising-based stagnation.

But Apple’s markets aren’t true competitive markets – they only work on Apple’s gear and on Apple’s terms.

The misalignments are now so great that the internet giants now see more gain from keeping the internet economy small, rather than growing it. Management consultancy McKinsey puts consumer surplus of internet services – the amount of money that we’d theoretically be happy to pay to use Flickr, GMail and the like – at €100bn a year. Google and Facebook see more short-term gain from being big fish in a small pond, rather than even bigger fish in a much bigger pond.

Quite simply, today, a Google (well, the Google) knows it can profit from other people’s (expensive) stuff by flouting the old rules… and knows it can get away with it.

The Number 10-commissioned Hargreaves Independent Review of IP and Growth – aka the Google Review – was scornful of copyright industry “lobbynomics”. But it painted a very partial picture. A technology company today can schmooze politicians and their advisors, create astroturf groups by the score, and even conjure up entirely phoney new industrial sectors (cf the nontrepreneur [n]). It has professors in its pocket. (A small note on Carrier’s report acknowledges: “This project received funding from Google.”)

Google’s off-field presence dwarfs the combined might of the creative industries – as evidenced in the rollback of UK citizens’ rights (see here and here).

Some of you may remember when The Victoria and Albert Museum marketed itself as “an ace caff [cafe] with nice museum attached”. Well, Google today appears to be a sophisticated global lobbying network with a legacy advertising business attached. It has become obsessed with moving the goalposts rather than innovation. Its motto could be “Think Small!”

Google has, in fact, become a bizarre mirror of the music industry.

So, what can we do?

As I said earlier, there’s plenty of blame to go round. How can we realign the players in an internet economy that has gone so badly off the rails?

Well, maybe you can help here. The answer looks both simple and complicated. The simple thing is to get both sides focussed on making money, rather than lobbying. The mutual interests have to be pointing in the same direction. This is easier said than done. The complicated thing in this era of fiscal austerity and negative growth is getting people spending money to kickstart the process.

On the prickly subject of piracy, legislators would rather the two sides sat down and made the problem go away through mutual cooperation.

Lawmakers attempting to draft decent, workable rights enforcement provisions can reliably count on the “Just Say No” camp of copyright activists to say “No to Anything” – like we saw with the defeated Stop Online Piracy Act.

This is actually a pity, because there are reasonable and just enforcement measures, worse ones, and really bad ones. But to a dogmatic copyright activist, all are equally bad. To a legislator who simply wants to do the right thing, this is no help at all.

My modest offering is this. If we want to look where value can be created (a euphemism for “punters happily parting with their money”) we should look at what is inconvenient and impossible to do on the internet today.

This can be fixed by introducing some flexible value recognition system that can be bundled with other goods. For example, ISPs could bundle tokens you can spend on the music and movie services of your choice. You could top up anywhere at any time. It ought to be universally redeemable.

Another inconvenience is playing music. There’s really no open, interoperable standard for taking songs on a mobile phone and playing them wirelessly on any speaker – whether it’s in a rented car, an office or a friend’s house. You have to faff around with Wi-Fi passwords and then you can bet those speakers won’t be connected to tech compatible with your handset. Another market misalignment, another opportunity for technology-copyright partnership.

And there’s categories of music goods that haven’t been invented yet: books that play music, for example.

(In Carrier’s report, an interviewed “entrepreneur” claims that “it’s actually impossible to run a fully legal music service”. This is utter tripe. The UK has more than 70 – including Spotify. The problem is not that it’s impossible, but that the services don’t reflect their value. Spotify is both too expensive and too cheap at the same time.)

I suspect money is the key, though. Facebook already has Facebook Credits – which you can only use inside the Facebook plantation. It’s up to the creative industries to create and jointly own something better – a flexible payment system and platform – to unlock some of that value. They can hardly complain when somebody else builds one, people use it, and they’re gouged for 30 per cent (hello, Apple and Amazon).

For its part, Google has much to offer too – it can build these platforms. The problem is that Google’s DNA and historical baggage make this extremely difficult today. Google has rowed itself out to sea and on to Freetard Island.

Google can’t unlock its own value without copyright – but its mindset, its Weltanschauung now holds it back. Shareholders are traditionally the key here to nudging a company towards greater growth. Google’s current corporate governance structure makes it difficult to change – it’s one of the least transparent, least accountable companies on the planet. But anyone looking at the Nexus Q ball will surely conclude, independently, that Google needs a new CEO.

At times the lack of courage of both sides in the content and technology industries makes you wish a plague on them all. But that ultimately leaves future generations much poorer, and is a victory for cynicism. We need to push them to get back to what they’re good at – based on the ground rules we know work.

And by the way, about that Unicorn?

It doesn’t exist. ®

When Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock opens his mouth, his foot soon disappears inside. The UK’s leading digital rights advocate has just demonstrated still more difficulty understanding the "rights" the group campaigns about.

At a Citizen 2012 data conference in London yesterday, where he was introduced as "the infamous Jim Killock", Citizen Jim listed the many injustices of the UK’s copyright law.

"The Olympic logo is copyright. The Olympic mascots are copyright. Therefore, reusing them is a breach of copyright and of course parodies using them get pulled down," claimed Killock.

In fact, the Olympic logo is a trademark, not a copyright, as the IPO lucidly explains. It’s a different property right, with completely different rules. The Olympic logo is actually one of the more famous trademark stories in recent years, with the Chinese government asserting its ownership of it – a fascinating case for IP law geeks.

Killock was discussing a proposal to weaken copyright-holders claims over derivatives made as parodies. After a public consultation in 2010 the IPO concluded there was no reason to change the parody exemption. But the Hargreaves Review, the so-called ‘Google Review’, bounced it back onto the agenda, and the Open Rights Group then discovered it as a campaign issue. Killock cited another example of why the law needed to be changed. It was the tale of a spoof on the Jay-Z song Empire State of Mind called Newport State of Mind, posted to YouTube in 2010.

"Newport State of Mind was pulled on copyright grounds – it was infringing – so that was that, and it got deleted."

The audience was left thinking a shadow had fallen across the interwebs – and possible a New Dark Age was about to begin. Copyright activists often evoke an imminent dystopian fantasy world – it appears to provide the ‘crisis’ which their politics require. What Killock didn’t tell them was that Newport State of Mind was back on YouTube a few days later, where it’s been enjoyed ever since. (You don’t need the copyright-holder’s permission to do a cover version, or use a composition backing track, remember.)

Killock wasn’t corrected.

Citizen Jim also argued that in order to be strengthened, UK copyright law should be "liberalised", in other words, it should do less. This logic may sound Orwellian, but it’s actually using a very obscure Olde English derivation. For example, you may have heard the phrase, "You’ll have to move: your house is being liberalised to make way for a bypass," or "I’m sorry sir, but your car is a total write-off: it was liberalised by joyriders, who have remixed it with a wall."

Last year Killock told Parliament that the UK copyright laws had deterred Netflix from launching in the UK. He did so 10 days after Netflix announced it was launching in the UK.

Sadly, since then, Jim’s public appearances are now quite rare – so we must treasure every one

The revolutionary dogma of Metro is sweeping through the old Windows desktop, too, a new leak of Window 8 confirms. The leaked build, newer than the public release of a fortnight ago, abandons the 3D design elements introduced into Windows in 1990 for a resolutely two-dimensional world. The ‘legacy’ desktop in Windows 8 is denuded of anything that takes advantage of human depth perception, such as window shadows, gradients or sculpted controls.

It’s a flat, flat world.

Microsoft had already promised to drop the gimmicky glass effect, first introduced in Windows Vista, last month. Public releases were considerably ‘flatter’ in appearance than before, squaring off round edges with the designer’s knife. Now the Windows team has gone the whole hog, theming Windows 8 to look just like a Windows Phone. So windows buttons are flat, windows don’t have shadows that help the user distinguish where they are in the Z-order, and UI chrome is a flat, single colour element without gradients.

The first popular graphical user interfaces of the mid-80s, pioneered by Apple, Atari and Amiga, adopted flat 2D designs because microcomputers didn’t have the graphical grunt to support them. But as horsepower increased, designers took advantage of 3D effects to distinguish the UI chrome from the content inside the windows. This is much harder in a flat, 2D world.

It’s doubtful whether the glass effect aided usability in any way – as it drew the eye to what didn’t matter. Many users were happier with transparency turned off.

It certainly looks different – but does it work?

On devices with a small screen, where UI chrome can be made to disappear, and where one application exclusively uses the screen, Microsoft believes that it does.

Mao Tse Tung’s once advised his fighters:

“support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports”

Perhaps they should also heed the Great Helmsman’s thoughts on self-criticism?

Hearing No.1: 25th April 2012

A Westminster investigation into the machinations of the UK’s copyright bureaucracy and the government’s intellectual property policy opened very gently this week.

The All Parliamentary Group on Intellectual Property is headed by heavyweight backbench MP John Whittingdale, and while members are pro-IP, they have plenty of beefs about how the handling of it could be improved.

Whittingdale recently revealed that he shared the concerns of protesters who stood against ACTA, the worldwide treaty to enforce IP rights. The group’s first evidence session invited copyfighters to make their case, and along came the Open Rights Group, quango Consumer Focus (a latecomer to the copyfight), the British Library and Google.

Google’s Theo Bertram, a former special advisor for Brown and Blair, wasted no time in playing the search giant’s trump card: don’t break the internet! Copyright enforcement proposals, he said, “no matter how well intentioned, could be damaging to the fundamental fabric of the internet”.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, there’s a new website documenting this proposition. The fabric metaphor, we note, is a favourite at the Chocolate Factory. Cynics suggest that many, if not all, attempts to enforce property rights and ownership that will “break the internet” are simple measures that Google just doesn’t want to implement. But it’s proved incredibly effective so far in scaring lawmakers.

Bertram sketched a kinder, gentler Google.

Originally published at The Register

“Google was seen as a defender of piracy and a propagator of piracy – I don’t think we’re seen as that now,” he added. Bertram also made the case that more “certainty and flexibility” was needed for internet startups, and changing the law would help.

“Surely any organisation needs to establish whether what it’s doing is legal,” mused Whittingdale, who pointed out there were 70 licensed music services in the UK.

Bertram replied that most of the digital media startups were American. That’s a proposition that Omnifone, We7, Spotify, Rara, Playlouder, 7Digital and Soundcloud might counter: all but one are British and the other is from Sweden.

Asked if he was happy with the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), whose behaviour had sparked the group’s intrigue, Peter Bradshaw of the Open Rights Group said that he was – especially in contrast to the Department of Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS). “On the process side whatever we think of the evidence, the process the IPO has followed is better than the one the DCMS has followed,” he said. What Bradshaw may mean is that the IPO welcomes groups like the ORG, but the Ministry of Fun doesn’t invite them to parties any more.

Ben White, of the British Library, raised a few eyebrows among the MPs by saying the IPO was the best in the world, and he offered an interesting reason.

“We’re really impressed with IPO, and the professionalism they display,” gushed White. “There are no economists in Germany or Scandinavia. If you compare them internationally, they are exemplary.”

The MPs countered by asking White if some of the financial numbers emitted by the world-class “economists” at the IPO in support of Prof Ian Hargreaves’ “Google Review” were justified. These figures were met with much ridicule when they were published, and the IPO backtracked pretty quickly. Now we know something about their hasty genesis: they had been been created for the IPO by Ben Mitra-Khan, a former Soros scholar and now supporter of the curious Left-ish “Post-Autistic Economic Movement” (since renamed “Real World Economics”). Mitra-Khan is really an economic historian, and may actually be a brilliant one, rather than your common-or-garden economist who crunches numbers.

White, perhaps, could have chosen a more convincing example of a world-class authority than the United Kingdom’s IPO.

However the hour-long hearing was dominated by one witness.

A Very Long History of Everything

The Teutonic contribution of Saskia Walzel, of doomed quango Consumer Focus, took up more than two thirds of the evidence MPs heard. Walzel has a Master of Arts degree in Human Rights, and several campaigning jobs hectoring companies on corporate social responsibility.

She turned one-point answers into paragraphs, and longer answers into sprawling historical and geographical dissertations. On and on and on she went.

It was like ‘Hegel, the audiobook’.

Her fellow witnesses seemed to be content to let Walzel ramble, perhaps fearing a skewering from the MPs. The group’s members had reminded all those present that they weren’t under oath and stressed the hearing was not confrontational; they genuinely wanted to hear what they thought was wrong with intellectual property.

Perhaps Walzel went to one of those schools where the quantity of knowledge that you can exhibit, weighed by the metric ton, is what is valued. Before MPs, however, this just seemed patronising and rude. In Walzel’s desire to tell the history of everything, everywhere, any coherency was lost, and MPs intervened several times to steer Walzel’s earnest stream of verbiage towards relevance.

This earnestness might have been counter-productive.

“Who are you, a quango, to formulate your policy on that? Who decides? You do it on behalf of the ‘consumer’ – who ever that may be. Why do you do it, frankly?” asked Whittingdale. Walzel offered a rambling answer after which Whittingdale muttered, “that doesn’t answer my question”.

Whittingdale also delivered a sly joke. He asked if her view could be summed up as “Hargreaves good, Digital Economy Act bad?” Walzel said the IPO was simply doing as it was told.

“They were following orders?” he asked.

“Yah,” said Walzel.

Originally published at The Register

Hearing No.2: 9th May 2012

There’s an elephant in the room as Parliament’s informal inquiry into intellectual property policy rolls on. In the foreground, there’s the role of the officials who are supposed to support it. In the background, there’s something more troubling.

Within the past two years – and without a hint, let alone a fanfare – the UK’s economic strategy has radically changed. It favours fashionable new sectors while downgrading successful UK sectors such as design, music and TV, which are based on “intangible” rights.

This is not merely a shift in industrial policy; it would appear to be a clear case of government intervening to “pick winners”. However, the “winners” here are mayfly internet startups that even the No 10-appointed ambassador to London’s Tech City admits won’t really create wealth. “Picking losers” might be a more accurate term.

It’s a curious silent shift to make because the long-term economic fortunes of the UK – and advanced Western economies – are increasingly reliant on these intangibles for growth.

These intangibles, unlike the products of the tangible industries of textile and hardware, cannot be made more cheaply in the emerging economies. Design, copyright, patents, brands and trademarks need to be protected and exploited to the utmost, and we’ll need a lot more of them. MPs may be confronted with more pressing issues such as the eurozone collapse, but surely none looms larger in the long term than the question of: “What will the British economy do?”

There are two conventional views on where this new stealth economic strategy has come from, and each is as troubling as the other.

In one view, rogue civil servants are operating an independent policy beyond oversight or ministerial control. On the other hand, it is official Coalition policy but one that Number 10 cannot explain or even acknowledge publicly: it’s the policy that dare not speak its name.

Either way, the view strongly lobbied for by overseas internet multinationals is that for the internet “to win” British rights must be weakened. This emerged in the second evidence session held by MPs in the cross-party group on intellectual property in its current probing.

Intellectual property: Who needs it?

The first session called on Google and digital rights campaigners to explain their case for weakening the current intangible rights framework by removing protections.

The second session heard many cries of incomprehension in response to these changes, and complaints about the conduct of the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and the process of the Hargreaves Review, which looked into the effects of intellectual property (IP) law on Britain’s future.

But as for the strategy change, whodunnit? Careful questioning didn’t unearth a smoking pistol. But there was no shortage of smoke.

Publishers Association chief Richard Mollet summed up the philosophical shift that has taken place. Instead of treating copyright as the foundation for market-driven growth, copyright was now viewed through a pirate’s eye patch: as just another burdensome piece of red tape.

“I feel there’s a chasm, a conceptual chasm, between the view of IP as a property right, which is recognised as such by UK, European and global law – it’s yours, you own it, you can trade off it – versus the other conception of copyright as a regulation, something that trips consumers up, and therefore the less of it there is the better,” said Mollet. “That’s a gap I don’t think can be bridged, and that view permeates through some IPO thinking.”

Hargreaves explicitly endorsed this view of copyright as a burdensome regulation, and it’s implicitly now government policy. En route to Hargreaves’ report becoming official government policy, nobody had thought to disagree.

This rubber-stamping was raised by several witnesses in contrast to the approach of Richard Hooper, who had been appointed to implement the Hargreaves Report’s “Big Idea” – a digital copyright exchange. While Hargreaves had dutifully carried out his homework, witnesses said, Hooper had questioned his task. This suggested the IPO, which wrote much of Hargreaves’ report, was carrying out a political assignment.

But reality wasn’t so simple. It may be, one witness suggested, a case of bureaucrats not understanding the industries.

Dids Macdonald, of the Anti-Counterfeiting in Design (ACID) group, had spotted more magical thinking. She told the panel of MPs that officials still thought “design happens by chance”, and isn’t really a skill worth protecting. Officials’ obsession with changing copyright appears to downgrade design, she implied.

We also heard evidence of bureaucrats taking an activist role, possibly misleading their ministers.

“Some evidence was not fed through to ministers,” said Andrew Yeates of the Educational Recording Agency.

And the consultation also heard that IPO bureaucrats had been attempting to change international policy before proposals had been discussed, let alone decided, in the UK. This state-within-a-state had its own very active Foreign Office, it seems.

“For the exception for data-mining, BiS [the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills] has been trying to ‘build up a head of steam’ without any evidence for the policy,” said one witness. “The policy is being lobbied in Europe but nobody in the UK has asked whether it’s good for the UK economy.”

Mollet also said he’d been in meetings where officials had told him “copyright won’t exist in 20 years”. This is a giddy claim since copyright has survived the invention of electricity and moved beyond copies almost 200 years ago. But it is the kind of thing we can imagine penpushers cheering. It would be interesting to hear which public servant had made this assertion.

We also heard how the IPO was “helping” write policy, such as the Hargreaves Review, and then reviewing it. One witness described this as the IPO “marking their own homework”. There’s another term, coined by blogger Frank Fisher, which is even more apt here: “carousel propaganda”.

Yeates also noted that officials had downgraded the contribution of creative industries from 8 per cent of GDP to 3 per cent overnight, much to everyone’s surprise.

So there’s plenty of evidence of a policy shift – and evidence of prejudices and bureaucratic activism. But not, so far, of where all this originates.

Witnesses wanted a stronger representation for intangibles in Cabinet, and were understandably frustrated that declining sectors were strongly represented in Whitehall (manufacturing) but growing sectors (intellectual property) were not.

MP Jim Dowd warned the witnesses of getting what they wish for.

“People name a department after a problem,” he observed wryly, “and think they’ve solved the problem.”

Who is pulling the levers behind the IPO?

Some of the most interesting contributions came from the floor.

One was an insight into how policy-making within the IPO was driven. Hubert Best, a lawyer and expert on Nordic extended collective licensing, said he’d been invited to explain it to the IPO, who clearly wanted to implement it in the UK. He had patiently explained that collective licensing – the act of putting an organisation in charge of collecting royalties on behalf of artists – as the IPO wanted it could not work within the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works.

“Now somebody has told those very nice people at the IPO that ‘This is the answer that has to be provided’. I was left asking myself – I wonder where that decision comes from?” he wondered out loud.

Ian Moss, formerly of the Growth Unit at the Treasury, put in an economic perspective that’s worth quoting at length because it provides so much of the wider context that is usually absent.

“At times they are mixing up what is good fiscally and what is good economically,” said Moss. “If you are looking at public spending you want to pay as little as possible for all the things you buy, and the easiest thing to do is make things free.”

The new stealth policy, he explained, applied that logic to the technology sector by making its inputs free.

“Unfortunately for the whole of the economy that isn’t a good thing – because for the things we value, there aren’t enough of them made.”

It’s a worthwhile point. If the new strategy wasn’t so stealthy, we’d be having a public debate about whether the economy as a whole should take a hit just so that one stroppy corner of the technology sector should get a leg-up.

And remember that much of the technology sector, including the likes of Apple and Microsoft, respects rights and works with rights-holders. Apple created new content markets where internet “experts” had said it would never succeed.

Moss had another observation about The Great Leap Forward. The IP debate advanced by radicals and reformers didn’t focus on economic incentives, but was about accessing stuff that had already been made. It looked at stocks, not flows.

“[It] is one thing asking ‘How do we ensure optimal access to the stock of content?’, [it is another to ask] ‘How do we ensure an optimal flow of new content?’. So far all the discussion is about the stock, and none from the IPO in policy areas is about the flow.

“Which means us utilising the rights we own now in new technology areas in the future: the cloud, for example.

“In most circumstances, we can look at past performance as a good indicator of future performance. If we’ve been pretty good at creating in the past, then that’s probably the thing we should stick with in the future.”

The inquiry continues today at 3pm BST, with the Intellectual Property Office’s head John Alty as sole witness. It won’t be the last session, we understand.

Originally published at The Register

Hearing No.3: 21st May 2012

The all-party group of MPs looking into the UK’s looming obliteration of copyright rounded on their quarry yesterday – and it turned out to be an enthralling battle of wits.

John Alty and Edmund Quilty of the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) were quizzed on their controversial role in maintaining – or failing to maintain – protections for creative work after being invited to the informal inquiry’s third evidence-gathering session in Westminster.

For over an hour the two senior civil servants showed striking indifference to Blighty’s creative industries, whose existence relies on copyright law and enforcement. The pair couldn’t even muster a word of lukewarm praise nor comment on said industries’ economic value to UK plc.

There is one area in which Britain is indisputably world class: armed with a mother tongue that has a vast vocabulary, our mandarins have the ability to create more ways of not answering a question than anyone else. They’ve perfected it, in the way the Brazilians and Dutch turned football into art. Step overs, dribbles, perplexing diagonal passes into space – the lot. And the IPO officials put all those skills to work yesterday in an exhibition performance.

But the six MPs raising questions, spearheaded by John Whittingdale (Con), Pete Wishart (SNP) and Don Foster (LibDem) were wise to this – and, unlike too many parliamentarians your humble Reg hack has witnessed, they were highly effective.

They wanted answers, and working like tag-team wrestlers they struggled to pin the slippery bureaucrats down. Most points were asked several times, doggedly, in different ways. Ultimately, however, it may be what the witnesses left unsaid that made the greatest impression.

Probing questions: a pain in the neck?

The point of focus was Alty, chief of the IPO. He’d brought along Quilty, the IPO’s copyright boss, whose actions had sparked this gentle probe by MPs. Quilty was sat at Alty’s left, looking like a pink Sontaran battle commander.

Now, if you know your Doctor Who, you will know that the Sontarans are a fierce and cunning race of warriors, who are capable of hypnotising humans. But they have one weak spot: a “probic vent” at the back of the neck. Even a blow from a shoe on this hole can incapacitate a Sontaran. Sat directly behind Quilty, in the audience, was Ministry of Fun official Adrian Brazier.

Brazier is the digital rights lobbyists’ second-favourite civil servant after Quilty, and he has led his department’s ‘’implementation’ of the Digital Economy Act. Which, if you look closely, hasn’t been implemented. Both are very sniffy about rightsholders actually enforcing their rights. So maybe Brazier’s positioning was no coincidence. It was defensive cover.

The IPO has a peculiar position. It has one function, which is merely administrative, of registering trademarks and patents. But it also has an advisory role giving ministers policy advice. Alty said it was also “influencing the global rights-granting agenda”.

It’s this policy creation that’s united the creative sectors – a rare achievement – against the IPO and prompted much concern. Wasn’t this dual role odd, asked Whittingdale? No, said Alty, the insolvency agency did much the same.

Do you see copyright as impeding innovation and growth, asked Whittingdale.

“Clearly you need a copyright system. I don’t think anyone in the mainstream is really challenging that,” said Alty. You could feel the “but…” approaching. “The question is where you draw the boundaries, what’s the economic impact on difference arrangements, and that’s the thing on which people differ, and we gather the evidence and draw a view.”

One MP pointed out that Alty’s mission statement for the IPO didn’t include the protection or support of intellectual property (IP) industries, and in fact made it impossible to support them. Alty repeated the mission statement but at greater length. Copyright is evolving, Quilty chipped in.

Then we got down the nitty gritty: to what extent were bureaucrats not just suggesting policy but creating it, the panel wanted to know. Who makes the recommendations, asked MP Mike Weatherley.

“It’s no different to any other part of Whitehall,” said Alty. “You wouldn’t expect a minister necessarily in a very technical area to suggest ‘these are things I want you to consider’. You have to take responsibility.”

Whittingdale pointed out that options for overhauling copyright – put forward by the (supposedly) independent Hargreaves Review – were radical and bound to cause controversy when aired by the IPO in a consultation.

“There had to be a rigorous examination of what options were available, what they cost… and that’s one of things that has evolved in recent years in a way that wasn’t before,” Quilty replied. “You’ll see impact assessments that support consultations, and which do look at all the options. People have to recognise that’s going to be part of policy making.”

Well, there’s blue-sky thinking, Estelle Morris MP countered, and then there’s sensible policy. Under Quilty, the IPO had given a platform for fringe extremists, and this fed into policy. “You don’t just put all the options out there, surely?”, Morris asked.

Don Foster tried to pin down the IPO as the source of the controversial education exception proposal in which school textbook authors are effective denied royalties: “Just for the record – you would not recommend that option?” he asked.

“I think the ministers also said…” Alty began to reply.

What about you? Do you recommend that particularly?

“Um. I think that, er… I’m in a slightly awkward position because we have to give advice to ministers, and not to all-party groups,” said Alty. “We’ve given a pretty clear signal that’s not the way we intend to go.”

(There are times when public servants appear to be extremely uncomfortable with the concept of accountability – and this was perhaps one of them.)

Reforming the IPO: ‘There is no right way of doing this’

If you were building a new IPO, asked Foster, is there anything you do that isn’t appropriate and any functions you’d like to take on?

Alty started another mazy dribble that showed off his technical skills, mentioning things like “build up capability in individual areas”, “there is no right way of doing this”, “I’ve worked in one role”, “I’ve worked in a different role”, and so on, running the ball over the line by the corner flag as the clock ticked down.

MPs questioned whether the IPO’s current home at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is the right one – the office used to be in the Ministry of Fun. Where should it be, Whittingdale asked, while wondering that the IPO’s current home may “rather skew you to look for policies that pursue innovation perhaps by diluting rights ownership?”

“The creative industries are also about innovation… there’s no magic answer,” said Alty.

On the subject of appointing an IP czar, the IPO didn’t like the suggestion of creating a secretary of state for the digital economy.

“I don’t think you could have a minister responsible for all those things,” said Alty as Quilty nodded vigorously. “You could say having two ministers is better than one.”

“[The Department of Culture, Media and Sport] is there to support the creative industries, they have that voice, so do we,” added Quilty.

How closely was Google involved in the process, wondered Wishart.

“I don’t know any more than you do. I’ve met lots of stakeholders and I don’t think one has an undue influence,” Alty replied. Quilty chipped in: copyright policy was all about fairness, and he strived to position it as a wise and dispassionate bystander.

“In the copyright area, you’re often talking about a cake which has to be divided up between people,” said Quilty. “And the questions are just how big is the cake, who gets the biggest slice of it: do creators get a bigger slice, do consumers get a bigger slice?”

For a “copyright and IP enforcement director” that’s a fairly hug-a-hoodie-grade idea.

Dodgy dossiers

Finally MPs touched on the empirical evidence for copyright reform and the positive effects it will have on the UK economy and finances – specifically, figures and numbers published in the Hargreaves Review that were backed by the IPO in its subsequent consultation. To put it charitably, much of this evidence turned out to be bizarre and implausible. Whittingdale’s view was that Prof Ian Hargreaves had made “sweeping assumptions – and you [the IPO] didn’t cast a critical eye over them”.

“Hargreaves was signalling a sense of direction and there’s much more detailed work to do,” said Alty, distancing himself a bit further from them. Foster was more specific: the evidence lacked “authenticity and validity” to support Hargreaves’ eyebrow-raising ideas, such as a digital marketplace that would be worth £2.2bn to the UK economy every year.

Alty said “there was a balancing act to be struck and we were not going to do the Hargreaves Review again. One of the things we’ve built up is our economic capability to do that sort of analysis”. Maybe Hargreaves was in a hurry, suggested Alty: “He did his job in six months and most reviews take longer.”

Hang on, asked Jim Dowd MP, the Gowers Review into intellectual property had only just been completed. (It was actually finished in 2006.) All the evidence was still sitting there, wasn’t it?

“Well that’s helpful too, then,” said Alty. “There’s an implicit assumption that somehow we nobbled Hargreaves to do the report.”

“Perhaps if you’d seen the disparity between Hargreaves’ evidence and his conclusion,” replied Foster, “then you might have pointed it out. That’s all.”

Why did you allow such nonsensical assumptions to just sit there, wondered Wishart.

“The truth is the evidence base for copyright is not that great,” replied Alty.

“These [figures] were delivered as if they were coming down from the mountain,” one of the panel said. “Nobody believes these economic assessments. Hargreaves said 0.5pc of GDP benefit would result – do you still believe that? They’re just so ridiculous, so nonsensical do you worry about being foolish?”

Alty remained unapologetic: “To get a debate going was a reasonable way of going about it. Of course you can argue about numbers. We’re breaking new ground.”

“It does start a debate,” echoed Quilty. “That’s how academic debate goes on.” The MPs were massively unimpressed.

“People aren’t interested in ‘a debate’ – but the outcomes,” replied Dowd, sharply. “What some people believe at the moment is that the government, through its various agencies, has a view of intellectual property in terms of value to consumers which in the short-term may look very attractive, but in the long-term, may undermine the whole principle of creative industries that produce products of benefit to consumers, and others.”

Alty said EU law forbids any copyright exceptions from damaging commercial interests – just in time for the final whistle to mark the end of the group’s time slot.

The IPO officials had held their line as doggedly as the MPs had questioned them. The pair insisted that the IPO must balance consumers’ interests with copyright holders; that any unpopular proposals weren’t really theirs and must have come from the independent review; and that they were starting a great big debate on copyright.

What they hadn’t done is show any indication that IP is important to the UK, rather than something unpleasant you step in, let alone how it’s important.

(The UK isn’t the only country to find anti-copyright activism embedded in its civil service, creating policy for ministers – but that’s for another day.)

The minister responsible for the officials, Baroness Wilcox, has yet to agree to appear. In an earlier appearance before Parliament in November, Quilty and Alty did most of the talking for her. Further snubbing the cross-party MPs would leave the impression that the bureaucrats were really in charge …

They’re at it again. Who? Take a guess: if it’s not the Daily Mail, then it’s probably the BBC. The corporation has once again been caught pinching photos, wrongly attributing them, and pretending nothing ever happened – in a triumph of crowd-sourced “citizen journalism”.

But this incident of photo-lifting is slightly more noteworthy than most: the BBC used a photograph taken nine years ago in Iraq to illustrate its story about the massacre at the weekend in Syria.

The photograph, taken in 2003 by photojournalist Marco Di Lauro and licensed to Getty Images, was passed on to the BBC by an anonymous source for propaganda purposes. Casting aside the diligence and thoroughness for which it’s known, the BBC simply pushed it out onto its news website, giving the copyright credit to “an activist”.

It’s the sloppy credit that adds insult to injury as we’ve noted here before. Associated Newspapers’ Daily Mail has been a pioneer in this area: the Mail has previously made attributions on photos such as “© Twitter” and even “© The Internet”.

The BBC removed the photo after nine hours, but offered no explanation or apology on its website.

“What I am really astonished by is that a news organisation like the BBC doesn’t check the sources and it’s willing to publish any picture sent it by anyone: activist, citizen journalist or whatever,” an amazed di Lauro told the Telegraph.

A spokesman for the BBC responded: “We were aware of this image being widely circulated on the internet in the early hours following the most recent atrocities in Syria. We used it with a clear disclaimer saying it could not be independently verified. Efforts were made overnight to track down the original source of the image and when it was established the picture was inaccurate we removed it immediately.”

John Harrington at Photo Business News (a must-read), points out one of several problems highlighted by the story. One is that the BBC’s “citizen journalism” experiment isn’t working. There was no fact-checking. Many media organisations use photographs and videos, whose veracity can not be confirmed, from conflicts with a boilerplate disclaimer – indicating news organisations would rather be the first, or the most dramatic, rather than right.

It was only a matter of time before another major organisation fell victim to a propaganda stunt.

And, don’t forget, yesterday the BBC hilariously illustrated a story referring to the UN Security Council (which is real) using a logo from the sci-fi game Halo of the United Nations Space Command (which isn’t).

How do we fix the mindless theft problem?

The Syrian story raises many more troubling issues which threaten the ecology of the creative system, in which the big beasts – such as the Beeb and the Mail – grow fat. Many of the “solutions” offered for copyright snags may actually make things worse.

A quick search using the PicScout image recognition technology – now owned by Getty – would have brought up the source instantly and given the BBC the correct attribution. The Beeb claims that 8,000 staff have attended courses on “sourcing and attribution”. Either the team responsible for this cock-up didn’t attend – or those teaching the courses need to be fired.

Although photographers have a strong and clear copyright tradition to support them, righting wrongs is expensive and time-consuming in practice. The amount claimed in compensation is typically between £50 and £350, according to photographers’ group Stop43.

The 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act established something intended to help creators and inventors: the misleadingly named Patents County Court, which allowed solicitors to take on copyright, trademark and patent cases. But the barrier to justice remains high, and demand for something better is strong.

In December 2009, Lord Jackson completed a review into why justice was so expensive, and identified the cause: legal racketeering across the system. He also commissioned a survey of freelancers and SMEs which found “overwhelming support for both a fast-track (72.2 per cent) and a small-claims forum (78.7 per cent)” and “high levels of potential usage for both these options”.

The patent court’s users recommended the name be changed to something more descriptive – the Intellectual Property County Court – and that proceedings be limited to one or two days. Lord Jackson strongly backed their recommendations.

Then along came the “Google review”, the Number 10 initiative to investigate the effects of intellectual property law on Blighty’s industries. It was led by Prof Ian Hargreaves, and this succeeded in taking the momentum out of Lord Jackson’s recommendations. Although the prof’s review gave a tepid nod of approval to the peer, if you blinked you’d have missed it – and the lord’s conclusions were relegated to the marginalia.

In his recommendations for shaking up intellectual property, Hargreaves included a dog that didn’t bark: the ability for freelancers to claim “dissuasive” damages against large media companies who steal their work. This means an independent operator is entitled to damages greater than a licence to use the work might have cost, to persuade the offender not to repeat the larceny.

Orphan works and unintended consequences

As Harrington points out this week, proposals to relax the protections on orphan works were designed for laudable reasons – to make libraries’ historical and cultural archives accessible – but the plans would simply give media giants a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Most of the proposals remove the obligation for the publisher to ask permission first before using someone’s work. The publisher would merely be required to perform a “diligent search” – but what constitutes a diligent search isn’t clear. Ten seconds of Googling may be enough. And ten seconds of Googling appears to be beyond the scope of BBC or Daily Mail photo researchers.

Technology can find the long-lost parents of orphan works – so proposals backed by Hargreaves are already something of an anachronism. Technology has caught up with the problem and yet it isn’t being deployed. Image recognition algorithms are now good enough to identify every photograph ever published electronically – even from poor, down-sampled fragments; Getty’s PicScout is the best known, and Google and Facebook have developed their own too.

Providing an online image exchange that collates commercial picture libraries, individuals’ private work, and even Creative Commons collections would make arguing over what constitutes a “diligent search” moot. This kind of “eBay for photo rights” would allow publishers and individuals to find pictures fast. And while Hargreaves borrowed the idea, he sketched a universal exchange for all kinds of rights across all industries.

For media giants such as the Daily Mail and the BBC however, it’s hard for even the most fair-minded correspondent to cut them any slack. They’re incredibly well-resourced organisations. The Mail recently overtook the the New York Times as the most read newspaper website in the world; it makes great use of photography and owes much of its phenomenal popularity to those visual images.

The BBC, for its part, invites the public to send in images (for which viewers don’t get paid) and then systematically turns the images into orphan works in clear violation of the 1988 Copyright Act. Both need bringing into line. Unless there’s a stick alongside the carrot of a photo exchange, with a penalty regime in line with the Finnish driving penalty – the richer you are, the more you pay – it’s hard to see them taking much notice.

It’s fashionable to call for the weakening of creators’ rights, and Hargreaves was merely reflecting the view of his academic contemporaries, and some of the dark fringes of the internet, that copyright is a bothersome regulation. This is usually dressed up under the weasel-phrase “liberalisation”.

But the BBC “citizen journalism” saga casts it in its true light. Thanks to technology lowering the costs of production and distribution, we are all creators now, and we need our rights protecting against their unauthorised, unpaid use by media giants – who want to use our work for no cost and at no risk.

Weakening these rights isn’t “liberalisation”, and it doesn’t create a liberal society – it’s exploitation, and the society that this will create will be indistinguishable from feudalism.

Originally published at The Register

“I haven’t felt so good having spoken to a businessman for ten minutes in about 25 years. That’s not normally how I feel! So thanks very much!”

And thanks to you, BBC presenter Fi Glover, for sharing the feel-good factor with us.

Glover was bringing the miracle of Shoreditch’s internet companies into the nation’s living rooms as part of a mission for Radio 4’s One to One slot. She had vowed to find out, in her words, “what do these tech-enabled business zoomers do”.

We learned that “while the rest of this country hangs onto the cliff face of economic prosperity by its fingernails, it seems that many of these internet-savvy people are right on top of the cliff, planting a flag”.

We need more flags on cliffs.

“A survey from the Boston Consulting Group last month hailed the UK as the leader of all of the G20 nations in our internet economy,” she gushed. “Yes I know: we’re top of the table at something!”

The tech-enabled zoomer she had cornered was Dan Crow of Songkick. He told her that if the rest of Blighty could only capture the spirit of Shoreditch’s internet startups, then Britain would be great again.

“I feel I should applaud,” said Glover.

Don’t let us stop you, Fi. She was on a mission, she explained, because she had found herself in the right place at the right time.

“I’ve watched this community develop because I cycle through it,” she told us.

Fair enough. There’s no better place to gauge the economic viability of a new business sector than from the vantage point of a moving bicycle.

Radio 4 is one of the most meticulous and serious speech radio stations in the world. Its documentaries may often be dull, but they cover grown-up subjects that others don’t touch. It has a great public service broadcasting tradition. This was a refreshing break with that tradition. The initials BBC are famously said on occasion to stand for “Best Bits Censored” – this is a prime example, because there was quite a lot missing.

Where does one start?

Miraculous evidence

Perhaps we could start with the Boston Consulting Group. This outfit has a nice little earner in producing hyperventilating reports on internet growth. A chapter title from a recent report captures their approach perfectly:

Meticulous and serious it isn’t. Not surprisingly, Google likes BCG’s approach very much indeed – in 2010 Google paid the consulting group to produce a report that inflated the size of the UK’s internet economy by injecting some flexibility into conventional definitions.

Boston reckoned the internet sector was 7.2 per cent of UK GDP – almost as large as the UK’s financial services sector. They achieved this by taking the final value of everything connected with the internet, and attributing it to the internet sector. The same logic, as El Reg contributor Tim Worstall pointed out, could be used to redefine banking as 100 per cent of GDP, because almost everyone uses a bank.

Nor is Boston shy about revealing its own prejudices – or pandering to its clients’ prejudices.

“Businesses in particular need to make a choice. They can rise to the challenge of a new internet-driven marketplace — and benefit from the expanded capabilities and higher growth rates that high-web SMEs are already achieving throughout the G20 nations,” Boston insists, without any convincing evidence. Or else, what? “The alternative is following in the footsteps of such industries as music and publishing, which held on to outdated business models for too long and are now dealing with competitive environments that have been reshaped around them.”
Mystical hubs

The claim that Shoreditch was one of the “top three technology hubs” in the world has an even stranger provenance. It comes from a consulting boutique, Startup Genome, founded by a 21-year-old called Max Marmer. Startup Genome gives away free research to boost its consultancy business. The data it analyses for this free research is drawn from startups, and is entirely user-contributed. So if lots of people in Ullapool, or Ulan Bator, send in their details, then Ullapool or Ulan Bator appear to be really busy. It is self-selecting. What Startup Genome’s hub report did was simply slice the data geographically. The claim that East London is a global leader is academically worthless.

And perhaps Marmer’s real interest lies elsewhere – in mental health and spirituality. “I am approaching wholeness. We all are. Our consciousness, our body, our community, our ecosystem is approaching wholeness together,” he wrote on his personal blog.

So, as with so many of the claims made for the Miracle of Silicon Roundabout, things aren’t quite what they seem. The miracle is in the eye of the believer.

Zoomer Crow stressed that supporting Silicon Roundabout was an economic imperative for the UK. But recent words by No 10’s “Ambassador to Tech City” Ben Hammersley, rather put a dampener on this. Silicon Roundabout was not about profits, but having fun!

“I would like to measure our success by the happiness and joie de vivre of everyone who lives around there – not the baseline profit of some multinational companies who rent space there,” said Hammersley – echoing the post-profit mantra of Reg columnist Steve Bong.

And Songkick is a case in point. The news feed for live music fans has already been around for five years. Essentially, it duplicates what Facebook and MySpace provide fans, and earns its revenue as a ticket affiliate. But with demand outstripping supply, ticket giants such as Ticketmaster don’t need Songkick to eat into their margins. Asked if Ticketmaster will eat Songkick’s lunch, Songkick’s co-founder and CEO Ian Hogarth told the Guardian, ominously, that:

“Every day they release something that is closer to what Songkick looks like than to what Ticketmaster used to look like.”

It would have been in the Reithian tradition to highlight the precarious nature of the business, but instead we heard Crow drool that Silicon Roundabout is “vitally important to Britain’s economy in the future. If we build the future … the opportunities are endless.”

OK, nobody’s making any money in Shoreditch … but who IS making money out of the idea that web freedom is sacrosanct?

Also conspicuous by its absence was much of the political context.

The government’s industrial policy has shifted by stealth – moving towards the creation of conditions favourable to internet multinationals such as Google. The real impetus behind “web industry” and its high profile comes not from Shoreditch’s mayfly startups but primarily, in fact, from Google. The internet advertising giant – which produces no content, pays minimal taxes to the UK, and relies on using others’ content without paying – may yet succeed in having the law changed to decrease its liabilities and supply costs at the expense of British businesses. It has certainly succeeded in having the British law reviewed on the basis of a claim that we now know is fictional.

Google uses Shoreditch startups cleverly, as a beard – a diversionary tactic – sponsoring astroturf groups such as Coadec. Demands for special favours sound so much better coming from a youthful startup than they do from a multinational. The idea that handling or manipulating content, as opposed to creating it, is a good thing for the UK – that’s an idea that Google really wants to spread around.

The BBC could have explored all this, and even the close relationship between No 10 and Google, but chose not to or simply didn’t look far enough. This is not the first time we’ve noticed that Auntie has a reluctance to address technology bubbles – as demonstrated by this extraordinary edition of BBC 2’s Newsnight.

When unicorns have been sighted, the Best Bits get Censored.

Why could that be?

Well there’s no doubting Fi Glover’s enthusiasm. Nor that her partner is a senior executive at Google, called Rick Jones. His LinkedIn profile lists him as Industry Head of Retail at Google.

The BBC’s own conflict-of-interest guidelines Section 15.4.25 (Conflicts of Interest: Declaration of Personal Interests) state that:

The onus is on the journalist, content producer or on-air talent to let the BBC know if they (or, in certain circumstances, their family or close personal contacts) have any outside interests which could be perceived as a conflict of interest.

That seems clear enough. We called the BBC to ask if this onerous guideline can be suspended if the presenter is bicycling through miracles.

We’ll let you know.

A new report by intellectual property campaigners has again put the UK on the naughty step.

This year, as last year, activists list the UK alongside Brazil and Thailand as having the most “oppressive” copyright laws in the world. The report was published by an international NGO called Consumer International, but this delegates the work out to a Soros-funded group called A2K.

It’s certainly a bold point of view. How does it arrive at this conclusion? Helpfully, we have the founder’s testimony to aid us.

A2K Network’s world view is that “publicly owned” knowledge is good, but “privately owned” knowledge is bad. It considers this a binary, zero-sum choice – and it is also one that trumps all other considerations.

So, by A2K’s yardstick, it doesn’t matter if the knowledge is easily accessible to citizens. It doesn’t matter, either, if a wide range of cultural material is available: a plurality of goods. Or that all this material is accessible to us at a low cost. Private ownership is the most important factor in any consideration; private ownership is evil.

As founder Vera Franz explained last year:

“The access to knowledge (A2K) movement first came together in 2004 to respond to a crisis, namely the increasing imbalance between privatized knowledge (that which is controlled by the intellectual property rights holder) and the knowledge commons (that which is ‘owned’ by the public,”

[our emphasis]

And this leads to some interesting policy dogmas as a consequence. Any economic activity around “private knowledge” – even if it creates jobs, or makes a plurality of cultural good available – is viewed with suspicion. It’s a bad thing, we’re told.

Creative industries in the EU currently add some $560bn to GDP annually – the proportion in the UK is higher, given our history as a highly innovative country and the status of English as a global language. Core creative industries account for 6.2 per cent of GDP and 5.4 per cent of jobs. But all this is a hindrance on the spread of “public goods”.

In the OSI/A2K world view, the creative economy exists to deprive people of publicly owned goods. It is always conspiring against the public interest.

From this logic, we can see that the “Access 2 Knowledge” campaign isn’t really about access to knowledge, but ensuring knowledge is freed from those “private” property rights and remuneration rights, and any economic incentives that reward its production.

The word “private” is a dog-whistle word: designed to alert suspicions. But another way of expressing it is as an individual human right, enshrined in conventions.

If individual inventors and creators are weaker and poorer, then to the campaigners, this is simply collateral damage. It may even be used as evidence that the system is improving. Fewer private rights, see?

And this is clear from the report. Protections for inventors and creators cause a nation to drop in the “freedom” rankings. Take Malawi, which CI/A2K places ahead of the United Kingdom in its consumer freedom rankings.

Creating for free for the greater good – what could possibly go wrong?

Originally George Soros endorsed the view of his hero Karl Popper that open societies are underpinned by economic liberty. Soros saw markets, rather than central stage managing, as the best way to achieve this. And markets are founded on property rights.

If you take away economic freedom from individuals, Soros argued, society suffers. The Open Society Institute was founded to promote such ideas. It’s very different today.

Via A2K, his Open Society Institute campaigns for the removal of economic liberties, and the destruction of markets, arguing that this is necessary for the greater good. But for an organisation that devotes much of its time agonising about “sustainability”, this is a very odd position to take.

Long-term sustainability is entirely missing from its economic analysis. We know that intensive exploitation of a natural resource leads to short-term gains for consumers. A lake that’s full of fish today may attract lots of fishing boats, leading to falling prices and an abundance of fish on the market. But over-fishing may also deplete the ability of the resource to renew itself, destroying its value in the long-run.

In the same way, weakening economic incentives today, in order to make more stuff available for free, is equally short-sighted.

Digital technology has certainly changed a lot: the ability to effectively control copies of a work, for example. But it hasn’t changed basic human motivations or needs. It hasn’t added more hours of leisure time to a day. It hasn’t created a new magical currency that creators can conjure out of thin air. It hasn’t changed the idea that if we want more good stuff (as opposed to say, Wikipedia or home blooper videos), it’s a good idea to reward people.

What the campaigners find themselves pushing for isn’t “consumer rights”, it’s the destruction of the ability of creators’ and innovators’ ability to seek market-based remuneration. That’s now an anachronism, they argue.

If the incentives are removed, A2K would insist, people may still create, donating the fruits of their labour to the greater good out of altruism. If property rights are removed, as they advocate, they’ll have little choice over the matter anyway.

While collectivising rights naturally appeals to people who favour collective solutions anyway, what is strange is that normally stalwart defenders of markets forget about them.

To illustrate how far this “balance” argument has skewed public discourse, there’s a fascinating debate online between Google’s corporate lawyer William Patry and a libertarian lawyer called Andrei Mincov. It’s a feisty exchange, and both score some important points. Patry favours collectivisation and Mincov individual rights. But both essentially agree on the same thing: discussing IP in terms of a “balance” between consumers and creators is a false one.

As Mincov puts it: “The reason I respect Patry’s position so much is that he understands that the balance model is nonsensical.”

Copyright is simply an economic incentive, founded on a temporary exclusive property right. It’s a business stimulus, designed to create monetary exchanges and rewards. It has nothing to do with consumer rights.

The Soros institute’s Vera Franz even boasts about confusing the public:

“The biggest accomplishment is that [A2K] managed to turn a seemingly technocratic issue — copyright and patents — into a political one, that people from all walks of life started to care deeply about.”

They may care even more deeply if they realised that their offspring will not have the economic liberty to be rewarded for their talents, which we can still enjoy today.

Unfortunately for the creative industries, there’s money and prestige to be gained from promoting this baffling child-like view. The funds that cascade down from Soros’ Open Society Initiative into campaigns like A2K, or from the EU into NGOs like Consumer International, or even from UK taxpayers into quangos like Consumer Focus, all perpetuate the myth that there’s a ‘balance’: that we’ll be richer if creators are poorer, we’ll have a more-free society if we have fewer individual rights, and that in the long-term, destroying rewards for creators is both desirable and ‘sustainable’.

Replacing the false view of IP as some kind of “balance” with one of long-term ecology may ultimately be more useful to policymakers.

Bootnote

To follow the money trail behind IP Watchlist, start here.

The writer Toby Young tells a story about how the modern 100m race is run in primary schools. At the starting pistol, everyone runs like mad. At the 50m point, the fastest children stop and wait for the fatties to catch up. Then all the youngsters walk across the finishing line together, holding hands.

I have no idea if this is true – it may well be an urban myth. But the media class’s newly acquired enthusiasm for teaching all children computer programming is very similar.

Speaking as a former professional programmer myself, someone who twenty years ago was at the hairy arse end of the business working with C and Unix, I can say this sudden burst of interest is staggeringly ignorant and misplaced. It’s like wearing a charity ribbon to show how much you care. And it could actually end up doing far more harm than good.

I like the BBC’s tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones a lot, and by breaking and pursuing the Spinvox story he showed tons of courage and enterprise. More than I am permitted to say.

But like so many bien pensant media folk, Rory has been promoting the make-coding-compulsory campaign vigorously.

Recently he spent a day “learning to code” and blogged about it. This has earned him some stick from professional programmers on Twitter. For Rory, this criticism is “sniffiness” about “a newbie having a go”. Rory puts “real” coders in scare quotes as if there is no distinction between real and (presumably) fake programmers – whatever they are. Or fleetfooted children and gasping, wheezing, very non-athletic children.

But when you read Rory’s account of his day at the codeface, you can begin to see how the criticism is justified.

Firstly, Rory spent just a day on the job – a whole day. The course was taught by staff at an advertising agency. The day entailed tweaking some HTML and CSS – which he told the nation on Radio 4 are “programming languages”, resulting in “cries of pain” when the code didn’t work. Debugging involved clicking on each other’s websites. And from this Rory came away from his “day of coding exhilarated by the experience and with new insights into the development of our digital world”.

Overnight I received a press release from outsourcing provider Prism IT in which its MD Gary David Smith says it would be “criminal oversight” not to make programming classes compulsory.

“I’m from a Cheshire town that has witnessed its textile businesses go bust and all the mills be turned into apartments. I, for one, do not want to watch the same thing happen to British IT businesses,” he vows. So our overcrowded prisons will be even fuller with teachers who forgot about the programming module.

What’s wrong with this picture? Several things, actually.

Prizes for all

Firstly, and most obviously, computer programming is a meritocracy. Not everyone will get a prize, and nobody should get a prize just for trying. The more mediocre programmers that you employ on an IT project, the costlier the outcome will be.

This leads us to a very different educational policy goal right away. We don’t actually need a lot of people who know a bit about coding, but a few people who are extremely good at actually doing coding well. The better the elite are, the more productive and innovative our companies, and therefore the more our economy will benefit.

So people who will become members of this coding elite do not require a compulsory Noddy-level introduction to HTML. Economically, teaching everybody “a bit” of code is a waste of time. We’d be better off stimulating and challenging the young bright coders identified as such in schools.

This makes the compulsion part of the caper highly questionable. Some of the most brilliant programmers I know have no academic qualifications whatsoever – they’ve proved their mettle on the job. They were able to stimulate their intellectual curiosity by taking apart Psions or Acorns, and the Raspberry Pi is undoubtedly filling an important role here in a technical curriculum.

(There’s also an argument to be made that making anything compulsory kills the pleasure: it took me a long time before I could enjoy Charles Dickens after being taught it at school, but I won’t make that argument here. Instead I’ll assume for simplicity to that every teacher instils in their class the sheer wonder of learning, every time, and without fail.)

But there’s no place for this in the compulsion crusade, as this next Tweet illustrates:

Here Rory seems to justify the crusade because children are too fearful to think for themselves, and require official permission to try anything. They need the authority figure to appear, much like a therapist would, to tell them: “Relax, children. It’s OK. This is an angle bracket.”

Perhaps this top-down authoritarian view of the world is not a truly accurate one. If it is, then society faces worse problems than kids not being able write code. Much worse.

The other criticism levelled by professional coders against Rory’s Great Coding Adventure may be less contentious to a technical audience. What he “learned” isn’t real programming, and bears little relation to it.

Several years ago I explained that a lot of problems with the web are sociological: people were addressing system-level problems using presentational-level thinking and tools. What Rory learned on his day out is presentational code. That’s what HTML and CSS are. The rest of the LAMP stack remains out of sight, like the Wizard of Oz.

(Redefining systems engineering in terms of painting is just one of several related trends: we’ve seen innovation redefined as talking about things, as James Woudhuysen explained here. But that’s a discussion for another time.)

So the day at the ad agency no more qualifies Rory to speak about computer programming than painting a fence qualifies you to be an architect or a civil engineer. You can certainly learn a lot about paint in a day. And paintbrushes. How far this gives an insight into building a system, or how systems interact, though, is highly debatable.

Which brings us to what for me is the most curious and interesting part of the campaign. At some point in the conversation with a compulsory-coding enthusiast (and I’ve had several of these conversations) you get to this next stage.

“OK,” they’ll say, “I concede that it’s not for everyone, and not everyone needs to learn open-heart surgery. But knowing even a little about how things work can’t do any harm, can it?”

Memorising runic symbols

I agree, it would be wonderful if people knew how things work: like proteins, machines or economies. It would also be wonderful if they knew some history, and perhaps with some basic philosophy, to be able to think clearly and identify specious arguments. Or cook.

But time is not infinite, and the proposition requires us to make special time for compulsory coding, shoving other subjects out of the way. Let’s take this proposition on its merits.

I simply refer the reader at this to the point about presentation tools above. Knowing how to place a CSS element 20 pixels from the margin doesn’t teach you how computers or networks actually work.

I very much doubt that we’d have so much ill-advised internet policy if, for example, people realised that “The Internet” is not a thing but a network of networks.

And here we return to opportunity costs, and the puzzling notion that learning those presentation tools teaches you anything.

Two very odd beliefs lie at the heart the compulsory-coding crusade. One is that by staring at these mysterious runic symbols, children will acquire some deeper wisdom. This is not education, it is really the opposite, a belief in mystification. (Let’s call this the Church of the Angle Bracket – it’s a web thing.)

The other is that getting down and dirty with “coders” is one of life’s great experiences, one that everyone should experience. This is as deeply patronising as Toby Young’s 100m race, and it’s nothing more than Nerd Tourism.

“Come at look at the coders. Smell their sweat. Live with them for a day!” the brochure will read. Donchaknow? It’s the new gap year.