Calder invites us to have a giggle, but really it’s not a bad list at all, and compared with the (cough) ‘futurists’ who have come and gone since, Calder and the participants did a good job. Alvin Toffler was repackaging these ideas, particularly mass amateurisation, many years later. As are thousands of Web 2.0 consultants today.

Read more at The Register

Choruss won’t ultimately be in the retail or service business, Griffin told us in Washington DC today – but it may provide an “umbrella” for managed service companies such as Playlouder MSP, the technology partner for the suspended Virgin Unlimited music service. “We’re not in the business of distribution,” he said. Griffin was also on a panel at the biennial World Copyright Summit, organised by CISAC, the global organisation for collective rights management societies.

Griffin says this year’s phase of Choruss is designed to experiment with pricing. Different colleges will get different pricing schemes.

“The plan is to use next school year to run tests and experiments,” he said. Only after the scheme has been running will an assessment be possible – but Griffin told Summit delegates that, “We’ve had students tell us it’s worth $20 a month – to share what they want to share.”

The fact that such large numbers have volunteered to pay for a P2P service defies the conventional music industry wisdom that the only way to compete with the pirates is with free offerings. It also shows how much Choruss has evolved since it first broke the surface last April, when talk was of opting students in automatically, in return for a “coventant not to sue”.

Many of El Reg’s criticisms from last year have been taken on board it seems. So instead of being herded like sheep into a compulsory scheme, Choruss envisages voluntary, paying customers.

No tax

“Here’s a market some have written off, and said they’re not willing to pay. People have voted with their own money: The student representatives allocated their own money to pay for music. They don’t want to pay for Music the Product, but Music the Service,” said Griffin.

The most significant aspect of a voluntary, pay-for service is that it spikes the argument that licensing networks need involve is a “music tax”. Griffin said the project should be regarded as an experiment to help gauge pricing.

“As an industry, we don’t do much testing, or experimenting, and learn at what price point someone would choose to participate in this system.

Phase Two of Choruss involves rolling out legal P2P to ISPs across the land.

“We can [soon] approach ISPs with metrics in hand, not speculation.”

“We’re not arriving to Hoover information off the student networks, that would violate their privacy. We need to ensure academic self-administration is respected.”

It’s hard to classify Choruss, and Griffin declined our invitation to stick a label on it. It’s a clearing house, of sorts. But Griffin’s sponsor Warner Music plans to spin it out with joint ownership by stakeholders – something that would need to cross antitrust hurdles.

Playlouder MSP boss Paul Sanders said attitudes had moved forward radically in the last 18 months.

“The rights holding community is now willing to engage with the ISP community. Only two years ago, we’d approach a major label and explain the unlimited model. They’d go, ‘fine but our wholesale price is 55p per track.’ No one’s ever going to start to have a sensible commecial conversation if that’s the premise.”

He predicted the debate would become more sophisticated as paid-for services were better understood.

“ISPs want a proper, professionally managed service that they can hold accountable for it. That’s not the same as a free-for-all. They want the grey area content [eg, mashups, live recordings, and bootlegs], but in a managed environment. A lot of these questions recede as the managed and invested-in services emerge.”

Griffin had one interesting observation that was a side-effect of the Net Neutrality fuss.

“How dare you [ISPs] speed some packets up, slow some down, but claim you didn’t know what was in them. They no longer deserve the Safe Harbour exemption. To claim otherwise would be blind ignorance. ”

“Let’s toss it out.”

Now that will drive the freetards completely nuts.

Has Charlie Nesson been at the magic mushrooms again? The hippy head of the Berkman Center, the influential New Age techno-utopian think tank that’s attached to Harvard Law School, wants to enlist Radiohead in his fight against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Nesson, a long-time opponent of creator’s digital rights, is contesting the statutory damages in infringement cases. A Boston graduate student called Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to reach a settlement with the record companies after being sued for copyright infringement, having shared files using the Kazaa P2P network back in 2003. Nesson’s strategy in Sony BMG Music vs Tenenbaum is to put the music business on trial. That’s fine – suing freetards isn’t going to stop P2P file sharing and it isn’t going to save the music business. It only adds to the anoraks’ persecution complex. Even the RIAA has now concluded it’s the wrong strategy.

But is Nesson the man to fight The Man? Nesson’s novel argument is that unlicensed P2P file sharing is “fair use”. Even his Harvard students, who are doing the work for him, think that’s stretch. And maybe he doesn’t want to win, just preen about in front of a camera. He wants it televised, he Arse Technica, because:

“It’s like a reality show that we can all be participants in as we go along… It’s an incredibly powerful expansion of the idea of teaching.”

Even long-time RIAA opponents such as Ray Beckerman of the Recording Industry vs. The People have expressed their doubts about Nesson’s random and bizarre behaviour. As the stoner ramblings on his blog suggest, Nesson’s all over the place: leaking private correspondence from colleagues, and insisting that unlicensed P2P is “fair use”.

(Beckerman is not pleased that Harvard waited five years to counter-attack the RIAA, and then only intervened in the case of one individual. Sitting on a cash pile of $36.9bn [*], Harvard is richer than the annual revenue of every record company in the world put together).

Paul Resnikoff at Digital Music News describes how the case “… has now slumped into a sewer of leaked correspondence, improper procedures, unprofessionalism, and several bouts of seeming insanity. Nesson has been pushing to qualify P2P-based downloading (and uploading) as fair use, something most experts disagree with. These experts, including Lawrence Lessig, privately expressed their disagreement with Nesson, only to have their correspondence spilled online – by Nesson himself.”

After Nesson was recently obliged to apologise to the Court, Beckerman concluded that the only value of the case is entertainment.

The bizarro assertions continue.

Nesson wants to depose Brian Message of ATC Management – one of Radiohead’s management companies – and chairman of the Music Managers Forum.

“He is leading a wonderful group of U.K. artists who are coming out in favor of the idea of non-commercial sharing among music fans.”

Are you sure, Charlie?

Brian Message – who also manages Kate Nash – is behind the new (FAC) Featured Artists Coalition which opposes copyright term extension in Europe. But claiming that Radiohead are file sharing freetards is a mistake.

The band looks after its finances professionally and cleverly used a publicity gimmick – preview the new album In Rainbows – to send the physical recording to the top of the charts. The band asserted full rights over the master recording – which was issued by an indie label, XL Recordings. Radiohead have never endorsed non-commercial sharing, although like many established, successful artists they can afford to turn a blind eye, if it gains them more fans.

The band described it as a “one-off response to a particular situation” and said it won’t repeat the experiment. Read more about that marketing strategy here. ®

*Bootnote: Harvard is as good as managing its money as Berkman law professors are at fighting lawsuits. By some estimates, $8bn has been wiped off the value of the endowment fund since the last annual report.

(Griffin has spent a decade campaigning to “monetize the anarchy” of digital music – see our 2004 interview).

So Choruss brings together the potential parties, then acts as a kind of clearing house for royalties. We understand that this has been the biggest challenge to date, and why so many other details are sketchy: A new royalty agency would be a de facto monopoly, and it would need to submit to the rules (and rates) set by the Library of Congress’ Copyright Office, which currently sets the rates for cable, satellite, and internet radio, for example.

Although Choruss is being incubated at Warner Music, the plan is to spin the venture out as an independent nonprofit entity. Jim Griffin, the force behind the initiative, is President, with WMG’s current Senior VP for Marketing & Strategy (and former Jupiter and Gartner analyst) Jack Foreman involved.

Griffin said universities had approached him last year, unhappy with the students’ exposure to big-label infringement litigation, and with the service students were being opted into for DRM music. He then found a parent that would support exploration in the shape of Warner Music.

As with today’s situation, subscription fees would be deducted from students’ general fees. Participating universities would receive a pledge not to be sued by the RIAA or its members. But would students even notice?

While dealing with DMCA notices is a pain for the University networks – who would dearly love to banish BitTorrent software and 24×7 freetards from their networks – students have as much chance of feeling real RIAA pain today as they do of being struck by lightening. RIAA litigation causes lots of press, and gives professors a chance to pose as victims, but its “success” can be gauged by the number of unlicensed downloads – a number that continues to climb. So a “covenant not to sue” has little meaning for end users, who take their chances by the millions today.

The two other significant drawbacks are that a) there’s no revenue for software developers or network innovators to create a better mousetrap, and b) that the end “users” aren’t actually consumers … or “users” of any Chorus LLC software or service. Because there won’t be any. So students would continue to take their chances on the Darknets, using torrent trackers and existing P2P services.

This won’t exactly encourage innovation. Today’s bandwidth-hogging applications (designed with the RIAA in mind) would no longer be necessary in a lawsuit-free environment. Better software for next-generation music sharing would naturally take the place of LimeWire and BitTorrent – these could permit caching, for example. So without replacements, networks would continue to support applications that would continue to cause havoc – a bizarre state of affairs, and one in which the cat-and-mouse game of traffic shaping and evasion would continue. That’s like imposing a curfew long after the war is over and the bombing has stopped.

Choruss’ ambition to be a digital-rights clearing house and set a de facto rate for songwriters is also unlikely to meet with much enthusiasm from representatives of songwriters and composers. A rate that suits the big record companies is unlikely to suit the rest of the industry.

Is Choruss-on-campus a model that the rest of us can live with? Hardly, since what makes it attractive to universities is the very same factor that repels others: Students are opted in, and money is extracted from their fees, without any choice. Outside of North Korea, there’s no chance of opting the population into a new taxation regime.

But as a one-off solution for students, Choruss has to be an improvement on today’s stalemate. Who but the mentally ill would want to continue to wage a war that is no longer necessary?

Putting the price of alcohol up to a minimum of 40p a unit would keep 41,000 people a year out of hospital, save the NHS £116m a year, and avoid 12,400 cases of unemployment, a report from Sheffield University claimed last week. These appear to be remarkably precise predictions. The government used the report – widely quoted in the press – to justify higher duties and greater regulation of the sale of alcohol. Yet on close examination, the report appears to be a prime example of “policy-based evidence making”.

The blockbuster report, from Sheffield University’s Section of Public Health, is in two major parts: a review of evidence, and a statistical model, totalling over 500 pages. Researchers examined the effects of alcohol pricing and alcohol promotion (and advertising) on three areas: consumption, public health and crime. I won’t cover the latter, because these proposals were dropped before the Queen’s Speech, but it is evident from the amount of time the Sheffield researchers devoted to this, that this was a legislative priority. Academia marches in lockstep with its financial benefactor – in this case, of course, the Department of Health.

Read more at The Register

Everyone’s a prankster these days – it’s all in the name of art.

On Monday a former Irish loyalist hitman was sentenced to 16 years in prison for the attempted murder of senior Sinn Fein leaders. Michael Stone had burst into the Belfast Assembly with nail bombs, a garotte, an axe and knives, but was quickly wrestled to the ground. In court, Stone claimed the event had been a piece of “performance art”.

Stone’s paintings had exhibited at Belfast Engine Room Gallery. In court, Stone was defiant: “Make art, not war,” he told an unimpressed judge.

But Stone’s not alone. Last week two art school students in the Netherlands released a software prank. They developed a Firefox brower plug-in that redirected Amazon.com surfers to unlicensed versions of the same material on P2P site Pirate Bay. The Pirates of the Amazon (geddit?) plug-in was quickly withdrawn after Amazon.com lawyers got in touch with the students’ ISP.

Florian Cramer is course director of the Media Design program at Piet Zwart, a faculty of the Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool (art school) of Rotterdam, from which the prank plug-in was launched. Cramer was somewhat less defiant than Michael Stone. Rather than basking in the publicity, he wrote an extended whinge on the Nettime mailing list:

“With the take down notice from Amazon.com, our students have been scared away from pursuing their art, research and learning in our institute,” he bleated. “We do not want a culture in which students have to preemptively censor their study because their work confronts culture with controversial and challenging issues.”

“The Commentards are being cruel”

Unappreciated: Cramer

Cramer piled on the self-congratulation (“apart from its humorous value and cleverness, the project is interesting on many levels and layers,” he boasted) – then turned to full blown self-pity, as he discovered that not everyone shared the same exalted opinion of the stunt as he did.

“What is perhaps more disturbing, however, are the openly hostile and aggressive internet user comments in blogs and on digg.com.”

What an ungrateful world.

“Unlike in a comparable situation only a couple of years ago, the majority of commentators failed to see the highly parodistic and artistic nature of Pirates of the Amazon.”

How could the world fail to laud the brilliance of the endeavour? Cramer had a theory.

“What the “Pirates of the Amazon” revealed,” he suggested, “is that even the p2p file-sharing community is happy with its niche, and eager to keep it like that. Amazon and The Pirate Bay are two parallel systems that don’t bother each other very much (although their media content is quite similar). In interfacing the two sites, the plug-in violated a taboo for Amazon.com as much for the P2P ‘pirate’ community which was afraid that, through the plug-in, their niche could be discovered by the mainstream and consequently shut down.”

Perhaps. But there may be other explanations.

The Belfast judge described Michael Stone’s claim to be staging a performance art event as “not believable”. Similarly, it could be the case that as artistic pranks go, the Pirates of the Amazon simply wasn’t very good.

A good prank reveals truths which are otherwise hidden. But P2P File Sharing is hardly a secret. It dominates the media, “mainstream” or otherwise, and the practice is widespread.

63 per cent of British internet users download unlicensed music – and the average amount downloaded is 53 tracks per months. People are refreshingly honest about why they download – it saves paying money for music – and surprisingly keen to become legitimate, paying for a decent P2P service.

A good prank doesn’t preach to the converted, either.

Lousy comedians blame their audience for being stupid; lousy politicians blame the voters. But Cramer can’t countenance the possibility that his work was not striking, original or subversive. He has to conclude that the audience secretly shares Cramer’s high opinion of his students work, but it won’t say so.

Faced with a prank that revealed no new power structures at all, and didn’t tell anyone anything they didn’t already know, Cramer resorts to “inventing” a truth hitherto unrevealed.

So Cramer’s reaction ranges from persecution, via self-pity, to self-deception. (Persecution myths are rife amongst the anti-creator crowd, I’ve discovered. Perhaps these are required to sustain the Freetards’ sense of moral superiority?)

Since Duchamp’s urinal, a great deal of modern art has been a “prank” against the art establishment. Maybe that’s why now, state-funded “pranks” like the Pirates plug-in – designed to preach to the converted – feel so stale. Or it could be Cramer’s own deeply conservative (and misanthropic) outlook. By design, the course ensures his students fulfill a narrow set of ideological obligations – all of which are de rigeur in modern media theory.

And that, we must conclude, is exactly what the modern state requires from its “radicals”. Rather than being outside the tent pissing in, they’re quite content to be on the inside, launching Firefox browser plug-ins outwards. Repressive regimes once persecuted dissidents – now they merely need give them cushy jobs on Media Theory courses to render them useless. They’ll do the rest.

And such is the fate of state-funded art – prank or otherwise.

The Society’s chief executive Dr Richard Pike told us that while the syllabus and text books covered a broad range of scientific subjects, the exams only touched on a small subset of these. As an example, the Society notes that one examination only asked questions about length, volume, mass and temperature, while the text book covered electrical current and resistance, pressure, rotational moment, and deriving.

The most taxing maths in the examination required students to find the mid point between 4 and 8 – by reading off a figure in an adjacent column.

The snail question was set for tiers 3-6 in Key Stage 3.

Other examples include these multiple choice questions:

Why is copper used for wires in a circuit?

• Copper does not stick to a magnet
• Copper is a brown metal
• Copper is a good conductor of electricity
• Copper if a good conductor of heat

In very cold weather a mixture of salt and sand is spread on roads. Why?

• Salt makes the roads white
• Salt makes water freeze
• Salt makes ice melt
• Sand dissolves in water
• Sand increases friction between car tyres and the road
• Sand makes water freeze

And this one, inspired by Father Ted, perhaps:

Some stars are bigger than the Sun but they look smaller. Why do they look smaller than the Sun?

• They are brighter than the Sun
• They are further away than the Sun
• They are the same colour as the Sun
• They are nearer than the Sun

That foxes me every time.

But seriously – who benefits most in the future from a population too dumb to distinguish between science and pseudoscience? Answers on a solar-powered snail, please.

Carbon Cult sickos are under fire for an interactive website that tells children they should die because they emit CO2.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Planet Slayer” site invites young children to take a “greenhouse gas quiz”, asking them “how big a pig are you?”. At the end of the quiz, the pig explodes, and ABC tells children at “what age you should die at so you don’t use more than your fair share of Earth’s resources!”

It’s one of a number of interactive features that “Get the dirt on greenhouse without the guilt trips. No lectures. No multinational-bashing (well, maybe a little…). Just fun and games and the answers to all your enviro-dilemas,” ABC claims.

The site is aimed at 9-year olds. However even a “virtuous” rating (e.g. not owning a car and recycling) is outweighed by eating meat, or spending an average Aussie income – with the result that many 9-year olds are being told they’ve already outstayed their environmentally-compliant stay on the planet.

“Do you think it’s appropriate that the ABC … depict people who are average Australians as massive overweight ugly pigs, oozing slime from their mouths, and then to have these pigs blow up in a mass of blood and guts?” asked Senator Mitch Fifield in the Herald-Sun.

The state-sponsored broadcaster (why is that not a surprise?) defended the morbid quiz, with ABC managing director Mark Scott insisting “the site was not designed to offend certain quarters of the community but to engage children in environmental issues.”

Which is eco-speak for frighten them witless. However, as the excellent science blog Watts Up With That points out, the site clearly breaches Australian broadcasting guidelines on “harmful or disturbing” content.

Meanwhile, the site’s designers are revelling in the controversy:

“Thank God for outraged senators – you can’t buy publicity like that,” PlanetSlayer’s “creative director” Bernie Hobbs crowed to the New York Post.

So how, according to ABC, does one appease the vengeful Death God, Gaia?

Your reporter doesn’t own a car, lives in an apartment, and discovered he should have died aged 3.9 years. After a couple of run-throughs, it appears that eating meat is a major factor. But this is overshadowed by claiming a) very low earnings and b) spending what remains of one’s pittance on organic food and “ethical investments”.

Whether that’s a life worth living is another question entirely. But the message from the Carbon Cult seems pretty clear: humans are a stain on the planet and should die; yet should they be permitted to live, they should live a life that’s as miserable as possible.

When you fill in the environmentally-correct answers – something extraordinary happens. Look -

A negative carbon rating is achieved, the pig flies up to heaven…

The government is hiring Byron to tout a “Live Consultation”, soliciting views on how the internet might affect children. That’s your taxes at work, Part One.

How odd then that the BBC, while making deep cuts in real current affairs coverage, is investing heavily in “virtual worlds”. That’s your taxes at work, Part Two.

Yesterday one of the Beeb’s champions of Sadville hit back.

“The social footprint of kids is diminishing year on year,” said Marc Goodchild [real name]. “They are allowed less distance from the front gate all the time.” The Duke of Sadville, the BBC reports, defended virtual worlds by saying that they allowed children to play with their existing friends, “and have some of those shared experiences they would otherwise miss”.

Experiences such as… being attacked by a squadron of flying penises.

That’s great news for pervs everywhere, who’ll no doubt be renewing their TV licenses with renewed enthusiasm, while looking forward to seeking out children in their (now) virtual allergy isolation wards.

But we merely note the observation that at the BBC today, as if you hadn’t already noticed, that the answer to every question is “Technology!!!“. Now what are the odds of some bright spark in the Cabinet Office engaging in some “joined-up” thinking – and actually noticing the contradiction?