A while ago I joked that perhaps the RIAA had secretly recruited Charlie Nesson to be its court opponent. Everyone from Ray Beckerman at the “Recording Industry vs The People” blog to Nesson’s old pals at the Berkman Centre at Harvard had advised him to knock it off – or at least not pursue a crackpot defence. But when it comes to the technology utopians, all jokes come true eventually.

Nesson has achieved something I thought was completely impossible in 2009, and that’s to allow the US recording industry’s lobby group to paint itself in a sympathetic light. No longer must the RIAA explain why their biggest members are not using technology to make money for the people they represent. The Boston case allowed the four major labels to justify an enforcement policy against opponents who appeared compulsively dishonest, irrational, paranoid, and with an abnormal sense of entitlement.

Nice work, Charlie.

Nesson failed in his avowed mission “to put the record industry on trial”. He failed to show why disproportionate statutory damages are harmful, which could have had a lasting constitutional effect. He failed to paint the defendent as sympathetic, or “one of us”. He failed to demonstrate why copyright holders make lousy cops. He even had a Judge noted for her antipathy to the big record labels. In short, he ceded the moral high ground completely and utterly to the plaintiffs, the four major record labels. The labels’ five year campaign against end users is finally at a close, but Nesson’s performance leaves it looking (undeservedly) quite fragrant.

Read more at The Register

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 Conservatives this week promised to scrap the Government’s plans for 15 “eco towns” which will potentially house 100,000 people. These have been heralded as a new era in design, but you need to take a closer look at both the theory and practice to see the full, grim picture.

Firstly, it’s clear that “design goal” is enforcing patterns of behavior on people.

“What are the responsibilities we each must share in return for the freedoms we enjoy?” asked Town and Country Planning Association chief David Lock last year when introducing a report. Lock and his quango are advising the Government on the initiative. What does he mean? He means freedoms you previously enjoyed have been clawed back.

Almost every aspect of life in the eco towns is minutely regulated. The streets are too small to drive around, and if you must drive the mandatory speed limit is 15mph. Planners are particularly excited about installing eco toilets that don’t flush. Because flushing is “the worst thing ever devised by modern man,” (according to one advocate), compost toilets may be mandatory. You won’t have a choice.

We took a look at one candidate loo, and the description gives us a whiff of this fragrant, low carbon future:

“The dry fecal matter is captured by a built-in teflon-coated bowl with a turning mechanism and is ‘flushed’ into wheeled bins in the buildings’ basements. ‘Flushing’ uses sawdust, dispensed from the back of the toilet, instead of water.”

Lovely.

Residents will also be required to pay a fine, mooted at around £2 ($4), each time they leave the town.

So these are really detention centres – with behaviour set down in advance by the Carbon Cult. Residents will not be able to vote on whether they want to have flushing toilets.

Another clue that they’re about punishment emerged this spring, when ministers described them as “healthy towns”. The eco-camps will aim to tackle obesity by encouraging lots of walking about, said Health minister Alan Johnson in April.

And being confined to such a grim existence means the end of social mobility. Forget about advancing along the precarious housing ladder. The houses will be far more expensive than they should be, because they’re saddled with fashionable but useless totems of Greenery such as “micro generation” turbines, that can’t even power a light bulb.

Nowhere in the glossy brochures that describe “what makes eco towns different” is employment mentioned. The new settlements are remote – several are on disused airfields – and “will become the eco-slums of the future if they are built without regards to where residents can get jobs or training,” the LGA’s Simon Milton has predicted.

Low resource use developments don’t have to be miserable – but with the eco towns, this is the whole point. Marry old-fashioned paternalism (where the proles should be grateful for what they get ) to the Carbon Cult’s misanthropy (where being alive is a sin) and what else do you get, but a boring, smelly slum? This time, by design.

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…

Demanding strict state-controlled energy rationing, Pullman says in a new book:

“This is a crisis as big as war and you couldn’t trade your ration book in the wartime. You were allowed three ounces of butter a week, or whatever, and that was it. And this is what it should be like with carbon. None of this carbon trading. We should have a fixed limit and if you use it all up in October, then tough, you shiver for the rest of the year.”

Sounds fun. But then Pullman reveals why he’s wearing a rose-tinted spyglass:

“My childhood was formed during the austerity years after the war. So I still feel influenced by that. Curious, isn’t it, how we were much healthier as a nation after the war when the rationing was on?”

Ah, yes. Those glory days when tuberculosis and syphilis were rampant, penicillin was rare, very few males over the age of 30 still had their own teeth, and life expectancy was ten years shorter than it is today!

Preventing people from turning their own heaters on in cold weather would result in the needless deaths of the old and vulnerable. But that isn’t grim enough for Pullman, who wishes a new menace upon us: killer carnivores.

“If the polar bears leapt from the pages of my fiction into reality and saw what was happening, they’d eat us. Eat as many of us as quickly as they possibly could. And good luck to them.”

Pullman’s nasty brand of misanthropy is all in the name of saving us from “global warming”, of course. His interview appears in a grim new book called Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth?, a collection of interviews with wealthy B-list and C-list celebs. It’s a sort of 21st century “Duck and Cover“, but instead of singing our way through a nuclear apocalypse, this show us ways of enduring self-inflicted carbon austerity. It’s co-authored by policy wonk Andrew Simms, who has done much to encourage the idea that we’re in a wartime situation, which (naturally) calls for wartime state controls and general all-round misery.

Pullman prides himself on his rationality, but there are a few facts that stand between him and a coherent argument.

Firstly, polar bears are really doing fine – proving their resilience as a species. According to the World Wildlife Fund, amongst 14 of the 20 polar bear populations worldwide it surveyed, ten populations are stable, two are increasing, and two are decreasing. One of the two diminishing populations, in Baffin Bay, is declining because the air is getting colder – not warmer. Polar bears do face threats from pollution (which the carbon cultists have shoved off the environmental agenda), but they seem to take warming in their loping stride.

Secondly, even NASA is reluctant to attribute a warmer Arctic to “Global Warming”. It’s a local, regional phenomenon, with the current favourite theory being changes in the circulation of ocean currents. A peer-reviewed study expectedly shortly explains the “dramatic” (15 per cent) ice loss this summer to the fact that the Arctic had around 15 per cent less cloud cover this summer. So much for that panic, then.

The prominence of polar bears in the news doesn’t tell us much about global warming – but rather more about a news media that’s given up trying to understand the world, and prefers to fantasise about it (and scare us) instead.

As David Whitehouse explained recently, the Earth’s temperatures have been stable for the past decade:

“It’s not a viewpoint or a sceptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased,” he wrote.

Thirdly, there’s Pullman’s insistence that the idea of human-induced climate catastrophe is somehow the voice of radical dissent. But it’s not, since anthropogenic global warming is the well-funded mainstream view today (as advocates never cease of reminding us). Pullman compares the climate scaremongers to Old Testament prophets… “and the struggle that the climate-change prophets have had to undertake to get their message heard”.

Some struggle. The doomsday view has huge institutional backing – the UN and NASA, for example – and the top-down science budgets follow. Greenpeace alone has spent $2bn on lobbying in the past decade, yet still presents itself as a ragtag outsider outfit.

You’re left wondering why this professional atheist has spent so much time constructing a religion for himself – it’s quite medieval. And how weird that an author of epic fantasy novels has constructed his greatest fantasy to use in everyday life.

Footnote: The Sunday Telegraph, which has an excerpt of “Shiver And Perish” here, bills Pullman’s worldview as championing “a new brand of environmentalism that offers us all hope”.

Proof that even on posh newspapers, sometimes sub-editors don’t read the stories.

Misery will be compulsory, if top rockers Radiohead have their way. The band have thrown their weight behind a “World War 2″-style programme of austerity measures: including restrictions on behaviour, and higher taxes.

Last week, two newspaper columnists called for a return to the kind of social coercion only ever seen before in wartime. It’s all for the sake of “the environment”, but as we’ll see – it’s a very peculiar and selective version of environmentalism.

Singer Thom Yorke told The Observer:

Unless you have laws in place, nothing’s going to happen…

Nothing of this is going to be voluntary. [sic] It’s a bizarre form of rationing that we’re all going to have to accept, just like people did in the Second World War.”

It’s the War On CO2, of course, and Radiohead will be doing “their bit”.

Yorke said the band is examining the option of touring by sea – although it would have to be a cargo vessel. A passenger liner, such as the Queen Mary, said Yorke, emits too much carbon.

(And it’s probably too comfortable.)

It’s strange to see how the anti-growth Carbon Cult has successfully pushed more immediate – and very real – environmental crimes such as pollution right off the agenda. The CO2 Cultists (think Wikipedians) now back hazardous alternatives to today’s products or services. These alternatives might harm people – but they lower the sinful emissions of CO2.

For example: from next month, mercury is being reintroduced into the British home. Mercury-based light bulbs will be compulsory within three years: but these CFLs (compact fluorescent light bulbs) are not only more expensive than traditional light bulbs, but pose all kinds of safety problems regarding their disposal. Break one, and you have a small biohazard in your kitchen.

In a similar spirit, but on a much larger scale, the nuclear industry has now been rehabilitated as “green” – after 20 years as a social pariah. The new reactors have got much better, but the problem of environmental disposal of the by-products remains the same: Dig a Hole… and Pray.

In each case, human health is put at a rationally-quantifiable risk, but us humans are necessary casualties in this latest “war”. How could this be?

I’ve noticed two curious aspects to this “war” which might help shed some light on it (no pun intended). I have no idea which is the more significant – and perhaps you can help?

The first is the underlying assumption that resources are finite. This has a corollary: which is that these limited resources are close to exhaustion, and therefore… the end times are a’comin’!

In fact, “resources” are anything we can usefully make stuff with. Cavemen knew nothing of naphtha crackers, or how to make anthracite. Spectrum scarcity was not a concern for Newton. Today, we’ve barely begun to tap into the potential of fusion, or geothermal energy.

So it’s odd to hear someone urging us to turn down the heating – and get accustomed to shivering miserably in our cold homes – when we’re sitting on a global furnace. Fossil fuels may be exhausted, but what got us here was a little inventiveness, and specifically some sound applied materials science.

Our limitations, therefore, are not of a material nature: our ingenuity, resourcefulness, and courage are our most precious resources.

The second observation is the underlying belief that somehow mankind is a stain on the planet – which would be better off without us. Quite literally, we don’t deserve to walk this Earth, and there’s some divine retribution taking place.

This belief manifests itself in the idea that any pleasure or material comfort is sinful, and this is fundamentally a Puritan notion. The CO2 Cult is strongest in northern Europe and the United States, and almost completely ignored in the rest of the world. Coincidence? Neither Catholicism nor Islam teach the idea that God hates us – quite the reverse – so perhaps it’s no coincidence at all.

Put the two together and you have consequences which include an eagerness to chivvy, bully, and coerce us, and Malthusianism: which is really a thinly-disguised racism. The “models” and “consensus” to support this are almost an accidental by-product.

(As Reg readers know, you can make a computer model say whatever you want it to say. Here’s a good example of this in action.)

So my conundrum can be expressed like this. Are these people miserable because they’re poorly informed? Or are they poorly informed because they want to be miserable?

Of course, it could be that Radiohead are brilliant businessmen. In urging us on into a monochrome world of World War 2-style rationing, austerity, and existential angst, they’re simply creating the optimal market conditions for their own product.

Liblicense is a project that Creative Commons hopes to integrate with MIT Media Lab’s OLPC, or One Laptop Per Child initiative. That’s the rubbishy sub-notebook designed for developing countries, that developing countries don’t seem to want very much. (Shockingly, the ungrateful recipients seem to prefer real computers).

The genius of the move is that instead of needing to hire shifty lawyers to bamboozle artists out of the right to be paid, Creative Commons makes the process not only voluntary, but automated, too. Liblicense will greatly ease the process of assigning a Creative Commons license to creative material straight from the desktop.

“Imagine finding a brilliant poem on a blog through Liferea you can base a video or song off of,” burbles one of the developers Scott Shawcroft.

Now imagine making a million-selling hit from one of these poems, and not having to pay the original author a penny. Cute, isn’t it?

The system depends on ignorance, of course. Today, there’s nothing to stop poets posting brilliant poems to the internet while retaining their full rights. There’s nothing to stop you reading them. And there’s nothing to stop songwriters “basing” songs from these poems – although if they “base” a hit by plagiarizing the material a little too obviously, they can expect a lawsuit. The system works very well, although it’s loaded heavily in favour of plagiarizers. Getting someone to bat on your behalf if you’re up against a Bono isn’t easy, and is harder still if you’re in Ethiopia or Mali.

But up pops Creative Commons, with a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist – with a solution that generates its own byzantine technical problems that you’d have to be a lawyer or a nerd to love.

(Not surprisingly, lawyers and nerds are the two groups keenest on this innovation).

The problem is, Commonistas are so evangelical about their crusade, they often neglect to explain the implications fully. If you, as a creator, forget to stick an NC (or “non-commercial use only”) attribute on your license, you formally forgo any chance of being paid, except by kind strangers throwing a penny into your begging bowl. Adding the NC attribute is greatly frowned-upon by ‘The Movement’, which calls it “very rarely justifiable on economic or ideological grounds”. However, that’s only because, their helpful explanation points out, ” … the decision to give away your work for free already eliminates most large scale commercial uses.

Guess whether that particular wealth-warning will be slapped on the side of an OLPC notebook?

Here’s an example of the confusion generated by these anti-copyright crusaders. When I drew attention to these problems two years ago, an agitated songwriter wrote in asking how a couple of songs he’d released under a CC license could be extracted from the license. He couldn’t do it, however, because he discovered the licenses are irrevocable. Oops.

(One can imagine situations where CC may actually be useful – such as on educational material, or reference material such as The Highway Code. But when it comes to works of art, the Commonistas are as naive as a hippo wandering into a minefield).

Much of Web 2.0 involves what’s called “sharecropping”, with aggregators profiting from the selfless unpaid labour of volunteers. The 1-Click Colonialism™ promised by the LibLicense/OLPC integration seems to use new technology to take us even further into the past.

In Silicon Valley this year, “collective intelligence” is the mandatory piece of psycho-babble necessary to open a Venture Capitalist’s cheque book. Surowiecki’s faith in prediction markets appears unshakeable. Writing in Slate three years ago, in an attempt to save Admiral Poindexter’s “Terror Casino” – punters were invited to bet on the probability of state leaders being assassinated, for example – Mystic Jim begged for understanding:

“Even when traders are not necessarily experts, their collective judgment is often remarkably accurate because markets are efficient at uncovering and aggregating diverse pieces of information. And it doesn’t seem to matter much what markets are being used to predict.”

“Whether the outcome depends on irrational actors (box-office results), animal behavior (horse races), a blend of irrational and rational motives (elections), or a seemingly random interaction between weather and soil (orange-juice crops), market predictions often outperform those of even the best-informed expert. Given that, it’s reasonable to think a prediction market might add something to our understanding of the future of the Middle East.”

A heart-warming fable, then, for a population robbed of their pensions, and beset by uncertainty after the dot.com bubble. Suroweicki failed to mention however that experts are regularly outperformed by chimps, or dartboards – but no one talks about “The Wisdom of Chimps”.

This week however the people spoke – and the markets failed.

In the wake of the Democratic Party’s capture of the Senate this week, we took a look at how well they performed at predicting the result.

Here’s the result from TradeSports.com:

Here it is in more detail:

And here’s the one from NewsFutures:

When the people really did decide to make a collective decision, the predictive “collective intelligence” of the crowd failed to foresee it. Awkward humans – especially those elusive humans who don’t go near the web – keep getting in the way.

What next?

It’s obvious. We need to cull the population so the result meets the market-markers prediction. That way, the facts will eventually fit with the Maoists’ theory.

How utopianism becomes misanthropy… becomes Malthusianism