Now we know why what was widely called the “Google Review” into intellectual property came to the conclusions it did. And we have it from the horse’s mouth: not Google, but Professor Ian Hargreaves and his team at the IPO, who “guided” him.

If you recall, a year ago the Prime Minister David Cameron revealed that the Google founders that they could never have founded Google in the UK, because of its copyright law. Even Google could never substantiate the quote, or provide a citation. Rather than getting a public inquiry, and shaming, of a foreign corporation for misleading our PM so badly – Google got the government to explore how the law could be altered… to benefit companies like Google.

So the review began with a mistake, and its guiding philosophical idea was a naive, simplified, and fantastical version of the world. This set the tone for what followed.

Hargreaves came across as wry and likeable, as he always does, but his words revealed the bien pensant view of the internet, its potential, and its commercial challenges.

“Politicians are afraid to address [copyright] because of fear of damaging the entirely legitimate and desirable wishes of musicians and other creators to have a fair level of protection, so they can make a return on their own work. I do disagree how this machinery has spread, and become an undesirable regulatory restraint on the internet [our emphasis] and the internet’s effects on the economy“

He continued:

“That is a very, very big risk for an advanced knowledge economy like the UK to run. In my view we can’t afford to run it. It’s urgent; the government has to take the action I have recommended it take”.

The sky was falling, he’d felt a piece of it land on his head. And he hammered home this urgency in his conclusion, in case you missed it:

“The digital revolution is not one-third complete, based on the penetration of the internet around the world. If we don’t ‘Get with the Pace‘, we will pay a significant economic price.”

There are several flaws to this approach.
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To Manchester, where I had been invited to liven up a Conservative Conference Fringe discussion on digital policy…

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The BBC has a real problem with social media. It’s delighted when something new appears. It slips into the patrician role that comes naturally to broadcasters – and especially the BBC. It can express childlike wonderment – Wow! – at something new and amazing. Getting beyond that though, is where the trouble starts.

Perhaps the BBC is haunted by the idea that people simply get on and use new communication tools without “Auntie’s” assistance. The viewers typically also have much more realistic expectations of the technology than, say, pundits. So we keep hearing wonderment, and advice on how get online, a bit like a slightly mad primary school teacher.

The gears really grind when something more critical is required. This week the corporation’s news flagship Newsnight – one of the last remaining TV programmes for grown-ups – asked if there was a “tech bubble”. Investment is pouring into social media startups. Would it all end in tears?

Yet having the posed the question, the report and discussion that followed were designed to dispel understanding and analysis. Before long it had turned into a gathering of the Unicorn Preservation Society. We were even told that only people who might want to describe the web investments a “bubble” were self-serving opportunists.

Bad people, in other words, thinking bad thoughts.
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Prime Minister David Cameron has cast his gaze east across to Essex – and dreams of a landscape filled with social media marketing consultants and SEO boutiques as far as the eye can see.

In the aftermath of the Olympics, Cameron wants to put the land and property on the Lea Valley to private sector use, and his Big Idea is to “nudge” the Shoreditch and Hoxton crowd eastward.

“Our ambition is to bring together the creativity and energy of Shoreditch and the incredible possibilities of the Olympic park to help make east London one of the world’s great technology centres,” said Cameron today.

That would be a sight: a mass migration of tiny designer tricycles as the Nathan Barleys pedal across the Hackney Marshes to Essex.
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My name is Andrew Orlowski from The Register, I was looking for an illustration to try and bring a very old debate to have a fresh perspective, and I came across this in my library, which is an extraordinary book written by a gentleman called Yoneji Masuda. The book was written in 1980 and it was the Japanese plan to computerise Japanese Society on Cybernetic lines.  It was a very modest project. It would have cost about $65 billion in the currency at the time, and plans included robotically controlled personal transporters, he forecast the death of the television by about 1985; an “information sharing” society would follow, democracy would be reborn.  Much of this utopian rhetoric is stuff we have heard since then, but we are in a very interesting time, I think, for digital networks and for society. 
 
We are faced with a paradox, very briefly, I will try and encapsulate it in about a minute. (more…)

There’s a theatrical quality to the publication of the Wikileaks Afghan logs that’s quite at odds with what they contain. You’ll recall that Wikileaks obtained a large number of classified field reports from US forces in Afghanistan and gave three media outlets, the New York Times, Der Spiegel and the Guardian, advanced copies of a small portion of the material, before publishing on Monday.

We’re told that they’re sensational, but this mundane and arcane collection of scraps of information has landed with a thud: it doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know. Yet everyone involved has a role to play, and is hamming it up to the full. The oohs and aahs wouldn’t be out of place at a WWE Smackdown, or a Christmas panto. Something feels not quite right here, but what is it?

The star actor and media manipulator is undoubtedly Wikileaks founder Julian Assange himself. Assange plays the part of “master hacker” and “international fugitive” – cliches at home in an airport thriller. But recall that the template is Cryptome, a site operated by New York architect John Young for 15 years. Young doesn’t appear to need Assange’s theatrical garb – such as never staying in the same location for two nights, requiring cryptography, and changing his number and email constantly. Young’s name and address are prominent on his website, and haven’t changed for 15 years. Young has arguably has far more to lose than Assange. So the fugitive role Assange adopts is a lifestyle choice, and not a necessity. Nor does Young feel the need to become part of the story himself: he doesn’t do vanity PR: press conferences or proclamations are not the Cryptome style. On Cryptome, you come and get it. And crucially, you then work out whether it’s genuine or not, and how important it may be.

“Assange is a master at hiding his assets and providing hypnotic illusions,” notes Young.

The Guardian has devoted as much space to how it processed the story, as to the story itself – which is usually a warning bell that the news content might actually be quite thin.

Read more at The Register…