| Saturday 20 May 2000, 23:45 BST |
| Stinky
meat. Get your stinky meat
here!
I'm very glad nobody's invented an odour plug-in for my browser yet. [Via
User Friendly's Link of the
Day] |
Microsoft versus
Slashdot: the reply. Slashdot's lawyer has
responded to
Microsoft's letter demanding they delete posts which (according to Microsoft)
are contributing to the distribution of a piece of Microsoft's intellectual
property. Unsurprisingly, Slashdot are taking a stance which can best be
described as "defiant." While the distinctly non-lawyerish tone of
the reply went down well with the Slashdot posters, I'm not sure that's
actually going to be much help to Slashdot should Microsoft decide to drag them
into court.
All the points Slashdot's lawyer's letter makes are valid ones, but it
seems to me that they don't really address the narrow legal issues on which the
case turns - ie whether the Non-Disclosure Agreement which visitors to
Microsoft's site were required to click on before downloading the document in
question is binding, and whether the quoting of the document can be covered by
"fair use" provisions. The letter reads more like the first salvo in
a PR battle aimed at ensuring that Microsoft are threatened with lots of bad
press over this affair. You'd think that Microsoft might want to avoid any more
bad press at the moment, but maybe they're past caring. If Microsoft persist
with this case, we'll see a lot more articles like
this
one by Spider Robinson. As The Register
points out, it
almost looks as if both Microsoft and Slashdot are spoiling for a fight. |
John
Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and Electronic Frontier Foundation
co-founder, has posted his
thoughts on the Napster
controversy. As you might expect of someone who has in the past been less than
pally with the commercial music industry, Barlow is in favour of the idea that
Napster will kill the music business and create the space required for the rise
of a "musician business." All of which is fine and good, but it
doesn't alter the fact that there's a clear moral difference between using
Napster-like software to distribute material which the owners of the copyright
have made available for free distribution and using it to copy information
which the legal owners (be they artists or record companies) have said should
not be distributed in that way. Barlow says that:
"Appeals based on moral principles will avail them
little. Cyberspace is and always has been a "gift economy" where
sharing is considered a virtue, not a crime. The music industry is generally
despised by both music-lovers and musicians, to whom they've been returning
about five percent of the retail value of their works."
It seems to me that this paragraph raises two points:
- If the owners of the works in question had put them in cyberspace
then the notion that cyberspace has traditionally been a gift economy might be
relevant, but the works of the likes of Metallica are being distributed in
cyberspace against the wishes of their owners, which is a very different
matter.
- So musicians hate the music industry and it doesn't give them all the
money their recordings earn. In that case the solution is for them to not enter
into legally binding agreements with these thieves, rather than to do so and
then complain about it.
[Via Techdirt] |
| Writing in Salon,
Scott Rosenberg analyses the real
lessons
for e-commerce sites of the failures of Boo.com and DEN. To sum
up: textual content is the key, not broadband-quality multimedia that 95% of
consumers can't or won't access. |
| Friday
19 May 2000, 23:50 BST |
| This site just has to be a
spoof. Doesn't it? [Via
Bifurcated
Rivets] |
| Thursday 18 May 2000, 23:55 BST |
Wired News
reports
that a couple of American colleges have begun to insist that applications are
made online. While a number of American colleges offer online applications as
one of a range of options, the colleges in question claim that online
applications are now (in the words of a professor at one of the colleges)
"something that we can expect from students." When I read this story
I assumed that the colleges in question would be either very upscale Ivy League
institutions which tended to cater for well-off students who probably could
afford computers, or else specialising in IT. In fact, one of them (West Virginia Wesleyan College) is a liberal
arts college.
I'm not sure whether this decision is a sign of the extent to which the
internet has penetrated US households, or of the extent to which such colleges
attract applicants from better off households. I also can't help wondering how
long it'll be before a pressure group representing partially-sighted or blind
internet users will sue, claiming that the colleges' web sites aren't fully
usable. |
Even more stupid
trademark games. After the Mattel/Mattl farce, we now have
Chiquita Brands, Inc sending letters to
artist Jessica Paff threatening dire consequences if she doesn't rename her
web site,
because the site's title ("Naked Juice") is also the name of one of
the firm's products, hence their having registered
nakedjuice.com. Note that in this case it
isn't even that she's registered the words "Naked Juice" as elements
of her domain name: it's just that she's using the term as the title of her
site. It seems that the firm believes that anybody anywhere who juxtaposes
those two words should be beholden to them, which is simply absurd.
Presumably I can expect a lawsuit somewhere down the line because the
title of my site might lead some people searching for an optician away from a
genuine optometrist's web site. [Via Metafilter and
Rebecca's Pocket] |
As the
Napster-versus-Metallica
furore continues, an article in
Wired News ponders the
effect of the agreement by Napster to block access for users who Metallica
claim have used the site to help them distribute copyrighted material on
Napster's popularity. The article outlines the status of various efforts to
produce Open Source variants on the Napster theme, only this time making the
program less vulnerable to legal action against the owners of a central server
the way Napster is. This is all very interesting, but for me the most striking
point the article made was that if Napster ends up signing some sort of
agreement with the recording industry in order to make the lawsuits go away it
may suffer because it'll lose the "outsider" cachet it enjoys at
present.
I find it amazing that users who presently use Napster and find it an
efficient means of distributing music files might suddenly throw up their hands
in horror if the company dares to come to some sort of agreement with the
record industry. I'm sure that some of these users have found themselves in a
record store that actually stocks CDs from major labels from time to time: do
they boycott such stores for "surrendering" to the music industry? A
recent story from The Onion seems
somewhat relevant. |
| Wednesday 17 May 2000, 23:55 BST |
Apparently the BBC are
supposed to be really embarrassed, as they've
confirmed
that this Saturday they won't be broadcasting Grandstand, their
Saturday afternoon sports programme which has long brought the nation the best
in sporting action. The reason is that the BBC doesn't have any major sporting
events to broadcast: ITV are showing the FA Cup Final and Channel 4 are showing
the Lords test match, so all the BBC have is three horse races from Newbury.
While it's certainly a bit of a comedown for the BBC, which used to have
the TV rights to both the day's major sporting events, it's difficult to see
what else they could do. The rights to major sporting events are fantastically
expensive nowadays, so in an environment where there's precisely no chance of a
substantial increase in the licence fee and any major BBC commercial activity
is regarded as yet another reason why the BBC shouldn't be taxpayer-funded
anyway, they're better off spending their income on drama, light entertainment,
news and so on. [Via Planet Jon] |
| I always knew that bloody Microsoft Office
Assistant "paperclip" was evil
incarnate! It turns out that Microsoft have set it up so that
it's "safe for scripting," which means that in principle a malicious
script could delete files, rename files and generally wreak havoc on your
system. Microsoft have issued a
patch,
but had no comment to make on the subject according to
ZDNet.
[Via Metafilter] |
First he was Prince, then he
was  , and now he's Prince
again. Considering that at his
press conference he
admitted what some of his fans have thought ever since the original change of
name - ie that he was doing it in the hope that it would allow him to
evade his commitments under his contract with Warner Brothers, rather than
because of some deep, highly personal change of direction - I can see no reason
to regard his as anything better than a publicity-seeker. Which is not to say
that he hasn't also been responsible for some of the finest musical moments of
the last twenty years: his run of albums from For You to
Lovesexy contained more brilliant, memorable music than we had any
right to expect from one person. It's just that he's spent most of the last
decade playing self-indulgent games with the press and producing some of the
blandest work of his entire career. |
| Padraig Harrington looked
as if he was in with a serious chance of winning a major golf
tournament last weekend, until it was realised that he'd
broken the rules by failing to sign his score card and he was disqualified. Jim
White in the Guardian used this incident as the excuse for an article
mocking
the complexity of the rules of the game and the social pretensions of the
members of a typical golf club. Granted, a lot of golf clubs are hotbeds of
sexism and racism, but that shouldn't detract from the discipline the
professionals exhibit: I've always admired professional golfers, like snooker
players, for their scrupulous adherence to the rules of the game and their
willingness to call their own mistakes. The contrast with, say, football is
telling. [Via Planet
Jon] |
| Monday
15 May 2000, 23:30 BST |
We live in The Age of the Customer,
apparently. Or so it says
here, anyway.
We customers have the internet to thank for our unprecedented power over
businesses that want to sell things to us, and this isn't a fad or a temporary
state of affairs, it's The Future. While I've no doubt that the specific
companies discussed made stupid decisions which led to bad PR, but I have a
problem with this sort of triumphalist approach to e-business. Author John
Ellis is very impressed that the financial effect of the decision by 25,000
Time Warner customers to move to Disney's cable service in the wake of the
recent disagreement between the two companies about Time Warner carrying Disney
content amounted to a loss to Time Warner of some $13 million per year, but
that's chickenfeed to a company Time Warner's size, and in time they'll weather
the bad PR unless they make a habit of pulling this sort of stunt repeatedly.
The thing is, all those companies Ellis is so impressed with which are
throwing freebies at the customer and undercutting their rivals are doing it
for a reason: to build brand recognition and market share. What's wrong with
that? Well, if they fail and there are still twenty players in a given market
five or ten years from now then none of them are likely to be making money, and
even the most starry-eyed venture capitalist will eventually tire of supporting
a business that doesn't make a decent return on capital. Then again, that might
be preferable to the results if the likes of Amazon.com succeed in carving out
a dominant share of their market, and they can then evade the competitive
pressures that keep prices low and innovation high. If your business relies on
actually moving physical goods around - and I know that's a desperately unsexy
thing to do nowadays, but that's what an awful lot of e-commerce is ultimately
about - then in the long run size and a track record and all those other Old
Economy assets do matter at least as much as nimbleness and having a
Cool Idea. [Via Metafilter] |
| Dru Jay, whose Misnomer
weblog is well worth a look, has now created
BlueGreen, a
Slashdot-style site dedicated to
distributing and discussing environmental news. At the moment the site hasn't
got a lot of content other than that posted by Dru, but as the word spreads no
doubt things will pick up. If you're at all interested in matters
environmental, you should probably keep an eye on BlueGreen. I wonder if we'll
one day talk about the "BlueGreen effect"? [Via
Misnomer] |
| Occasionally Salon's writers can go
over the top, but they
can also really nail a subject. Back in March they
published
an interesting article about the treatment of pregnancy and abortion in US teen
dramas, pointing out that such shows always treat pregnancy and its results as
a function of the moral standing of the character rather than a result of sex
pure and simple. Now they're
returned
to the subject with a perceptive article from Audrey Fisch contrasting the
treatment of abortion in The Cider House Rules and High
Fidelity, and making a strong case that the latter film is this year's
really radical film about abortion. |
| Contrary to the rumours
I mentioned last
week, Microsoft have not disbanded the Internet Explorer for MacOS team.
They have, however, been moved over into the WebTV group. [Via
Metafilter] |
| Sunday
14 May 2000, 23:55 BST |
| Will
Wright, the designer of the classic god-game Sim City
recently released The Sims, a game which lets players guide their
"sims" through a simulation of suburban American life. The
Sims has been an enormous success, and Wright decided to introduce a
wildcard element to the game. It's possible to download additional elements to
your simulation, so he released a simulated virus which would be carried by the
simulated guinea pigs in the game and which could spread to the human sims with
fatal consequences. Wright didn't actually let anyone know that this virus
could kill their human sims, and the result is that some players lost their
carefully-nurtured sims to the effects of the virus. The question is, was his
release of this virus into the virtual environment fair? [Via
NetSurfer Digest] |
While we're on the subject
of deceptive online behaviour,
Zeropaid.com are being a bit
naughty. They believe that Gnutella, the Open Source server used to distribute
files across the Internet Napster-style, is being used to spread child porn and
they've decided to do something about it. They've set up their own Gnutella
server and used it to make a number of suggestively-named files available and
they publish the IP addresses of users who log into their server and download
those files.
This sounds all very clever, but there's one minor flaw in their plan:
most dial-up users, and even some users with 24/7 connections using DSL or
cable modems, don't have a static IP address, so someone could in all innocence
be allotted an IP address which had been used to download the faked files
during an earlier online session.
This is such an obvious flaw in their plan that I can't really believe
that they haven't taken account of it. I can only guess that since blocks of IP
addresses are allotted to specific ISPs their real strategy is to build up a
picture of which ISPs are home to lots of users who like to search for child
porn and put pressure on those ISPs to implement some form of filtering to stop
their users from downloading such material. Either that, or it's a rather
elaborate means of demonstrating how useless IP addresses are as a means of
tracking identity so as to give ammunition to those who'd like to see some form
of user identification built into the infrastructure of the internet. [Via
Metafilter] |
| January magazine is a rather good book review
site. Their current
edition includes worthwhile reviews of Planetary by Warren
Ellis & John Cassaday and Get Happy by Gerald Clarke.
[Via NetSurfer Digest] |
| We live in an
era when neo-liberalism is lauded as the only viable
political philosophy. Writing in The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner
puts
forward a more nuanced view of the reasons for the robust health of the
Right and the differences between the American and European strains of
neo-liberalism. [Via MISCmedia] |
Dr Godfrey isn't the only litigant
who likes the British libel courts.
BBC News Online
reports
that the Law Lords have given the go-ahead for a Russian businessman to sue
Forbes, an American magazine, for
libel in an English court on the grounds that even though the magazine has a
circulation in England and Wales of just 2,000 it's possible that the internet
will have been used to distribute the allegedly libellous article to more
readers than the paper circulation, thereby damaging the businessman's
reputation in England.
The implications of this decision are massive. Nobody seems to have
produced any figures demonstrating just how many times (if any) the article was
downloaded by English users, so one can only assume that since anything
published on the internet could be downloaded in the UK this means that the
highly restrictive English libel laws could be used against just about anyone
anywhere. As the solicitor for Forbes put it, this decision is
"…a shot in the arm for libel tourism." One can only
hope that in the event that the case eventually comes to trial in England and
Forbes loses the damages will take into account the magazine's UK
circulation as a share of the UK newsweekly market and the minor reputation the
plaintiffs had in this country prior to the libel case. |
| The BBC's Political
Editor Robin Oakley is to retire early so that his successor,
former Independent editor Andrew Marr, can cover the run-up to the
general election. Marr is a superb political commentator, insightful and much
less interested in the daily spin than in the big issues which drive politics,
so I'm delighted to see him elevated to such a high-profile position. With Marr
analysing the ebb and flow of political fortune, there's little danger that the
trivialisation of politics-as-soap-opera will continue. [Via
BBC
News Online] |
The
government is being criticised by the Opposition for not
rushing to remove the protection against double jeopardy, which prevents
defendants from being tried twice in connection with the same offence. The
argument, prompted by the Stephen Lawrence case, appears to be that this
protection may allow the guilty to get away with their crimes if stronger
evidence of their guilt is discovered after their trial.
BBC News Online
reports
that the government is awaiting advice from the Law Commission before proposing
changes to the law on this point, but I think they'd be mistaken to remove this
protection against government persecution of suspects who were felt to have
"escaped justice." The point of a system where innocence is assumed
and the onus is on the prosecution to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt is
that if you're found not guilty then you're allowed to get on with your life,
and if the prosecution's case isn't strong enough then it shouldn't bring a
case until it's found more evidence to shore up its case.
The really scary thing is that this attitude that "too many
criminals are getting away with it" is becoming more prevalent. There's an
assumption abroad in press coverage of high profile cases that "there's no
smoke without fire" and anyone accused of a crime is likely to be guilty.
That's a very dangerous path for society to go down. |
| Just how big is the
Open Source development community, and how reliant is it on
the efforts of a small number of coders? The Orbiten Free Software Survey seeks
to answer these questions by
analysing the authorship of some 25 million lines of Open Source code. Orbiten
Research intends to repeat this survey at intervals in an attempt to profile
the size and shape of the Open Source community; the results promise to be
fascinating. [Via NetSurfer
Digest] |