Owen Gibson wonders why the ad agencies are still steering clear of the net.
Month: January 2003
Kazaa busted
Kazaa Media Desktop is a slick, commercial-grade file sharing app, shielded – so far – from prosecution by the application’s distributed architecture and the company’s multi-layered off-shore status. A US court has just stripped away both by compelling an ISP to grant access to a user’s personal data. By going for the users, the RIAA realises, they stand a better chance of paralysing the business. Who will download it once they know they’ve just bought themselves ‘felon’ status?
I’m bored saying this
Charles Mann in Wired Magazine, restates the euphoricists’ case for the imminent dissolution of the recording industry. The recording industry is nearly 100 years old and has weathered dozens of existential threats – from the great depression to radio to cassette tapes. It is still with us. It will still be with us in 100 years time. I blogged the irritating robustness of the status quo here in July 2002.
Rosen resigns – slowly
Hilary Rosen, the downloaders’ Great Satan, will step down from her job running the US Recording Industry’s trade body, the RIAA, ‘by year end’. Considering it’s only January, she’s certainly providing plenty of warning – she’s been at the RIAA for nearly fifteen years so I guess she’s accustomed to thinking long term. I blogged Rosen here on 27 August and here on 28 August 2002.
The management consultants, the toothpaste marketers and the other Carterets…
The Observer’s profile of Stephen Carter as he prepares to assume the role of Chief Executive of Ofcom. Most interesting is the ballooning payroll. The first estimate I can remember is 500 staff. At the Oxford Media Convention a couple of weeks ago some were prepared to venture 600. Here, in the same article, 900 and 1000 are given an airing. Do I hear 1100?
The right to be annoying
For some reason, people have been asking me lately about the increasingly visible Trots at Spiked! and the Institute of Ideas. Why are they so cynical and snotty? What is it with the obsessive debunking? Why are they so annoying? Why are they everywhere? So I thought it might be useful to link to three very thorough Guardian articles from two years ago providing the kind of background you won’t get from their own web sites, events or publications.
Life after Living Marxism: Fighting for freedom – to offend, outrage and question everything, The Guardian Saturday July 8, 2000
Living without Marxism, but with the bubbly at hand, The Guardian Monday July 10, 2000
Life after Living Marxism: Banning the bans, The Guardian Saturday July 8, 2000.
Blunkett’s ‘coiled spring’ interview in The New Statesman
“Britain, says the Home Secretary, is now “like a coiled spring”, febrile and tense, and ominously on the lookout for scapegoats. David Blunkett interviewed by John Kampfner.
Pity anyone whose daily in-tray begins with terrorists making weapons in bedsits, continues with asylum-seekers being housed in hotels and ends with gangs on shooting sprees in city centres. David Blunkett is confronted with danger. But he has identified something worse – a danger coming from our minds…”
Words of Waldman
Simon Waldman, a pioneer interpreter of the Internet to UK Plc (and the man responsible for The Guardian‘s absolute pre-eminence in cyberspace – perhaps also for its voodoo doll status among the warbloggers), has upgraded and redesigned his weblog. It’s got loads of good stuff in it.
Two good articles from The NYRB
From the current New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson’s clever and humane review of Michael Crichton’s ‘Prey‘ – another blow against the tech determinists – and Timothy Garton Ash’s chilling and useful Anti-Europeanism in America.
Never mind congestion charging…
…London needs one of these.