Tag: Uncategorized

I’ve met Tom Szlukovenyi, Reuters Gobal Picture Editor, a few times and almost all we talked about was his practically pathological hatred of ‘photoshopping’ and all other kinds of doctoring, fixing, enhancing and otherwise fiddling with his precious news photographs. The idea – spread by the warbloggers and by the Israeli media – that he might have deliberately permitted Adnan Hajj‘s crappy Photoshop-job onto the wires is absurd. Just look at these two pics – can you see the glaring error in the doctored pic on the left? I think that’s the most obvious use of the Clone Stamp Tool I’ve ever seen. Back to school, Adnan…

Not that you’re going to bother anyway: traffic around here has dropped off a cliff since the start of the school holidays. Have you all gone on holiday? I suppose so. Anyway, it’s Olly’s 8th birthday in a week or so and Juliet took him and some of his hilarious mates out for the day today (because they’re all going to be on holiday next week) so I won the privelege of taking my lovely daughters to Princess School at Mystical Fairies in Hampstead.

We like Mystical Fairies, not only because they’ve played a major part in the formation of my daughters’ fantasy lives but also because they’re one of the best outlets for my wife’s ‘Airy Fairy’ greetings cards. Princess School involves lots of pretending, lots of games, lots of making things. It lasts two-and-a-half hours which seems like a long time for a three year-old and a six year-old but they were totally absorbed and totally entertained throughout. Brilliant.

You can also learn to be a pirate or a fairy. Obviously.

And I don’t mean the European Union. I mean the whole bloody continent (more or less). Well, let’s think. I suppose you could teach everyone Esperanto. Or pick someone everyone likes and make him Emperor of All Europe. Or reintroduce Brown Bears and Wolves everywhere so we’d all have to huddle together for safety. Or (I know! I know!) hypnotise everyone. Or you could spend three hours in makeup, perform a jaw-droppingly cheesy song called Hard Rock Hallelujah and wait for the votes to pour in. Amazing. Quite amazing.

Hi Nicola,

Thanks for your thoughtful response. I don’t want to sound like an obsessive or a copyright geek but I think ownership of intellectual property is important in modern cultures and economies and I think the media owners’ efforts to extend protection essentially indefinitely are potentially very damaging to our idea of ‘the public domain’.

There is a large and growing body of criticism of existing copyright law from people and groups identified with the public domain. The Internet, digital media in general, low cost grassroots media and other trends make these issues more important and more visible than ever. I’d be very happy to talk with you about all this. Give me a call if you’d like to.

In the meantime, here are some disconnected thoughts!

* The public domain is important. As a concept, it was essentially invented here in Britain when authors were first offered protection for their works in the 17th C. Copyright law, since then, has balanced the short-term economic interests of creators and the long-term interests of the public domain.

In copyright law a creator is granted a temporary monopoly in their work so that they can recoup the investment they made in creating it. After that it reverts to the public domain. Many people think that the continuous extension of copyright terms erodes the value of the public domain and provides excessive returns on initial investment for creators.

* Whether you like it or not, Cliff’s position *is* the industry’s position. The potential economic benefit to the industry of extending copyright protection to cover essentially the entire history of recorded music is incalculable. By comparison, the benefit to the tiny handful of artists who are a) still alive and b) still selling is irrelevant.

By the way, Sonny Bono’s campaign to extend copyright protection in the US was conducted not on behalf of artists but on behalf of his sponsors in big media. His campaign was more about permitting Disney to keep Winnie-the-Pooh and Mickey Mouse out of the public domain than about happy retirements for singers. You can be sure that when Mickey comes round to his 95th birthday Disney et al will be campaigning for another extension.

* Your question to Cliff about cheap CDs was valid but of secondary importance: copyright expiry returns a work to the public domain, making countless derivative works, remixes (‘mash-ups’ as they are now called) and reworkings possible. The Internet, open source software and the culture of free and accessible media point to the possibilities inherent in the public domain.

* ‘Use it or lose it’ is a real and useful concept but not in the way described. Public domain advocates, including, for instance, Larry Lessig, a law professor and inventor of ‘creative commons’, an alternative to conventional copyright, has proposed a very simple ‘use it or lose it’ rule for copyright owners.

Lessig proposes *reducing* protection to the original 14 years but permitting copyright owners to renew protection indefinitely on expiry on payment of one pound. This is a great idea because it minimises the risk of media ‘orphans’ – works which are protected and thus unusable but not currently available to anyone because they’re out of print or deleted. If a publisher or record company doesn’t want to protect a work someone else can pick it up and make use of it. In Britain, the Royal Society for the Arts is advancing a similar template for copyright reform: http://www.adelphicharter.org/

* The public domain is diminished whenever a work of value to someone (a business or an appreciative customer) is ‘walled up’ behind copyright protection and inaccessible. There are literally millions of such works – ‘orphans’ – across all media. Publishers, for instance, hold prisoner hundreds of thousands of books which they’re not interested in publishing but which have automatic protection for many decades. This is damaging not only to individual artists (like your Darts man) but to the economy at large.

Thanks again,
Steve Bowbrick

I don’t think I could work in space exploration (like they’d have me). The stress or the grief (or both) would kill me. The tiny (really tiny: it weighs about a pound) probe dropped from the Japanese Asteroid mission Hayabusa has got lost, drifting off into space instead of cleverly bouncing across the surface of the asteroid to scoop up space dust. The last image we’ll ever see of Minerva (for that is its name) is an impossibly melancholy one (see above) – that tiny blob near the right hand end of the asteroid is Minerva, about to keep its appointment with eternal oblivion…

You’ve probably been looking for a nice new phone with a decent camera, bluetooth and all the other stuff. Here’s the kiddie: a brand new, boxed and sealed, unlocked Sony Ericsson K700i. What are you waiting for? Go on. Click.

The Extreme Sports Channel. Really. It’s brilliant. Me and Olly sit open-mouthed in front of Freestyle Moto-Cross, Vert skateboarding and Ultra-skidoo (is that what it’s called?). I’m a 42 year-old male – completely missed the skateboarding thing as a kid (my dad did once fix a bit of hardboard to a roller skate so I could roll down the cycle track outside our house on my arse – no question of standing up).

I absolutely love the attitude of the kids I see on the channel. They’re the opposite of the starched sporting prima donnas we see at Wimbledon – they’re irreverent, ironic, idealistic, precious about the culture out of which their sports grew. They’re ambitious, though, and they’ll probably wind up getting all their weird street pursuits accepted as Olympic sports – but that’s the kiss of death for the culture. Once they have to stop playing ‘skatecore’ at events and wearing jeans to compete that’ll be the end, I’m sure.

I upgraded to iLife 05 (still using Panther). iPhoto 5.02 seemed to be quite happy but then my gorgeous 2 year-old girl switched off the external firewire drive the iPhoto library lives on and… So, on restart, every single one of the 16,000-odd photos in my library is gone – replaced by a neat, grey outline. All photos are intact on the hard drive and keywords, cropping and titles are all retained in iPhoto. Just no actual images. Holding down a complicated key combination to rebuild my library (which took 18 hours!) didn’t work. Still lots of neat, grey outlines (worse, since then iPhoto has crashed and, on force quit, returned with albums (hundreds of them) all gone. I am utterly stumped. Sort of dreading the prospect of rebuilding the whole thing from scratch… Oh God. Any ideas?

Great news. It’s now possible to an fit an automatic speed limiter to your car so that you simply can’t exceed the speed limit. In fact there’s a trial fleet of cars fitted with these helpful devices cruising around Leeds right now (I think I drove home behind one the other day). It’s connected to your Sat Nav system so it’ll always be up-to-date and, presumably, if you snap the GPS antenna off or wrap it in tin foil or something your car will cleverly pootle around at the default 20mph until you fix it.

Some of you (all right, about half of you), will resent this. You will regard it as inimical to the British way, as incompatible with liberty, as an affront to your maturity and autonomy. The rest of you will think this is a perfectly acceptable constraint on liberty, acceptable precisely because it will cut annual road deaths in half – a bit like seat belts or the mobile phone ban. The question is, how could you introduce such a gizmo without provoking a revolution amongst the motoring classes? Well, I reckon it would be quite easy actually.

The trick would be to make it voluntary and to allow the market to take care of the roll-out. To begin with, the gadgets could be distributed free of charge, paid for by the Government out of expected health service savings and by the insurance industry out of their savings on accident pay-outs. So a speed limiter would be a free option on a new car and could be fitted at your annual service for everyone else. The incentive to get one would be straightforward: your car insurance would be cheaper. Over time, more and more people would adopt the devices and, sooner or later, the handful of hot-shoes left without would begin to stand out like crack smokers in a creche. Speeding would become uncool and confined to race tracks and drag strips. Speed limited drivers would wear a window sticker with pride. Ferrari owners would whinge. Jeremy Clarkson would almost certainly emigrate.

Ivan alerts me to this genuinely amazing web site (with real historic value). Jonathan at Things to this lovely linklog (apparently run by estate agents), David Galbraith to this niche weblog (with a staggering PageRank of 9) and Robin Kearney to this excellent Mac weblog (quite geeky).