Britblog roundup #150

Britblog roundup #150 is brought to you by Chameleon at Redemption Blues.

If you have any blog entries you want put into the next britblog roundup — which incidently I am doing — send your nominations to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.

If Microsoft were honest…

If Microsoft were honest, this is what Windows Vista boxes would look like:

(via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)

Music DRM is dead; movie DRM will die

Warner Music is to sell non-DRM’ed MP3 files:

Warner Music has announced that it will begin to sell non-DRM’ed MP3 music files on Amazon, making it the third (of four) major labels to sign up for DRM-free distribution of their music, Universal and EMI being the other two. Only Sony BMG have held out — and that’s the same label that gave us the infamous Sony Rootkit, a dangerous hacker-tool that Sony infected millions of PCs with in a failed bid to prevent copying of its music.

Sony is now the only holdout, and it’s likely they will move to non-DRM’ed music during 2008. Thus the battle over whether music will be delivered in an open format, or whether the music corporations will control us while we listen to it, is essentially over.

The moral of this story? That selling your customers deliberately substandard products and treating them like criminals is not, in general, a good business strategy.

Moving on to the motion picture industry, both it and the music industry have struggled to cope with the new world where copying information and transmitting it around the world is quick, cheap, and effortless. The music industry has felt the pressure earlier, because music has less information that movies and is thus encoded as smaller files — 4 MB for a song, 1 GB for a film are typical. But the underlying pressures are the same.

Expect movie producers to start giving up on DRM by 2010, as it becomes apparent that (1) it doesn’t prevent people making and distributing unauthorised copies, and (2) it pisses off would-be customers. Instead movies will tend to be financed by cinema audiences and merchandising, and also state funding such as with the BBC in Britain or its equivalents in other countries. Movies might get less revenue, but this won’t reduce the number made since they will be cheaper to produce due to advances in computer graphics and machinima.

UPDATE 2007-Dec-31: according to Ed Felten, earlier this year, Warner’s CEO Edgar Bronfman said that selling MP3s would be “completely without logic or merit”.

Britblog roundup #149

Britblog roundup #149 is now up at Mr Eugenides. (Actually it has been up since Sunday, but I’ve only just noticed).

If you have any blog entries you want put into the next britblog roundup, send your nominations to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.

Egypt to extend copyright to 5000 years

You might think that the current copyright term applying for many works of life of the author plus 70 years is too long. (It is). But the Egyptian government wants to extend copyright to their antiquities, some up to 5000 years old:

Egypt’s MPs are expected to pass a law requiring royalties be paid whenever copies are made of museum pieces or ancient monuments such as the pyramids.

Zahi Hawass, who chairs Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told the BBC the law would apply in all countries. The money was needed to maintain thousands of pharaonic sites, he said. Correspondents say the law will deal a blow to themed resorts across the world where large-scale copies of Egyptian artefacts are a crowd-puller.

I’d like to know how they think they are going to apply this worldwide.

David Starkey is poorly educated, says Cabalamat

It seems that royal historian David Starkey is not a big fan of Her Majesty:

Queen is poorly educated and philistine, says Starkey

As the country’s most high-profile historian of the British monarchy, one might expect David Starkey to take a warm view of the house of Windsor.

But in a week in which the Queen overtook Victoria as Britain’s longest-lived monarch, Starkey has delivered a less than rose-tinted verdict on the head of state, accusing her of philistinism and being uninterested in her predecessors, largely due to being poorly educated.

“I think she’s got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude to culture,” the historian told the Guardian. “You remember: ‘Every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.’ “

But it wasn’t Goebbels who said that, it was Göring. (The expression originates from Hanns Johst’s play Schlageter in which a character says “Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning” meaning “Whenever I hear of culture… I release the safety-catch of my Browning!”)

Starkey, as a historian, should know better! Particularly when he is criticising someone else’s poor knowledge of history.

Father Christmas

Something that’s just occurred to me:

Adults who believe in God are arguably about as intellectually mature as children who believe in Santa Claus. We don’t let children vote in elections, on the grounds that they are too intellectually immature to make good decisions on how the country is run. So, should be let adults who believe in God vote?

A scary and stupid solution

From Slashdot:

Swedish athletes Carolina Klüft and Stefan Holm have proposed a radical technological measure to stop top level competitors from taking performance-enhancing drugs. Klüft and Holm, reigning Olympic champions in the heptathlon and high-jump events, argue that competitors at the highest level should either have computer chips implanted into their skin or GPS transmitters attached to their training bags so that the authorities can keep tabs on them at all times.

This is deeply, deeply scary and wrong. Whatever one’s position on athletes taking performance enhancing drugs, the suggestion that people have chips implanted in them to fix this problem would be creating a much bigger problem — a bit like curing a headache by amputating the patient’s head.

Nick Clegg doesn’t have an imaginary friend

One good thing about Nick Clegg, the new Liberal Democrat leader: he doesn’t believe in God.

Britblog roundup #148

Britblog roundup #148 is up at The Wardman Wire.

If you have any blog entries you want put into the next britblog roundup, send your nominations to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.