Two Rules, Same Issue

Hot foot from his sleazy holiday on an expensive boat in Corfu, courtesy of David Geffen of Dreamworks, Lord Mandelson personally intervened to strengthen laws against those who download music or films illegally. He did not attack the real perpetrators of the crimes, those who steal the content, but the people who take advantage.

Think about this. Suppose you invent something really clever and you then patent it. Next step, you bring it to market somehow and you find it is serving a need and it becomes successful. The next thing you know, another company or individual steals the exact same idea, even though you have a patent, and starts to make and then sell an almost identical product at a slightly less price. You would have incurred all the development costs associated with bringing the real thing to market, the 'cloner' would have simply capitalised on all that expense and taken a slightly lower margin to whip you with the same idea.

In law, there is nothing stopping people buying the 'cloned' product. We are getting some pretty poor attempts to stop the illegal trading of designer label goods like clothes, but that's a brand protection issue not inventions. Realistically patents are swiped every day in the area of technology and there is huge money in it. If the owner of the patent wants to do anything about it, then they can only sue the violator of their patent and that is a long, expensive and nasty process. You only have to look at what happens when you see Apple's incredibly long running dispute with Microsoft over the infringement on their patent on an operating system using windows.

Notice how this long running sore and drain on people's ideas has never been tackled. Despite serial inventors like Trevor Baylis lobbying Mandelson, nothing will get done as he has no expensive yacht and he wields no power in the world of business and commerce. There are no plumb non-executive jobs at stake or any movements in the world of the rich and famous. Inventing can be the grubby domain of garage-based grease monkeys who have passion and commitment, for who the money is really a bonus - it is the invention that provides the stimulus.

Not so in the high octane world of David Geffen and his peers. The laboratories and offices are full of the latest hi-tech kit and littered with the brainiest of talent who work on taking other people's ideas and turning them into films. Often, unless you are people like JK Rowling, who have their own way of controlling their income by having the much needed sequels in their head, the writers get little return compared to the producers, actors and others who distribute the content in the digital world. The popstars have to be pretty hot and consistent to keep the mincing machine going which is why people like Geffen and Cowell deal in the numbers game - and are so incredibly rich.

In the new digital world, it is the creators and inventors who are preyed upon by the likes of Google who take their content like any old piece of junk and just distribute it. Today you can buy ebooks by any old duff author who couldn't sell an actual book alongside the classics. Google is strangling the life out of news too by making the value of the content almost worthless but the distribution is worth billions.

So in the new digital age, Mandelson rides roughshod over inventors who have genuine patents logged and waves two fingers at them by focusing laws only on the digital age. He has even made those laws geared toward the downloaders, the equivalent of nobbling those of us who by PCs with Windows, which was 'allegedly' invented by Apple. It's actually the wrong way around as you need to stop the actual thieves.

But no, life at the top is all about being smooched by rich people. Laws are crafted far more carefully if wealthy people directly gain as then you have some favours to call in later. The new Digital Britain Laws are absolutely barking up the wrong tree. If content, illegally replicated is made available on the web, the people who replicated it should be the ones prosecuted. There is so much free content made available on the web, it is crazy to implement laws which puts the onus on individual users to check the intellectual property rights of the source of their download - it is sheer lunacy and flies in the face of digital media and freedom to access content. This is a problem the software and media industry should solve, not users.

Mandelson has got it completely wrong. Should he now be attacking all of us for not checking whether Microsoft has infringed any IP before we buy their products? No, he doesn't ask us that but frankly, there is a fair bet they have in many cases judging by the amount of companies who sue them each year. Such companies are far too rich and nice in his eyes to bring a case against them. The same actually goes for David Geffen and his peer companies - have they observed the rights of all the individuals and companies they should have in producing their content?

Why should ISPs knowlingly allow illegal content to be made available via their portals to the web - why are they not prosecuted instead of their customers?

This is a huge blow to the individual freedom of any user of a PC and having access to the web. It has meant that we, the users, are responsible for checking the validity of the IP of all content, not the people who distribute it. Content aggregators like Google, ISPs, telecom companies, and all others who present content to us over the web just got off scot free. Should anybody who is prosecuted under these new laws have a case against their ISP for allowing the content to be downloaded in the first place?

The users have become the criminals, the people the furthest from the source of the alleged crimes. Welcome to Digital Britain, Mandelson style.

The High Price of A Free Holiday

Oh, Peter. You are so obvious but that's why everyone loves you so much.

Yes, it is old Lord Mandelson again up to his old tricks. After a lovely, free, holiday on a yacht moored in Corfu (yes another expensive yacht near Corfu) courtesy of David Geffen, co-owner of Dreamworks who has a major axe to grind on pirate copies of media being downloaded on the web, Peter has personally intervened to beef up the new laws governing downloads in the new Digital Britain initiative.

Once again, the war on piracy has been taken to the consumer not to those who put the content on the web who actually stole it in the first place. Those characters are much harder to chase as they are slippery, elusive and getting as rich as David Geffen - so maybe someday they will have expensive yachts and free holidays to dole out. Consumers? No, they are weak, puny and easy to catch, particularly as the new legislation governing security allows the Government to question the ISPs who provide our internet services for records of every movement, word and message we send. Welcome to Digital Britain - who knows, maybe blogs like this will be illegal soon as I mention a Politician's name.

In Sweden, a whole Political Party has sprung up ostensibly to tackle the download issue but has leapt to prominence by gaining an MEP seat when it tackled the issue of excessive security laws. It will be a direct consequence of laws, supposedly intended to safeguard us from terrorist attacks, that allow Governments to monitor everything we do on the web, that will be able to find out who has wantonly downloaded music, software, films etc and violated copyright so that they can be fined.

Yes, that's right - fined.

It's all about money. But then again, you don't have to follow Peter Mandelson far to find money. He met Gadaffi's son twice this year, once on that very yacht, and guess what? Yes, the Lockerbie Bomber is freed to a hero's reception in Tripoli and we get more trade with Libya - just wait and see.

This isn't rocket science, you know. It isn't even subtle. This is rich people scratching a power-hungry Minister's back, who is unelected, who correspondingly does their bidding in Government - accountable to no one.

Once again, Welcome to Digital Britain.

Questions Of Science

The problem with reading a copy of New Scientist on a short flight is that it rekindles the lost academic potential within you - it's a slim chance at the best of times but some 25 years ago science was my best hope of a career. Now I struggle to spell Avagadro let alone remember the man of Turin's famous number but that's life, I suppose.

So I pose a little question - which of the four fundamental forces in nature baffles scientists most as the other three can be explained by the exchange of force-carrying particles? Let me put you out of your misery - it's gravity. Einstein explained it as the force which arises from the smooth warping of space-time by massive objects. Does that sound double dutch to you? I hope so. For the layman, the explanation of 'smooth' is anything which behaves according to a nice equation however much the said equation looks like a set of scripts from a Dead Sea Scroll.

Gravity is the one force which cannot be explained by quantum theory. There have been approximations and strings but realistically they are merely theories which have yet to be proven by any physical evidence.

I put forward another natural phenonemon which defies 'particular' definition and constantly elludes the wit of man - coincidence. This is the happenstance of two seemingly unrelated events occurring from which we may may infer a connection, however tenuous. Well that's my definition anyway. I am talking about the bizarre oddment of me being in Berlin and reading about the premier of 'I,Robot' on the plane over and then literally bumping into Will Smith on the pavement outside the Four Seasons Hotel less than a few hours later. Finer analysis would have shown that the article was in the BA magazine, advertising the route to Berlin where the premier of 'I,Robot' was taking place because Audi were a major sponsor - so the scene was set, the stars aligned. If I happened to be walking along the road at roughly the time Will, as he likes to be called, was going to the cinema with his family then I would bump into him.

That can be explained when using probability theory and the two itineraries (Will's and mine) - we happened to be in the same place at the same time so it may have been more likely we would have bumped into one another. But consider this - and yes I get political here because I am sick to death of it and I cannot stand the man - that Peter Mandelson is invited to have a free holiday on the luxurious, multi-million dollar boat of a very significant player in the world of films and downloads (we are talking David Geffen of Dreamworks here) and less than a week later officials are told to draft laws to punish illegal downloaders of content, even if it is the people who post the content who are doing the real wrongs.

But Peter defies the statistical evidence much more than this. On the same holiday, he has a chance meeting with Colonel Gaddafi's lush looking son and next thing we know the Lockerbie bomber is freed. Fancy that. It reminds us of other rather coincidental events - like the Hinduja Brothers wanting UK passports so there is a donation to the Dome Fund. Or perhaps that Peter spends time on a Russian aluminium tycoon's yacht and then there is an EU vote in favour of lowering tariffs on importing the self same commodity making the self same oligarch incredibly more wealthy. By an an even more science-defying coincidence, the very pages in Peter's diaries covering the dates of the first meeting with the self same oligarch are 'lost' while he is moving back from Brussels and having a gall bladder issue solved.

I wish I had the scientific nous to define a theory to govern all this but it elludes a feeble brain like mine. My curse is to wonder why a twice disgraced dodgy dealer is allowed back into Government as an unelected offical and peer of the realm and then gets to run the country. That is the one thing you cannot put down to the strange law of coincidence - this was premeditated stupidity on behalf of the weakest PM we have had since Chamberlain.

One thing which is not a coincidence is that on the weekend that Gordon Brown chose to continue his holiday and not to open a centre for injured troops we found out that the tally of dead heroes in Afghanistan rose to 204 and the toll of injured troops was over 900 in the last three months alone.

Science can be baffling - the obvious can be even more baffling.