It’s always fun when the people in charge are hypocrites. While the UK government bitches about freedom of speech in the likes of China, Open Rights Group confirms Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, is now in discussions with ISPs regarding:

self-regulatory measures to tackle online copyright infringement through site-blocking

If you want to sift out the bullshit, he’s talking about a national firewall, where IP owners would have sites blacklisted, for rights infringement. It’s a far cry from blocking Tiananmen Square protest pictures and entire social networks, but it’s a slippery slope. And we all know how mental the media industry is regarding rights infringement. (Boing Boing adds that the list would, naturally, be ‘secret’ and likely wouldn’t be transparent nor open to judicial review.)

The silver lining, according to Open Rights Group:

[Vaizey] has promised to invite civil society groups to participate in future discussions on the matter

Yeah, I’m sure that’s going to go swimmingly and that Vaizey and co. won’t ignore the protests of civil liberties advocates and technology gurus entirely, in order to appease their rich chums who own or have a huge stake in multinational media companies.

A Sun apology from 2005:

Julian’s mother did not say, during or after the inquest, her son often got on all fours creeping around their house pretending to be Gollum.

There’s a level of oddness in there that is almost beyond belief—and parody.

Amazon’s just unveiled its Cloud Drive, including a Cloud Player, enabling you to upload your music and then play audio across PCs, Macs and Android-based smartphones. This is massive and the sort of thing people were hoping Google and Apple would do, but Amazon’s got there first.

This also means Amazon’s the first to test the murky legal situation of back-ups. In the UK, fair-use laws barely exist. The 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act in theory enables you to make a copy of software and games, although it’s in part been superseded by the Copyright And Rights Regulations act, which stamps all over the prior law by making it illegal to exercise your rights should you circumvent copyright protection technology.

In music, things aren’t any clearer. There’s a general misunderstanding in the UK that it’s fine to make copies of music you legally own; in the old days, that meant transferring vinyl to cassette for your Walkman, and now that means ripping CDs to a PC or Mac, or (technically) making copies of digital audio files by placing them on an audio player or smartphone. Interestingly, the BPI (the UK equivalent of the RIAA), while generally taking a typically hardline stance towards filesharers (ZeroPaid), announced in 2006 that it would refrain from suing people making copies of purchased music for their personal use (Macworld). BPI chairman Peter Jamieson said:

Traditionally the recording industry has turned a blind eye to private copying and has used the strength of the law to pursue commercial pirates.

We believe that we now need to make a clear and public distinction between copying for your own use and copying for dissemination to third parties and make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs for their own private use in order to move the music from format to format we will not pursue them.

This is an eminently sensible decision, of course, but, importantly, it is at odds with UK law. Therefore, while Jamieson once said this, there’s nothing to stop the BPI changing its mind, being overruled by another party, or from some other organisation (such as a record label) suing you for ripping your CDs.

Naturally, then, this also means Amazon’s in the same position. According to the Guardian, Amazon claims it can circumvent rights legislation by claiming its online storage is the equivalent of an external hard drive. Craig Pape, director of music at Amazon, said:

We don’t need a license to store music. The functionality is the same as an external hard drive.

But note who (or rather what) that quote is referencing: Amazon. In other words, Amazon is indemnifying itself and putting sole responsibility for rights issues on to the user. Now, this is fine, because it’s the same as any other online service, but in this case Amazon is suggesting to users that they use Cloud Player for their music. In effect, Amazon is directly tempting people to break the law, but noting that it won’t be liable for any comeback.

I’m wondering how record companies will react. If they’re smart, they won’t care, since Amazon’s offering is a step up from the likes of Spotify in encouraging you to upload content, which you may have bought legally in some format. Most importantly, I’m also wondering how the law will react, because if Amazon’s service says anything, it’s that the UK desperately needs fair-use (i.e. copying of media—across formats, if necessary—for personal use) utterly enshrined in law.

As we all know, Charlie Brooker Is Right About Everything (YouTube), but he’s especially right about Rebecca Black’s Friday (YouTube) in his Guardian op-ed How to tweet bile without alienating people. Or making 13-year-old girls cry. If you’ve missed the story, a 13-year-old’s parents paid for her to make a vanity pop song and video, which became a YouTube hit and attracted the kind of bile and hatred usually reserved for mass murderers and idiots who don’t indicate on roundabouts. (Seriously, those orange lights aren’t fucking decoration, drivers.)

Having never listened to the track before, I just popped over to YouTube and, once the Flash plug-in deigned to play the video, watched and listened to the whole thing. What I found was a run-of-the-mill pop song with vapid lyrics and pretty horrible auto-tune on the vocals. What I didn’t find, crucially, was:

• Anything that prompted any kind of outpouring of hate;
• A song any worse than plenty of crap that regularly climbs the pop charts;
• Something any worse than the kind of songs I used to write when I was 13, bar the lyrics. (Although, to be fair, it wasn’t written by Black, but by Clarence Jey and Patrice Wilson, who I’m guessing are somewhat older than 13.)

But the online response has been utterly shocking, and shows how idiots use the internet to insult, bully and harass, while hiding behind pseudonyms. (That even happens on this blog, where people regularly leave comments saying what a total arsehole they think I am, and then sign off with a name like lolcakes—how brave!) What’s particularly great about the Rebecca Black incident is that the hate has resulted in press, and the press has resulted in the song being propelled up the charts. Being level-headed, Black has made a pile of cash that she’s subsequently donated to the Japan relief efforts. One wonders how many of the dickheads slagging her off on the internet have donated.

Even if you only have 140 characters to play with on Twitter, the important thing is to be constructive; just telling someone to die in a fire makes you about one step up from a cauliflower in the awareness ladder. Or, as Brooker rather brilliantly puts it in the aforementioned Guardian article:

In summary: bitch all you like. Just don’t be a dick about it. Poise, people. Poise.

A lot has been made of Google’s decision to delay the publication of Android 3.0 source code for the foreseeable future. One of the best write-ups is on Ars Technica, where Ryan Paul suggests Google is being hypocritical and contrary to the idea of open in the sense of software:

Android has become an insular platform developed almost entirely behind closed doors in an environment that is hostile to external contributors and is mired in a culture of secrecy that serves a small handful of prominent commercial hardware vendors and mobile carriers.

I’ve been moaning about this for a while now, not because I have a hugely vested interest in open-source, but because I believe that if you’re using an aspect of your product as a major marketing plus, it’s something you should stick to.

On Twitter, two points were made to me recently, seemingly countering my argument. First, Damien McFerran stated:

Google stopped playing on the ‘open’ thing ages ago, most Android phones don’t even advertise that they’re Android.

And then Nigel Whitfield said:

Is openness really a marketing gimmick? I really think, outside geeks, no one gives a damn.

I agree with both comments, but these points are also related and link back to the original argument about Google’s increasingly spotty track record on openness. Google may have—to some extent—stopped playing the openness card, but its advocates haven’t. And, yes, geeks are the only people who really care about ‘open’, but they still have a lot of clout when it comes to purchasing decisions. More often than not, a non-techie will ask a techie friend what to buy when considering a new smartphone or tablet. Geeks will sometimes push Android over other systems on the basis of its openness, no matter how disingenuous Google is being about that, and, often, purchasing decisions will be made on that basis, despite it being of little or no direct benefit to the purchaser.

This is why it’s still important for Google to play the open card—it gives the company an underground sales force of sorts, to counter the mag-friendly shiny shiny of its current major rival in the field, Apple. (The other major card Google holds is, of course, price: Android sales have sped past iOS, on the basis of lower cost of ownership—although that does mean a number manufacturers dependant on Android are forcing themselves into the same low-profit cul-de-sac that most Windows PC manufacturers are currently slumming it in.)