It’s almost becoming a weekly event. Rupert Murdoch says something about the future of media, paywalls and electronic newspapers, and the Guardian has a go. Today, it’s the turn of Jemima Kiss, who in an article entitled Murdoch: Tablets are the future for News Corp reports that “Rupert Murdoch was cosying up to Apple again today as he spoke at a media debate,” (of course, the Guardian wouldn’t be seen dead releasing an iPad article approximately once every three seconds) and argues that “in the long term, the thing that will be harder to calculate is the cost of losing much of [the Times’s] voice in the international, online news market. That’s the bottom line we’d really like to see.”

It’s far better, presumably, to obliterate the cash reserves the Guardian has built up over decades by relying too much on ‘free’; the Guardian may have a bigger voice now in international news, but that will only last as long as its pile of cash does.

I’m no fan of Rupert Murdoch. I think his attitude towards the likes of the BBC is abhorrent, and with the exception of a few talented columnists, the Times isn’t a publication I’m interested in reading. However, my gut tells me that Murdoch’s gamble might well work; he’s taking a risk in saying to people that news and related content is worth paying for if the format is good enough. This will add value to his brand rather than diminish it. And when in the future rivals realise he was right, they’ll be fighting to enter a market Murdoch’s already leading in.

It’s not a big surprise when a right-wing think-tank bitches about the licence fee, but they’re not usually so transparent as to say: “We love Sky. Sky makes us feel funny in our happy place. We really really think the BBC should be just like Sky.”

So congratulations, Adam Smith Institute, where the BBC you hate so much was kind enough to report your boneheaded views:

It says continuing with the public subsidy will lead the broadcaster to be scaled back and “diminish its contribution”. To be fair, this isn’t entirely inaccurate, but only because governments and Rupert Murdoch bang on about the ‘evils’ of the licence fee so much. The Tories are desperate to marginalise the BBC under the guise of ‘value for money’, which will, inevitably, lead to it being scaled back.

But let’s think about the subscription model. The BBC would suddenly have to become competitive in every way: pricing, market-share, popular television. In other words, it would have to become another Sky, otherwise it’d lose the income it needs to survive. This would most definitely lead to it being scaled back and diminishing its contribution.

The report singles out the success of Sky with its subscription model, adding that the BBC could have “the global presence of a Hollywood studio but with a wider range of output”. Sky is now in around ten million homes, but for the majority of its life it’s had little serious competition. Even when Virgin arrived, Sky was the major player and with Virgin totally capitulating towards Sky recently, that looks set to continue. The BBC would not enter a market in the same fashion as Sky, which offered people lots of US shows at a reasonable price, the alternative being terrestrial television. It would enter a market fighting both against Sky and Freeview.

Again, the only way it could possibly survive as a major player would be to ditch the niche and go with the popular; if the BBC stayed as it was, it would become utterly marginalised—the television equivalent of a critically acclaimed indie studio, rather than a big Hollywood player like Warner Bros.

The BBC should be given a fixed sum of money from the government to cover any initial losses, it suggests. I’m not sure how a ‘fixed sum’ can cover loses, unless said fixed sum equates to the money the BBC would have gotten from the licence fee, but there you go.

The institute has also called for what makes up the essentials of public service broadcasting to be redefined. Sounds great, although these guys don’t seem to understand that public broadcasting services are more able to service the public in a meaningful manner when they aren’t commercial entities.

It currently includes areas such as news and children’s programmes, which would remain free under its proposed new system. But hang on—you’ve already said the BBC’s going to have to scrap its licence fee and will only temporarily get government money to make up some of the shortfall. Now you’re saying that it will have to pay for news and children’s TV for no return, out of its diminishing pool of resources? What a great idea!

Advertising on the BBC is not ruled out in the report, but it acknowledges the broadcaster would prefer advert-free forms of revenue. Man, if only the UK currently had a really good company that offered a great range of programming, news and children’s TV, radio and web services, and all entirely ad-free, for a reasonably low monthly fee. HANG ON A MINUTE!

David Graham, the former BBC producer who wrote the report, said he hoped his findings would encourage “serious debate at a critical time”. I’m also hoping his findings will encourage former BBC producer David Graham that coming up with some actual arguments might be nice, rather than banging the old ‘poor value’ drum again and again. This is particularly tricky when those you’re trying to convince bother to do the sums and find out how little the BBC costs.

“It really is going to be very difficult for the BBC to resist the justifiable hostility of other competitors who just now, receiving no subsidy, have to bear the whole brunt of the… competitive market, cycles that go up and down,” Mr Graham told BBC 5 live. And now we get to the crux of it. Those poor commercial channels! It’s so unfair that they have to deal with the cycles that go up and down when the BBC gets huge piles of cash for doing nothing apart from: providing loads of programming that isn’t considered commercially viable by other channels; creating niche output that is world-class and that commercial channels won’t touch; offering the closest thing the UK has to impartial news, since it doesn’t need to deal with advertisers; getting the bulk of its output from the UK, rather than grabbing from an ever-diminishing pool of quality US output. (We’re already seeing UK channels being forced to buy second- and third-tier US shows. Sooner or later, we’re going to be importing the dregs. Surely, it’s better to make more British television, but, hey, that doesn’t work terribly well when it comes to making huge profits for commercial organisations.)

Also, cycles go down and up. When the commercial companies are making money hand over fist, I don’t hear them complaining.

“You know ITV up against BBC really hasn’t a chance in a difficult advertising environment and that really shouldn’t be allowed,” he added. OK, so in a tough financial climate, we should hamstring the BBC, because ITV can’t cut it? ITV’s problems are, of course, nothing to do with ITV choosing to increasingly concentrate on terrible mass-market programming that leaves it unable to differentiate itself from all the other garbage channels now available in the UK. It’s all the fault of the BBC!

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has indicated his support for continuing with the licence fee, but last month suggested it could be cut from the current £145.50 after the next negotiations. ‘Culture’ Secretary Jeremy Hunt wants to kill the BBC, but thinks it’ll be more fun for it to get a death of a thousand cuts.

The spokeswoman for the BBC Trust, which represents licence fee payers and governs the BBC, said: “The trust welcomes the fact that the current government has expressed its support for the continued existence of multi-year licence fee settlements. But, frankly, we wish they, Hunt and Graham would go screw themselves, and realise that £2.80 per week for everything the BBC offers is, in reality, a huge bargain.

The iPad’s a confirmed success. Apple can’t make the things fast enough, and they’re vanishing from shelves worldwide. Another thing that’s vanished is the ‘pad’ jokes, comparing Apple’s device to sanitary products. This sort of thing tends to be the case when a device is successful—the same thing happened to the Wii.

What’s more interesting is how ‘pad’ now might become a generic term over ‘tablet’ for similar devices. Engadget reports that HP’s filed for the PalmPad trademark and Pocket-lint notes that RIM’s grabbed Blackpad.com.

These might be defensive moves, but perhaps these companies are bright enough to take advantage of Apple’s branding success, using names that would immediately get consumers thinking of the iPad, but selling devices that are more ‘open’ or more geared towards enterprise. That said, don’t expect Microsoft to reveal the Windows PhonePad 7 any time soon.

BBC News reports that a UK judgement has ruled what it calls ‘game copiers’ for the Nintendo DS illegal. This means under British law the import of the likes of the R4 is now no longer legal. The court noted: “The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence”, adding that “game copiers first circumvent Nintendo’s security systems before any non-infringing application can be played on Nintendo’s handheld products”.

This is a pretty interesting judgement, and one that will go a long way to giving the fair-use brigade a solid kick in the teeth. Got an R4 and use it to carry multiple games with you that you own a copy of, because you don’t want to cart around £200 of DS games and leave them on a bus by mistake? Tough. Use your R4 for emulation and homebrew? Tough.

And how long before this judgement creeps into other areas of digital media? If R4s are now dubbed ‘game copiers’, are CD-Rs ‘music copiers’, and DVD-Rs ‘movie copiers’? Perhaps it’s time to ban paper (‘magazine copiers’) too, along with hard drives (‘everything copiers’). And good luck, iOS device jailbreakers and ‘hackers’ of other consoles—if the R4’s now illegal because it circumvents a system’s security, it’s only a matter of time before other media giants clamp down on anyone who has the audacity to want to fiddle about with a piece of tech kit they’ve paid out money from their own pockets for. The bastards.

Sometimes I read about the US legal system and despair. Quite often, in fact. Ars Technica reports that three iPad users are now suing Apple over the iPad, and have filed a class-action lawsuit to “redress and end [Apple’s] pattern of unlawful conduct” regarding promises Apple made.

The problem, apparently, is that the iPad, like all electronic goods, has the sheer audacity to shut down when a critical operating temperature is reached—typically around 35°C. This is common among similar products—Kindle does the same, although you might get another couple of degrees out of it.

The idiot claimants argue that because Apple said “reading on the iPad is just like reading a book,” the company is a big, fat liar, because a real book can be used in “the sunlight or other normal environmental conditions” without shutting off.

I wonder if there’s the possibility in law for Apple to sue these people for being cretins? As Ars asks, do Apple’s claims really make the company “guilty of fraud, negligent misrepresentation, deceptive advertising, unfair business practices, breach of express or implied warranty, intentional misrepresentation, or unjust enrichment?”

Maybe these opportunistic dimwits should have gone the whole hog:

• “I made a note in biro in the margin of a book on my iPad, and when I turned the page, it was still there! APPLE LIED TO ME!”
• “I tried folding the page to keep my place in a book on my iPad, but the page wouldn’t fold. In the end, I had to put the iPad in a vice and bend it, but then the entire thing shattered! THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN WITH REAL BOOKS!”
• “When I decided I’d had enough of reading, I opened Safari and surfed the internet and also downloaded my email, while listening to my favourite album, and then it dawned on me: this isn’t like a book at all! I DEMAND APPLE GIVES ME MONEY!”

My advice to Apple: make a ‘special’ iPad for these ‘special’ people—nip into the local stationary shop, scrawl ‘iPad’ on a couple of paper pads and mail them to the claimants. It won’t be quite as magical as the real thing, but at least these idiots won’t be able to complain about it being unusable in the hot sun; nor will they be able to say it doesn’t work exactly like a paper-based object.