Because information and media is very accessible online, there’s a generation growing up that expects everything to be free. Because they’ve only known torrents and online sharing, they think nothing of taking what they don’t have the right to take, be it music, movies or content.

I’ve had this kind of thing happen to me on occasion. Things I’ve written have been reprinted without credit or permission, often in eBay listings, but sometimes in blogs. Bits of websites have also been grabbed, but usually for personal projects, by people who probably don’t grasp the way copyright works, and I’ve never seen a need to smack anyone with a legal hammer of doom.

What’s staggering, though, is how a general disregard and ignorance for copyright is spreading throughout the commercial arena. We had the BBC nicking a Robert Llewellyn YouTube clip, and Lily Allen stealing all sorts of content to, ironically, bitch about rights infringement in the music industry (and the subsequent revisionism that followed), but an hour or so ago something truly bizarre was reported.

Edgar Wright, he of Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame, said on Twitter: Answer me how this http://tinyurl.com/yfr6ad4 is cut down to this http://tinyurl.com/y9w3s3x without my permission, blessing or approval.

The Times had, without permission, taken Wright’s heartfelt tribute to Edward Woodward, hacked it down and, in Wright’s words, “gut[ted] it of all feeling”. Amazingly, Media Monkey reports that the rip even made the print edition, with a photo of a grinning Wright placed cheekily alongside.

Although I utterly disagree with chilling government proposals regarding copyright infringement law, it is shocking how few people realise that just because something is online, that doesn’t mean it’s freely available to use and abuse as you see fit. That a supposedly professional organisation like The Times, stuffed full of journos who could write their own piece (or at least have the decency to ask Wright for permission), so blatantly stole work from anyone, let alone a famous film director, is almost beyond belief.

Update: The Times online has now updated the article, using all of Wright’s original copy and crediting his blog as the original source.

Update 2: Wright reports that, on his request, The Times will make a donation to a charity of Edward Woodward’s family’s choosing.

Apple crushed Psystar in court; the ruling reported on November 14 stated Psystar had no right to hack about with Mac OS X and sell Mac clones.

Oddly, commentators are saying this is a bad thing. PC World called it a ‘hollow victory’, providing all the usual garbage arguments like “what if [insert car company] only let me [park in certain places/drive on certain roads]?”, ignoring the fact that with Apple, the entire unit—hardware and software—is the product. (And, car-argument fans, with Intel Macs you get your own roads and can also drive on everyone else’s.) Boxed copies of Mac OS X are to enable people to update existing Apple products. And since other platforms and PCs exist, Apple in itself isn’t a monopoly.

The main argument rearing its ugly head, though, is that Apple is stupid in restricting its OS to Apple hardware alone. It could, some say, have huge market-share if only Apple allowed its software to appear on every PC around, or even if it just licensed to choice vendors such as Dell.

This is bull. Apple is, despite what some people seem to think, primarily a hardware company, and it makes the bulk of its money from relatively high-end kit. If Mac OS X could be run on cheap hardware, that wouldn’t increase its market-share—it would just eat into Apple’s profits. This already happened once, during Apple’s disastrous experiment with Mac clones in the 1990s. And lower profits for Apple leads to less R&D and weaker products—a vicious cycle that would neither benefit Apple nor the industry as a whole.

Furthermore, Apple runs a relatively tight ship, and that’s because it deals with the entire package itself. If Mac OS X had to officially run on a huge number of additional pieces of hardware, problems would hugely escalate, and the platform’s stability—much of what makes it so appealing in the first place—would be gone.

Ultimately, Apple cares about profits. Sure, it doesn’t want its market-share to plummet, but then that’s not happening. Even in these dark financial days, Apple’s share is (very) slowly rising. And even with its small market-share, Apple consistently outperforms the competition; but it’s a fallacy to believe Apple would perform better if it ditched its lucrative hardware in favour of cheap Dell laptops running Mac OS X.

Mac OS X 10.6.2 arrived recently, and it doesn’t support the Atom processor. This has led to people crying foul, saying Apple’s out to kill the hackintosh community. One blog claims, commenting on the system causing instant reboots for affected hardware, “My sources tell me that everytime a netbook user installs 10.6.2 an Apple employee gets their wings”. Shane Spiess is then quoted in an article by Kevin McLaughlin for ChannelWeb: “There is no other logical reason why Apple would do this unless they’re going to enter this space with some sort of tablet-type device” (hat-tip: Daring Fireball).

I suspect the reason is simpler. If you count the number of products Apple has in its line that use the Atom processor, you’ll come up with the figure of zero. Nada. Zip. Why should Apple spend time supporting a processor that’s not used in its products? Chances are Apple’s been optimising and bug-cleaning, and broke something that it can’t be bothered to fix—because it doesn’t need to. And even if the action was ‘malicious’ as the earlier linked blog claims, it’s worth noting that Apple is a hardware company and makes a huge chunk of its profits from Macs. If Apple doubled its marketshare but in doing so lost most of its sales to Atom-based netbooks, it’d be screwed. But as Apple’s Q4 results show, the company’s in fine form and doesn’t have anything to fear from hackintoshes, which more points to the likelihood that it just doesn’t care.

“Oh noes!” shrieked the internet, “The Apple iPhone finally has a virus!” Well, a worm, according to the BBC. Well, a worm if you’ve jailbroken your device (against Apple’s recommendation). Oh, and if you’ve also installed SSH.

Clearly, Apple should immediately leap to support people who’ve installed unsupported software on a device that they’ve jailbroken, thereby making it unsupported twice over! Alternatively, it’d be nice if journos would make it clearer that this exploit isn’t down to inherent failures in Apple’s device, but down to people doing stuff with it that the built-in software’s not designed to deal with.

Pocket Gamer reports analyst Michael Pachter has been at the scaremongering juice, topping it off with a stupid olive. He says: “I think the iPod touch is the most dangerous thing that ever happened to the publishers, ever,” and this is because when the price of Apple’s device drops, kids will want one instead of a DS or PSP. “Why would you pay $20 for Tetris when you can get it for $6.99 or $3.99 on iPod touch?” he says.

Indeed. But I can’t for the life of me see how this is the “most dangerous thing that ever happened to the publishers, ever”. Lower price-points generally mean people just buy games instead of ripping them off (*cough*R4 on DS*cough*), and with the App Store being digital-only, overheads are much lower for publishers. Therefore, decent publishers that aren’t complete idiots should rapidly be able to find a way to make decent money from iPod gaming, more so as the device’s market share increases.

What the App Store and Apple handhelds could finally put paid to, though, is stupid publishers selling games for way more than they’re worth—across the board. To that end, the only thing that has reason to be scared of iPod gaming is greed—and by extension greedy and clueless publishers.