On the Societal Web, Alison McClintock examines the reasoning behind modern corporations using software to find disgruntled customers online. As she rightly points out: “There’s no such thing as a lone complaint in cyberspace and businesses of any size and sector should take note.”

I agree with this, and it’s interesting to see this modern take on customer service in action. I’ve bitched about various companies on Twitter, and had responses from support teams, leading to swift resolutions, which is great. There are, however, two problems. The first is when a company’s systems aren’t fully integrated. It’s great for someone to reply to you on Twitter within five minutes, but decidedly less great when they tell you to email a certain address and you don’t get a response. Secondly, if this process is being automated—as is increasingly common—everything goes wrong very quickly.

Recently, I said something on Twitter about the BBC licence fee costing less per month than the standing charges on my BT bill. Taking that text in context, there’s no reason for any company to respond to me. Sure enough, though, a BT ‘bot’ chirpily replied to the tweet, asking me if I needed help with my bill. This is a nuisance, and shows that, as with any other area of customer care, you actually have to take care to make it work. Scouring the internet and helping customers is a good thing; having bots run rampant and respond to vague keywords in an out-of-context manner is not.

Hat tip: Ian Betteridge.

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.

Being a fan of South Park in the UK isn’t easy, especially since I’m not also a fan of downloading torrents (both for bandwidth and moral reasons). For years, South Park releases in the UK rather absurdly stalled at season four, requiring fans to buy the region 1 releases (which in itself makes certain studios spit red-hot fury). Even when this changed, the releases retained the most boneheaded aspect of the US editions: making you wait several minutes to access any one episode—see Helpful Hints for DVD Producers for more on that.

Today, I was helpfully spammed by Amazon about South Park – The Hits Volume 2, which is now excitingly available. Containing random, out of context episodes I already own on DVD, this DVD with one of the laziest pieces of cover art in history (name, eyeballs, rating—it just screams ‘bargain bucket’) could be mine for just £6.49!

Never mind the fact that I’m still waiting on season 13 of the series, which was released on Blu-ray (for £49.99) back in March. Another search reveals, though, that Paramount Home Entertainment is finally going to allow people with a DVD to buy the series (for £24.99), albeit in September, six months after the Blu-ray release (which, remember, costs £49.99, which in NO WAY is the reason for the DVD version’s delay).

No doubt said DVD will still be stuffed full of adverts and anti-piracy garbage you can’t skip, along with a tiresome and lengthy snippet from an episode, before the menu appears. And companies wonder why so many people are drawn to torrents these days. As noted in the title of this post, Paramount Home Entertainment hates South Park fans—unless they own a Blu-ray and have deep pockets.

In my recent 5 things article, I noted that digital storage is slowly seducing me, to the point that I now rarely feel the need to buy physical media when it comes to music; soon, I suspect I’ll be buying digital movies and TV series, and only the lack of a robust solution for playback is currently stopping me. *

The media industry of course knows this and is scared by the prospect of falling physical media sales and the decrease of control digital brings, having ceded a lot of power to the likes of iTunes and Amazon’s MP3 store. Now, people can cherry-pick music tracks and individual episodes of TV series, without grabbing an entire album or box-set.

In an article over on Billboard.biz, Kristin Hersh argues that there is still a place for physical media. “I disagree with the recording industry which claims that music has been devalued by the Internet, but I admit that CDs have been devalued by an industry that put so much crap on them,” she says. “I wanted to push the idea that music is measured in impact rather than plastic while still giving people something beautiful to hold in their hands.”

Fundamentally, this is about value for the consumer. When the perceived and actual value of a physical object betters the digital equivalent, people will still buy it. However, the days are long gone when a recording artist can shove three great singles on to an album alongside a load of crud, and where a format-bump is enough to convince most consumers to buy all their favourite movies yet again.

* On that note, if anyone knows of a really good wireless or ‘connect to a wireless drive’ system that’ll happily playback DVD rips, QuickTime movies and so on, I’d love to hear about it.