UK Legislation to ban illegal downloads…..it won’t end well

Ok, so the government wants to put in laws similar to the Three Strikes rule. Why? Because businesses told them they’re losing lots of money.
But that’s not all there is to it. If businesses lose money, then consequentially, the government loses money through taxes on said businesses (apparently, although more likely, the government won’t see jack and it’ll all go into business ‘profits’), and if you want to spin this out far enough, losses of money to businesses means less investment by large corporations, and therefore less jobs, and more stress on the economy and the UK Benefits system.

But the point is that there are really only three ways to try to stop illegal downloading. And when I say stop I really mean reduce.
You’ll never stop all people from downloading - if you continue down the path of prosecution and regulation, you’ll just move it underground and make it more of a criminal activity, and increase issues with organised crime gangs who download it from another country, ship it over, and then sell it on where they can. This all harks back to getting bootleg recordings and CDs in markets that was prevalent in the 80s and 90s

So any way back to the three ways…..

1. Prosecution (Persecution?)
2. Regulation
3. Incentivisation

Prosecution

Prosecution simply does not work, it won’t divert people away from P2P sharing sites en masse, and the money recouped from individuals will be a drop in the ocean, compared to your losses. Moral victories won’t put money back in your pockets
Of course, it does make the corporations and people like the BPI, look like tw*ts, in fact this is the only thing that prosecution does, but you have to admit it does it very well.

Regulation

Regulation is next to impossible - it pushes the problem into the realm of the government and the justice system, instead of making the content producers get their own houses in order. It also puts unprecedented strain on ISPs, and with broadband services becoming more and more of a commodity, it means that ISPs will go out of business (like the film and music industries care!) because once one person finds out their ISP is watching them they’ll move ISP along with most of the other customers on that line, and people who pay for big bandwidths will just reduce their package and reduce the money flowing into the ISP, thus companies go out of business and there are job losses. So it just a different set of people who are out of work. Oh that’s alright then!
Also technically it’s very difficult to do, because each and every packet has to be inspected, recreated as a full file and then watched/censored by a person to actually determine if the content is infringing copyright. Don’t believe me? How do you tell the difference between a 5 second scene from a free to view trailer and the same 5 second scene in the actual film? Doing this will have a hugely detrimental effect on broadband speeds, which are already dire in the UK because of the telephony wiring used to put telephones into people’s homes. Couple this with the fact that not all P2P sharing is illegal and is actively encouraged by some companies. Large opensource projects like Fedora, Ubuntu and many other Linux distributions use torrents to spread costs of bandwidth when you have large numbers of people downloading

Incentivisation

This is really the only sensible way to reduce the numbers of people downloading. But it requires effort from the content producers and sellers to sort this out, effort that will most likely never occur, because that would take them away from prosecuting 13 year olds.
First of all, downloadable content is only there because people want it. I.e. there is demand, and that demand is for different formats, SD, HD, small size, without adverts, etc, and the demand is there to have the content as quickly as it can be obtained/uploaded from the ‘original’.
If people didn’t want it, it would die out pretty quickly, and here’s another reason why prosecution or regulation won’t work - it doesn’t reduce or deflect the demand
Companies say that they’re losses are running into the millions even billions each year, so you stop downloading. Okay. But do you really think that all the people who used to download an album, will go and buy the next one? Your conversion rates will be pretty small.
So let’s put something on the table.

What happens if, for arguments sake, the companies, and potentially the government,got together and spent their energy more fruitfully on withdrawing the demand for illegal downloading. Let’s say every track for 10p, a full album at £1,a tv episode for 50p, a full season for £5 and every film £1.

First the companies, and the BPI, being the neanderthal behemoths that they are, will say ‘We can’t support that kind of price, it’ll bankrupt us!’. Well guess what chummy? Illegal downloads are already doing that and 10p a track is better than 0p a track

Things like BitTorrent are _slow_, yet because of companies’ pricing structures, content restrictions and lack of choice on that content (i.e. the companies lack of supply) people are willing to put up with that kind of inconvenience. At 50p for an episode of whatever, and for it to be downloaded in 10mins, people would be willing for that rather than wait God knows how long for a file to appear.

Here’s a few ideas for you to try out

1. Take off DRM - it doesn’t work and it just annoys people
2. Stop putting anti-piracy adverts on DVDs that I’ve just bought legally!
3. No advertising on downloads.
4. Release all films internationally on the same day or at worst within a 72hr window
5. Regulate your CD/DVD copying people, because, hey, all those albums that we hear about being shared 6 weeks before release have to come from somewhere right?
6. Don’t try and whip up international frenzy for the latest TV blockbuster and then only allows downloads from the US.
7. Offer content in multiple formats at reasonable price points (and by reasonable we don;t mean reasonable to you, but to the poeple who download it and are, ultimately, paying you for the content)
8. Remember that distribution costs are really minimal with digital downloads compared to hard copy
9. You can’t stop progress - even the XBox360 and PS3 have media streaming in them for things like music and video

For the UK government.

1. A tax levied on CD/DVDs like in Canada or certain other equipment
2. A new license fee ‘top-up’, with the current price going to the BBC as always, and an extra amount on top being shared among artists, content producers etc.
3. Stay as far away from this argument as possible, believe me, this won’t end well for the government if regulation were introduced.

The rule is simple - if you give people the choice, and the range of content that people want, provided in the timeframe that people want it, and make it available internationally, instantly, and you make it more convenient than the ways they do it currently, they’ll download it legally from proper sites simply because it is more convenient to do so, even if they have to pay you something - just don’t try to fleece people

See it’s not rocket science and it’s really not that hard, so go and put your lawyers back in the dungeon.

My Top Ten Films of all time

Went to see Transformers today - all I can say is Wow! And yesterday it was Shrek The Third, so I thought I’d do a quick top ten films that I love - please feel free to comment on yours! (Please bear in mind that I’m a parent - so these are ranked on as much as they entertain my children, as much as they entertain me)

• 10 - The Crow - Back from when I was younger, saw it again recently, still really strong
• 9 - Harry Potter - the new one is really good
• 8 - Borat - I have never laughed so much in my life!
• 7 - Bladerunner - always loved this film
• 6 - Batman Begins - the best of all the Batman films, with none of the campness - hoping for good things from the next one
• 5 - Shrek Trilogy - every film is strong
• 4 - The Count of Monte Cristo - the more Recent Version
• 3 - Transformers - you have to see this film it is amazing
• 2 - Star Wars Saga - especially Empire Strikes Back
• 1 - Lord of the Rings Trilogy

If Transformers had a sequel I would be seriously reconsidering my top three, it had humour for all ages and the sequences were stunning

BBC, iPhone and the Carriers

You’ve got to love the BBC - a few days after the plans for iPlayer were announced (currently Windows only, reliant on wmv and MS DRM tech) they talk about the iPhone - apparently the internet connection is slow; ok it doesn’t have 3G, but even 3G and data plans are slow compared to the Wifi installed in the iPhone.

Eh? The iPhone has built in wifi? Yes, Throughly-Research-My-Articles-BBC-Person, it does.

Of course they know this, but, erm, fail to mention this on any of their broadcasts and online review bar the tiny specifications box.

I hate to say this, but most people despise browsing the internet through their phone - on any network technology it’s slow, the screen/and or browser just don’t make it a good experience and most phones that do have wifi in them, have it switched off by the network or carrier because it interferes with the carriers revenue streams - one of my workmates has a phone and they’ve removed the WIFI capability (or turned it off - same difference) so he has to use T-Mobile’s Web’n'Walk.
My hope for the iPhone is that it’s more a shakeup for the demands of the networks and carriers than it is to the handest makers - at least then the iPhone will have a positive effect for everyone regardless of whether they buy the iPhone or not

iPhone SDK? (pt2)

There have been many postings around the net of Mac developers grumbling about the lack of Apple support for a true iPhone SDK, but there are a number of issues here….

The problem with a phone or indeed any device that manages your personal information is restricting access to that information and the overall phone OS as a whole. I think a full iPhone SDK will happen, but in the 5 months since the unveiling there was going to be no way on earth that Apple could get this thing to market, get a full SDK and a sandboxed environment to run it all in….. If you wanted that perhaps you would have preferred Leopard to be stalled until October 08?

Steve Jobs already mentioned that he’s not a big fan of Java on phones, and as a Java developer of 8 yrs, I’m afraid I have to agree with him. Many J2ME applications, including some games, are teetering on the very edge of mediocrity, and this isn’t just Java’s fault - lack of screen resolution, differing models and of course the networks disabling features of the phones and what they allow on their networks in the form of IP sockets, all contribute to the stranglehold that is mobile application development. And it isn’t just Java - the mobile Windows guys suffer the same issues.

By using a web server you can piggy back your application over Wi-Fi and GPRS without having to worry too much about the carrier restrtictions.

Also there has to be some form of SDK for the Safari based app development otherwise we won;t know how to link it into the phone features, and I suspect that when a full Obj-C SDK come out, a primary focus will be in the Safari plugins, that the web-apps can then integrate with.

Also the update issue does to soe extent go away as you don’t have to install a full mobile application (at whatever the data transit cost your carrier charges you, and at some god-awful speed) the application can be delivered much quicker to the user.

Installing Safari for Windows

Just started installing Safari 3 Beta for windows. Installed very quickly and installed the bonjour Services. I’m installing it into an XP image running under VMWare Fusion Beta 4 so let’s see what it looks like then!


As you can see the Windows version (on the left) has already forgone the Brushed metal for the gradient gray, but functionally it’s not too far away from Safari on Tiger. It seems snappy enough, although my thughts turn to how you would develop a native plugin for both Windows and OSX - perhaps this is where some more (future) SDK trickery comes in

Apple not supplying dedicated iPhone SDK

Well to all those who are subtley enraged about not having an iPhone SDK - think about this

Whatever environment Apple would have written for third party apps on the iPhone would’ve required some form of sandbox to set it apart from the rest of the system; after all you wouldn’t have wanted any old pre-built non-sandboxed app sending your phone numbers across the net to some nefarious ne’er-do-well now would you?

At least by using the Safari engine and Ajax, there is something there now to develop on, and I would not be surprised if there is an SDK being brewed as well for those kind of applications that just won’t work well through a web browser

Complete Jini client in how many lines…..?

24! Could probably get it a bit shorter but hey…..!

Here it is, this is from the current HEAD of Glyph - from this we can generate configs, service starter startup configs startup scripts, and all the binding to a service…..If you think this is good, you should see what it can do with one of the most painful parts of Jini - Distributed Leasing. With a bit more testing, and clean-up etc, Glyph 0.3 will be shipped

package glyph.test.simple;

import java.rmi.RemoteException;

import net.jini.core.lease.Lease;
import net.jini.core.transaction.TransactionException;
import net.jini.lookup.entry.Name;
import net.jini.space.JavaSpace05;
import org.jini.glyph.Client;

public class TestClient {
@Client
public void writeMyEntry(JavaSpace05 myspace){
try {
Name ne = new Name(”Joe Bloggs”);
myspace.write(ne, null, Lease.FOREVER);
} catch (RemoteException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (TransactionException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}

Heroes

Heroes…..Best television show ever……on a par with Lost - another show that keeps me completely engrossed and confused in equal measure….

Neon 0.2 nearly there…..

Okay yes it’s been such a long time coming……

Finally, I’ve managed to get around to sorting out some of the issues with Neon, such as the transparent grid capabilities, and add a few things in and sort major parts of the code out.

There are a couple of things left over being the site docs and tutorials, and a few good samples to show how it works

Of things that won’t be sorted out until the 0.3 release, the major things are

• Zenith dispatcher - I’m thinking through concepts for a dispatcher policy that can be specified at deploy time so you can change the way Zenith handles incoming messages to suit your needs
• Slices - a very small bit of ‘Slices’ will be in 0.2 but the main part requires a lot of other foundation stuff from 0.2
• In-Call Mobility - ICM allows for an agent to move host during a method call on that agent. It needs better support in Neon for savepoints and savepoint based restarts

So it’s getting there…..slowly

I Wonder if Bruce gets royalties…..

I’ve been on a number of java websites over the past couple of days and been confronted with the Flex Ad - “I’ve been Thinking in Java, now I’m Thinking in Flex’, a quote from ‘Thinking in Java’ author, Bruce Eckel.

Adobe must have thought they’d hit the Jackpot on that quote….
…but I’m guessing that it’s not Bruce that’s getting the benefits of that particular advertisement