on 11 May 2007In April, Microsoft called for an antitrust investigation into Google. I checked my calendar and it was the 16th, not the first. But I did start wondering if there might be a kind of sunspot activity that temporarily switches off the brain’s irony detector. That would make sense, given that it’s really sunny in Los Angeles. And over the next few days my suspicions were confirmed.
First, a British police chief, Bernard Hogan-Howe, called for stronger gun laws. Not before time, you might think. Under the present system, an organised gang can chase down a member of the public without provocation and pump eight bullets into his head, in front of witnesses – and not only do they not go to jail, they get given new guns! That surely must worry Mr Hogan-Howe, who could be the next commissioner of the Met.
The present Chief Constable for Merseyside may sound like the unnatural offspring of Crocodile Dundee and a certain Tory Chancellor, but nobody reading his comments to the Guardian could suspect him of being right-wing or a twit. Hogan-Howe’s plan is to change the law (unlike the law that criminalises kids who try cannabis, which he’s very keen on) so that members of the public and victims of gun crime can be compelled to spill more beans.
What penalties would outweigh the displeasure of someone known to be handy with a shooter? We ignorant laypeople had assumed it was already against the law to withhold information about crimes and that the reason more people weren’t forced to rat on violent criminals against their will was common sense rather than a lack of legislation, so it’s lucky we’ve got experts like Hogan-Howe to put us right. He didn’t tell us, though, what legal penalties he’d come up with to outweigh the displeasure of someone already known to be handy with a shooter. Perhaps suspected witnesses should be dressed in an orange jumpsuit and forced to stand on a box with a noose around their neck until they give a statement on the Today programme saying they really think Operation Trident has been very effective.
Those sunspots weren’t done yet. China proudly announced it would install WiFi throughout Beijing in time for the Olympics, presumably so that everyone can access the bits of the Internet that it hasn’t yet paid US tech giants to censor out. A spokeswoman for Thames Water said the continuing spillage of 1,000 litres per second of raw sewage into the Firth of Forth wouldn’t cause any problems as long as ‘people take care not to dispose of any improper items’. Poos, for example?
Then up popped the BBC’s Director of Future Media and Technology, Ashley Highfield, to announce at a Cannes conference (your TV licence = his minibar bill for Thursday) that the state-funded publicly accountable independent broadcaster would, grudgingly, after all, be allowing users of systems other than Microsoft® Windows® to access its digital TV services, even though ‘Apple’s proprietary and closed framework for digital rights management gives us headaches’.
Excuse me? Being proprietary and closed is the whole point of copy protection. The only reason why there was any headache about platform-agnostic delivery in the first place was that the Beeb’s media industry chums – not Apple, or Tessa Jowell – insisted on having DRM applied to all their content. Which, as usual, won’t prevent copying, just make it annoyingly tricky, thus ensuring that the only people who can be bothered to do it are organised bootleggers, while the rest of us are hindered from exercising our meagre rights of fair use.
At least we got to know what Ashley thought. It once took me a dozen emails to prise no comment out of him on the future of digital TV (to be fair, I didn’t fly him anywhere), although I did eventually get a response from a colleague, who said many of the same things Ashley would say at Cannes four years later. Sometimes the future takes longer than you think.
Ticketmaster sued a rival who’d allegedly sold seats on which it was supposed to have a monopoly But I knew the sunspots were out of control when Ticketmaster initiated its fifth lawsuit in a week against a rival company who’d allegedly resold seats for concerts on which Ticketmaster was supposed to have a monopoly. Among the ‘improper practices’ cited was negotiating deals for tickets with artists. Imagine! Musicians taking money in return for seats at their own gigs, and members of the public bidding freely for them in an open auction, while poor Ticketmaster loses out on the inflated fees it’s rightfully entitled to under its exclusive contracts with management. True, that kind of contract is more generally associated with men in sharp suits whose names end in vowels, but a deal is a deal.
Let me stick my head out the window a minute. Facing south. There, that’s it. Now I can honestly say I have the deepest sympathy for Ticketmaster and I wish them well in their efforts to right this terrible wrong. Has anyone got any Factor 15?
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