Good news/bad news on figures for the ‘cost’ of filesharing

In an earlier post I looked at an extraordinary claim that the cost of illegal filesharing around £12bn p.a.. John Naughton has just blogged an extract from a parliamentary committee discussing Mandelson’s proposals to cut off internet from persistent downloaders and the people they live with. Here, the government is using the figure of £200m p.a. losses for the music industry alone. No source other than ‘industry’ is given to support this claim, and minister Ben Bradshaw appears not to know how it was arrived at either. Consequently it’s impossible to assess how plausible this number might be, though it appears to be an order of magnitude lower than earlier figures. So much for evidence-based policy-making.

PlanningAlerts.com closed down

Today, I got the following email from the MySociety.Org-hosted PlanningAlerts.com, which has been closed down because it can’t afford to use the postcode system now that Royal Mail want payment of £4,000 p.a.  licence fees. I didn’t realise that the postcode system is private property… There are attempts to get a free licence for non-profit applications – see this post on the Ernest Marples’ blog for more info,

“As some of you may already have spotted in the news, Planning Alerts has been effected by legal action by the Royal Mail:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7700621.stm

We are left with the choice of paying the Royal Mail up to £4,000 a
year for access to the postcode database and either running a much less
accurate and useful service or shutting PlanningAlerts down altogether.
If are concerned about this, please consider doing the following:

– Write to your MP –

Tom Watson MP has tabled an Early Day Motion in Parliament calling on
the Royal Mail to allow non-profit organisations to use the postcode
database for free. Please write to your MP asking them to sign this
Early Day Motion (number EDM 2000) and protest at the actions of The
Royal Mail.

You can write to your MP here: http://marples.writetothem.com/

– Sign the petition –

Nearly 1,200 people have so far signed a petition on the Prime
Minister’s website, please add your name:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/nfppostcodes/

– Blog / write to your local paper–

Please consider writing a blog post in support of PlanningAlerts or
writing to your local paper.

Yours,

The PlanningAlerts.com team”

Velletri agreement

A few weeks ago I was preparing some introductory comments for a public talk on the theme of ‘Digital Futures’ that the OU in the North West hosted. Given the theme, and this year being the 40^th anniversary of the OU, I wanted to mention some other suitable anniversaries. Among them, and rather less celebrated than say, the commissioning of ArpaNet or Berners-Lee’s proposal for what became the web, was this year being the 25^th anniversary of the Velletri Agreement. As of this morning, google returned 5 hits for the term ‘Velletri Agreement’, and Bing returned 2, so perhaps it’s worth a few words here.

The Velletri agreement committed a group of ‘grassroots’ NGOs from women’s, human rights, sustainable development, labour and other movements to develop the capacity to exploit the new information and communications technologies. For a fuller account of Interdoc and the Velletri Agreement, see Brian Murphy’s (2005) First Monday article: Interdoc: the first international non-governmental computer network, which includes a copy of the agreement.

I got involved in Interdoc a little later. They were exciting times, and personally I learned a great deal. I’ve just been trying to find a photograph taken at an Interdoc technical workshop in the Netherlands around 1988 showing a bank of hotel payphones in various states of disrepair as people were trying to attach modems to get online to post…. I’ll put it here if I ever do dig it out.

Curious sign of changing times….

I spent an enjoyable day today at Headingley watching the Roses match. The academic publishing industry is currently in a state of flux as new forms of scholarly publishing emerge: institutional repositories, open access journals and academics’ blogs, but it still surprised me to see this advert/sponsorship at the game. Who are they trying to reach?

Beware Carphone Warehouse….

A little disgruntled-customer social action here… This may be old news to many, but I was surprised at quite the level of mendacity in a high street shop.

I just attempted to buy a new mobile from Carphone Warehouse in Leeds. Having identified the phone I wanted, the sales rep offered the phone free if I changed the contract to one which appeared, at least, to be rather more appropriate than my current one. After some to-ing and  fro-ing with the network provider so that I could keep my current number, I started the process of giving my bank  details. The rep said a) he wanted to be sure that he could offer me the discount he had offered me on the phone by checking with his manager; and b) he wanted to put through a small bank transaction to ‘validate’ things. I told him I wouldn’t do b) until I’d got a positive answer to a). Surprise, surprise, having theatrically disappeared for 5 minutes to ‘talk to his manager’ he couldn’t offer me that deal, but offered me another ‘better’ phone, which patently it wasn’t (at least, not for me).  At which point I left; quite how this sales rep expected me to trust a word he said after this was beyond me. His sales talk had clearly involved several statements which were at best dubious, at worst deliberate falsehoods.

So, beware the ‘offers’ from  Carphone Warehouse staff.

Digital futures: perspectives and possibilities

On the 8th July, the Open University Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology is hosting a public talk and panel discussion with Prof. John Naughton (Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology); Dr. Adrian Woolard (BBC Norther Lab) and Shaun Fensom (Chair, Mancester Digital), at the City of Manchester Stadium. If you’d like to come, details are available at: http://users.mct.open.ac.uk/r08/DigitalFutures.html