We get far more letters and blog pingbacks every week than we have room for in print. So here's what we chose last week's letters and blogs in print from..
FILE SHARING Adam Webb (Can filesharers be made to pay? Technology Guardian, March 23 2007) correctly identifies that litigation against filesharers is just one aspect of the BPI's campaign against online copyright infringement. But it is wrong to surmise that litigation has had no deterrence effect on consumers' behaviour. Since the legal actions began global broadband penetration has grown, yet filesharers have migrated from the networks targeted by litigation and illegal uploading has declined. Countries where legal actions have not yet been brought also suffer from the highest levels of online piracy. And a separate consumer study by Jupiter says that 50% of the European filesharers who cut back did so due to fear of legal action. The music industry's objective is to monetise online music consumption in a way that is fair to both rights holders and consumers. But we should not overlook the fact that litigation has been both a vital step in deterring illegal filesharing and in educating consumers that music - like almost everything of value - must be paid for online just as in the physical world. Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive, BPI
There is an issue in the music piracy debate which seems to be perennially ignored - quite simply, the overwhelmingly dominant player in the download market - itunes - only offers downloads at 128kps. This is well below CD quality standard, but consumers who have ipods (ie almost all of us) have no option to change it. How on earth can the music industry expect us to buy music legally when the freely available music on P2P networks is of superior quality? Most torrent files are at least 192kps, which whilst still probably inferior to CD does in my experience makes all the difference between acceptable and unacceptable. The mainstream media gives the music industry far too easy a ride when it comes to reporting such issues (though admittedly the Guardian is better than most). The fact is 15 years after the internet took off the labels are relying on a 3rd party (having done nothing except squabble themselves) to provide a legal option to download, and then only at inferior quality, and tied down by DRM issues. The sole action the labels have taken a lead on is to use lawsuits to criminalise the very people that they rely on. What this tells me is that in 2007 the record labels' business model is still to pretend the internet doesn't exist and offer consumers no choice except to keep buying CDs. Its a complete refusal to engage with the reality of the modern world, whilst all the while attempting to pin their own failings on music buyers by accusing them of theft. Ultimately, music is our species' cultural capital, that has been around for as long as we have. As such it is tailor made for the globally networked community that is the internet. The record label's actions make it pretty clear to me who the real criminals are in this debate. Presumably in a few years time the poor saps that paid for these lo-fi recordings will be offered the chance to re-purchase their entire collection at a decent bit rate and a huge cost. In the meantime I shall continue to break the law using torrent files, and crossing my fingers that the music industry does not chose to make 'an example' of me. Any chance of an informed article on these issues? The current situation is an outrage. Murray Goulden, Nottingham
DON'T SING FOR OPERA In response to Andrew Brown's recent article in the Guardian's Technology supplement on Opera, as an evangelistic user of the application I feel I must object to his premature notions that the browser is on its way out. Mr Brown misrepresents Opera as a purely PC-based piece of software. Opera is also one of the most accomplished browsers in the mobile device and embedded systems market. It is shipped as standard on millions of mobile phones across the world, and is available as a download for most modern Java-supporting handsets. It is also the platform used by Nintendo's DS and Wii videogame consoles for web browsing. Mr Brown makes the very controversial claim that web standards bodies are now largely defunct. I feel I must remind him that without these bodies, the web would be much worse off, especially when it comes to accessibility. AJAX applications are very nice for those who can see and are able-bodied, but few take into consideration the needs of the disabled by providing accessible alternatives to fancy JavaScript and Flash functions. We need organisations such as the W3C to promote accessible design, and Opera is a triumph when it comes to the implementation of their standards. I ask that Mr Brown forgets his selfish needs and impatience for a moment, and consider those who are often left behind and let down by the likes of Google and Yahoo. These are not the organisations that should be considered as the driving forces behind web standards. Finally, Mr Brown lists Flickr and GMail as examples of AJAX sites which "don't work quite right" within Opera. As you may have noticed from my email address, I have written this email using GMail, which functions perfectly in Opera on my machine. I'm also a big fan of Flickr, and despite having run into the odd "you are using an unsupported browser" warning, have proceeded with no difficulty whatsoever. May I suggest that Mr Brown checks that he is using the latest version of Opera? David Edwards, Coventry
Here is the real problem, it show the illogical tendencies of companies when dealing with the internet. In real life, would you want a computer manufacturer to make it so that you have to make a special motherboard for each one of your parts? Probably not and this is exactly what Google, Yahoo, etc are promoting with the help of Firefox and IE. They don't support standard and because of them the web has because a mishmash of bad web coding and each corporate site having its own quirks that the browser designers have to cope with. It should not be that way, and I will continue to use Opera, not only because it is the better, more solid browser, but because it supports standards, and in the real world, standards are what holds things together. Hopefully someday all web designers will realise the same thing. P.S. Opera didn't have tabs before everyone else, they had 'pages', Firefox and IE don't even have real tabs, each tab isn't its own window, they are SDI not MDI like Opera. Calvin Kostov (no post town given)
I forsook Opera for Safari, which is inferior in every way but one - it has a little trick up its sleeve for troublesome sites: an option which in effect says (or rather whispers) "I can pretend to be internet Explorer for this site". If Opera would deign to adopt this little bit of slumming and thus open up ALL the web, I would return to it like a shot, as it is the best browser around bar none. Chris Rigby, Ullculme
Just read your article on Opera and couldn't agree more. Opera has do much potential but their constant excuse when a site fails to render properly (it's not standards compliant) has long ago gotten very old. It baffles me that Opera continues to lead the industry in innovative features that the basic browser remains stuck in their "Standards" hole and THAT is why Opera will never make it mainstream. A novelty browser at best that will drive a sane person over the edge since when it works right it is amazing but when it doesn't (especially on the main stream sites) it just pisses people off...then they hit the uninstall button. Chris Sherrod, Washington DC, US
FREE OUR DATA? >> The only organisations which actually value information are those who use it, and it therefore is logical that they should pay for it. However, although I firmly believe the current funding model for the OS is the correct one, I am not going to argue that as currently defined the licensing framework around the crown copyright data the OS manages is fit for purpose. There needs to be a fundamentally new approach to licensing OS data which allows greater access to information, and yes for some types of data and for some types of user this would be without cost to the end user. This could be achieved with minimal impact on the financial performance of OS but could inject a major boost to the UK GI industry. http://www.edparsons.com/?p=442
BUYING THE PLAYSTATION 3 In response to your article, "You shouldn't have any problems bagging a PS3 - if you want to" you miss represented the quote Howard Stringer said. He was not talking about the PS3 failing financially due to it's price, but failing to out sell the wii because it was a different class of system. He was implying that a Honda Accord will out sell a Mercedes because it's market is for a different level of consumer. Thus the Mercedes will fail to out sell the Accord. If you read his full statement you will see this is what is being stated, not that the PS3 is financially not doing well. The PS3 is actually doing better than the Xbox 360 did in its first 4 months if you look at VG charts total sales from inception. Now admittedly if it plunges for another month that may not be the case, but please don't miss represent to sell an article. Bill Y (no post town given)
The PlayStation is great and well worth the price. The only problem right now is a noticeable absence of many titles. But new titles such as Oblivion are showing up and it won't be long until enough great titles are available that the holdouts will purchase. The Blu-ray capability is a bonus. One big complaint is that it doesn't support AVI playback, so if one wants to say connect a large USB drive and put all of ones home videos on it...they must first be converted to MPEG2 or 4. However, Sony could easily fix this with an upgrade to the OS. In addition Sony's PS3 home looks to be very compelling. Resistance and Oblivion are two good games available right now. In short the PS3 won't fail, it may just take a little longer to get past the birthing pains. Brian Hart (no post town given)
>> With a console that only did well here [in the US] because of the eBay effect, it seems that Sony may be having a hard time convincing Europe to buy into it's pariah of a console. I don't mean to sound rude, but when the predicted loser of the console wars - the Wii - has outsold your console three times over, the ground might be to great to recover. http://insignificancywithpurpose.blogspot.com/2007/03/more-to-add.html
THE BOOK ISN'T DEAD I think you're absolutely right that social networking around books is an attractive proposition that is set to grow rapidly. But did you know that as well as Librarything, there is now a wholly independent and completely UK-based site called www.booktribes.com It's been set up by a group of writers and journalists, is chaired by a former Natwest Markets analyst and media start-up specialist (John Sanderson) and has Clare Alexander of agents Gillon Aitken - who is also chair of the Association of Authors' Agents - on the board. Booktribes is still relatively small and new and is being trialled at the moment before a full launch during the summer. We think Librarything has its strengths but we have tried to make our site much more book-lover friendly. Extensive market research told us that in the UK, one of the biggest barriers to finding and buying new books is that people increasingly don't trust publisher or bookshop blurb. We've fashioned our site accordingly. The main aim is to help people find their next read, to offer ways to move outside the 'comfort zone' and to allow users to chat away about what they like and don't like about what they're reading. It has a host of networking features, including a 'recommendations' slot (facilitated by collaborative software) that - based on the choices of users - selects 10 recommended books, once a user has posted 20 books on his or her virtual 'shelf'. The site database has more than 2.5m books supplied by Nielsen Book Data, and there are also sections covering literary news and literary events - the aim is that it becomes an important hub of such information. We plan to derive revenues from the organisation of literary events. Booktribes went live in December, and to date has attracted heading towards 1,000 members, drawn principally from the UK and US, but also Sweden (where we had a very favourable review in Svenska Dagsblat) and most of the English-speaking world. For March, we're on course for 85,000 page impressions at an average view rate of around 11 pages a visit. Traffic has doubled each month. I do hope you have the time to take a look, and maybe next time you touch on this area, might mention this British addition to the web literary scene. One further detail is that one of the founders, Tony Cook (ex- LBC and joint founder of Red Pepper) established some years ago www.abctales.com. This has become one of the most successful websites for aspiring writers and is our sister site (14,000 registered users and 40,000+ stories posted). Backers of abctales include John Bird and Gordon Roddick. David Keighley, Marketing Director Booktribes Ltd, Brighton
SITE UNSEEN I could hardly believe my eyes when I looked at the charts in Siteseeing (P.4, March 22). could it really be that so many more young people were interested in the Apple Web site than the Microsoft. It just seemed odd, considering Apple's much smaller market share. Then I twigged. The bars do not compare like with like. They set percentages of one quantity against percentages of another. They tell us nothing at all about how hits on the two web sites compare. We have no idea whether more young people accessed the Apple site: only that a larger percentage of those who did access it were young. This is a misuse of graphics that simply shouldn't have made it to the pages of a technology supplement. If you want to compare shares in two separate quantities, you need two pie charts. Otherwise the graphic is meaningless. Stephen Wells, Wolverhampton [Microsoft receives roughly five times more UK visitors than Apple - Technology Ed.]
MORE OF GOOGLE EARTH I think David Lund's problem with Google Earth (Letters & Blogs, March 22nd) is that he doesn't know where to look. In June of last year Google announced that it had high-resolution coverage of over 20% of the Earth's service, and over 33% of the world's houses. So admittedly the chances are his house may not be visible. However, my website Google Sightseeing (http://googlesightseeing.com, previously mentioned in Web Watch 14/04/05) is about taking you to see the weird and wonderful things on Google Earth that are much more interesting than a rooftop. Giant writing, aliens, planes, secret bases and even naked people are all featured. We have many sights that I'm sure David will enjoy, including loads in the UK and a couple in New Zealand. James Turnbull, Edinburgh
David Lund writes what most of us who've tried it must have experienced of the blurry UK mapping of Google Earth. Is this by any chance another example of data waiting to be free? Meanwhile for a much sharper image of most of the UK, and no software to install try www.flashearth.com (might work for New Zealand too). David Vere, Banbury, Oxon
Many rural areas in the UK have a much higher resolution in Microsoft's Virtual Earth (not New Zealand, however) David Were, Pembrokeshire
