Everything that Microsoft does (except for, strangely, X-Box, though I’m sure they have a reason for that) is directly tied into Windows. Even their keyboards have a Windows button. Zune, Windows Phone 7 (what a truly awful name), Windows Live, Bing… it’s all built to keep people using Windows. To keep that pipeline of money going directly in Microsoft’s pockets. The chief threat for Microsoft is that people will be able to easily move away from Windows, taking their data (and their money) with them.

Google on the other hand, isn’t building products to protect a platform. After all, you can use Google anywhere. Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, you name it. You don’t need a particular set of software or hardware to use Google search and be served up Google ads.

The threat for Google is a bit different from the threat for Microsoft. Where Microsoft is afraid their captive audience might slowly drift away, Google is afraid their mostly self-chosen audience might not be able to access Google search. Microsoft’s platform dominance was built on an ecosystem, Google’s search dominance is also being extended through an ecosystem with (and this is crucial) Google by default.

Any time Google is faced with a challenge to their search dominance, they enter that market. Google isn’t the default on your phone? No problem, Google will make software to run on your phone. Google isn’t the default in your browser? No problem, Google will write their own (better, imho) browser. Google isn’t the default on your operating system? No problem, Google will release an operating system.

Defaults are terribly important. Microsoft defaults to Bing. Not because they love search or are even (by a very long shot) a search company or even an internet company. No, Microsoft defaults to Bing because they want to keep you hooked into Windows. Search revenue is incidental. Microsoft’s offerings, such as Bing and especially Windows Live exist specifically to hook you to Windows and keep that cash baby alive. They don’t want cross-platform accessible data freedom. No, they fear that more than anything.

Google on the other hand wants you to default to Google. Not because they want to protect their platforms. The revenue from their platforms is incidental. Google’s offerings, such as Chrome and especially Android exist for no other reason than to keep you searching with them.

And this is why you see Google and Microsoft competing in the same spaces so often. Their operating philosophies are completely different. Microsoft isn’t particularly know (to its detriment) for its whimsy, for example. But they enter the same spaces to do the same thing: Protect their core product. No other reason. They are protecting very different things, and are very different companies, but that’s why they’re there. Make no mistake. Everything Google does comes back to search. Everything Microsoft does comes back to Windows. And so it goes.

A quick note on Google. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2011-03-26.

I just found out I went over my cap last month by like 10mb. It’s a very charge, but it’s still a charge.

By the by, I own the HTC Desire, and it’s a fantastic phone. The only things I don’t like about it are the camera and the limited internal storage. The camera is pretty shitty no matter how you look at it, and I find myself bumping up against the insanely low internal storage at least once a week. I think I have something like 14mb left. Now, I’m running CyanogenMod 7rc2, and I’ve moved all the non-essential stuff onto the SD card (browser, google apps, reader, etc), even a few system apps, but still. An SD card just doesn’t cut it for system internals.

Other than that? Absolutely fantastic. Plus I dropped it on concrete once and it didn’t shatter. I consider that a bonus.

An Open Letter To Telus originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2011-03-15.

I’ve been evangelised by Jehovah’s Witnesses (the worst of the religious lot, because they bring their crap to your door), Mormons, Muslims, Fundamentalist Christians, and Open Sourcerers.

All of these people hold pretty important ideas about God, life, freedom of information, morality, and other important topics. There’s something worth discussing (if you wanted to, which I don’t) there. How you see God can change your life. Information and the freedom thereof can change an entire culture. Your morality can change your actions. These are Big Ideas, worth of discussion, debate, and furious examination.

Then there are the worst of the worst: Apple zealots.

Where religions like Buddhism and philosophies like information freedom contain important ideas (whether you agree with the ideas or not, at least agree that they’re important), Apple zealots have a shiny toy that makes them happy. They’re like children with a new colour of block showing it off to all the other children, unaware that it’s just another block and they’re just a bunch of blockheads.

There’s this pseudo-religious quality to their conversion experiences. Their Stockholm-Syndrome-like devotion to a company run by people who rightly deserve to be called a bunch of assholes.

That would all be okay (people like things and that’s fine up to a point), but when I’m having a conversation about technology and you interrupt with your HAY LOOK I’VE BOUGHT AN IPHONE ITS SO GRATE IT HAS GAMES LOL, or your MY MAC NEVER CRASHES OR GETS VIRUSES AND IT CURED MY GOUT AND ENLIVENED MY SEX LIFE, I feel justified in comparing you to one of those retarded little yappy dogs that won’t. ever. shut. up!

Look. I understand great design can make people feel marginally better about things. I understand that being part of the club makes you feel good. I get it. I really do.

But it’s just a thing. A THING. Not a religious experience, not a drug, not a miraculous life-changing device that will forever alter your destiny. It’s just a thing.

If it makes you happy, okay. No problem. It’s a little weird that you like a thing that much, and you should probably re-examine your crass, materialistic worldview, but whatever. Just don’t make it my problem by yapping about it in public as if you had done something important like cured AIDS or made world peace (both of which I could probably tolerate you evangelising, thankyouverymuch).

You went to a place, bought a thing, and now you’re telling people about how it changed your life. Let’s go all C.S. Lewis for a second here. Either you’re lying, in which case you’re pathetic for trying to lie about something so trivial; or you’re crazy, in which case you’re pathetic because you’re crazy; or you’re telling the truth, in which case you’re pathetic AND your life is pathetic for being changeable by such a tiny, worthless item of merchandise.

Here’s the takeaway: Keep your electronics fetish to yourself. Keep your life-changing bull-hockey on the other size of your teeth. Don’t reveal yourself in all your misery to those who are able and willing to mock you.

Don’t evangelise me, bro. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-08-05.

Okay. But you need to ask yourself a question first. What do you want your comments to do?

If you just want a place where people can respond with brief messages of congratulations, or with additional information, a standard non-threaded comment form should be just fine. Registration need not be required. Just have good spam filters, you know?

If you’re a new organization, you’re probably looking for members of the public to discuss & debate with the added goal of keeping it sticky and rolling eyeballs to your advertisers. Nothing wrong with this: You get to turn a profit like everyone else. Large news organizations are odd fish because there are additional liabilities to be considered, but I think there’s something to be said for approaching trolls head-on in this situation. Let the reporters roam within the comments instead of weeping quietly to themselves when their work is unfairly attached by axe-wielding peasants. You’d be surprise how much more civil and pleasant even anonymous people are when they know someone is reading and someone is replying to their comment. Of course you’ll always have trolls, but you can learn to distinguish pretty quickly. Always have your finger over the delete button.

If you’re an aggregator, you’re probably looking for a great deal more discussion than a news site. Slashdot, Lifehacker, and (to some degree) Boing Boing are aggregators. They don’t create content at all. They exist as a layer in between content producers and content consumers, a layer that accumulates content in the form of discussion. (It’s a pretty slick way to make money, actually; you don’t have to do much but build a cool site and scrape the web and let people talk and click.) If you’re an aggregator, you want lots and lots and lots of discussion.

Slashdot is really good at this. It’s an ass-ugly site and there’s tonnes and tonnes of trolling going on, but the karma system works fairly well. It’s not perfect and it does promote groupthink, but it turns the whole site into a sort of game, and there’s nothing more sticky than a game. They’ve tried to de-emphasize this in recent years, which I think is wrong-headed. But between threading & moderation, Slashdot does a pretty good job. The downside of this system is that it’s fairly complex. Add the metamoderation layer on top of that, and there’s maybe a tad too much moderation going on. This is okay for technical types, but not really user-friendly for your stupid uncle.

Boing Boing is a site that has succeeded despite its commenting system, in my humble opinion. From needing to be moderated before a post appears (maybe they had a bad experience with wide-open posting in the past or something) to the complete lack of threading, the comments are usually a mess. There’s no conversation or debate to be had there. Every comment seems isolated. They could add at least a level or two of threading and some simple community moderation.

Lifehacker has a balance of both. There’s not a lot of threading going on there, but there is a bit of moderation. By default only approved commenters appear (the commenters with stars beside them), and you can view the rest of the discussion if you with by toggling a link. This works because once you have a star you’ve gained a level of trust and of status and you don’t want to lose it. You’re chosen for your quality posts and you want to go on making them. There’s enough threading to make discussions make sense, but not so much that it breaks tables. I think they’ve got a pretty good thing going there.

So riddle me this, my dear blog readers: Do you know of a site that does comments really well? Do you have an idea? Disagree? Hit me up in the completely open, non-moderated comments.

Is doing comments right even possible? originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-06-21.

As soon as I started up the program, it would be particularly non-responsive. After a day of being open, it would be nearly usable. I thought it had something to do with the new indexing engine, the speed of my relatively ancient computer, and a host of other things. I changed settings, I compacted folders, I did this and that and nothing worked.

Until I though… hey. I have Microsoft Security Essentials installed here. I installed them and TB3 at approximately the same time… could this be the problem?

I excluded the Thunderbird binary from MSSE (Open > Settings > Excluded Processes), and lo and behold, stability!

MSSE is pretty rough on Thunderbird, it turns out. I don’t know if this is deliberate or not, though it certainly wouldn’t be out of character for Microsoft. It’s also pretty rough on Firefox, as soon as Firefox tries to download something.

In any case, this isn’t the safest thing in the world unless you’re behind some pretty good spam filters and firewalls, but it’s really the only way to make Thunderbird usable on Windows. Exclude the binary, uninstall MSSE, or use a different mail program, I guess.

Thunderbird not responding? Try this. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-06-21.

• Move the “Create a New Filter” link to toward the top of the page. I end up with a lot of filters and I don’t really want to scroll down all the way to the bottom just to make a new one. Or put a link at the top and the bottom. There’s no reason it can’t be in both places at once.
• Under the “Reply” pull-down box, place a link to make a filter from that sender. This is a lot easer than, say, copying the email address, going to filters, making a new filter, pasting the email address, etc.
• For Google Apps, could we perhaps get a “Global Filter” type page or something to mass-manage email? There are quite a few message types I would prefer no-one receive, and I don’t have time to modify each account.

Thanks!

Dear GMail… originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-08-27.

RCA to VGA converter. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-08-26.

Imagine a world where people stop demanding a faster, more awesome computer, simply because they don’t need one any more. Imagine a world where the pendulum swings back to where it came from and remote servers are the big deal and local terminals are essentially (but not totally) dumb.

This would be a surprising (and frightening) world to both the founders of IBM with their big iron and the founders of Microsoft with their big desktop iron. They would both be wrong at least a great deal of the time. Even in those places one might expect big iron there are simply commodity machines connected together. In those places where one might expect big desktop iron there are simply a bunch of web applications. This would be the miracle of the network. This would be the Cloud at work.

Maybe something will come along soon to make this possible future extremely unlikely. I have no doubt that is possible. The web, the big network connecting the small networks, is that sort of disruptive technology. Note though that the web first developed over existing infrastructure: Telephone lines were the first transport technology to support the internet. Now the internet is drawing that infrastructure into itself. It’s not that strange to imagine that the internet will be the infrastructure that draws all the separate infrastructures we know and dislike (telephone, cable television, etc) and unites them. This is happening right now. The internet is the One Ring, if you will.

But my point is not to state the obvious, but to point out that the infrastructure that replaces the internet as we know it will probably (barring any truly disruptive technologies; keep in mind that I don’t claim this is a necessary development but merely a likely one) use the internet as its infrastructure and gradually subsume it. Anyone who has coded a AJAX application is praying desperately for that day to come, and soon.

I can imagine a world where Netbooks (or whatever you like to call them: I choose Mark Shuttleworth’s term because I happen to admire him) are essentially access points to the Cloud. Certainly specialised hardware exists: No one wants to edit video on something just larger than their palm. But small laptop like devices become at least one of the dumb(ish) access points to the internet at large. This, also, is already happening.

It’s entirely possible that Moore’s Law will stop functioning. It’s not a physical law, after all, and it is a meme entirely subject to physical impossibilities that require a great deal of ingenuity and expense to circumvent. It’s also entirely possible that Moore’s Law will become irrelevant as computers become smaller, more ubiquitous, and less visible. It’s hard, for instance, to fit a heat sink in your shoe; it’s easier to simply make a smaller program and use a processor with less processing power.

Perhaps soon processors themselves will become obsolete. Who knows.

I know this post has been long and taken many un-needed detours but let me interject some personal thoughts on personal computers: Good riddance and could you please give me my fish back. I am so sick to death of overpowered computers that need to be constantly upgraded to do (essentially) the same thing. I could run a word processor on my 486 that did almost everything that the word processor on my P4 does (namely, process words). There are really very few applications that deserve the sort of processing power we’ve got idling in our living rooms. Video editing, sure. Audio processing, sure. Graphic-intensive games? Absolutely.

Instant messaging? Web browsing? VoIP? Creating text documents? No way.

I’d rather like a future where I could buy a box as I needed it. Not tailored to a one size fits all Swiss Army Knife approach (I’m looking at you, Windows) where every five years brings a new chance to upgrade to a shiny new (and despicably slow) operating system with shine new (and despicably slow) hardware. I want something I can purchase and use and throw away when I’m done. I want something disposable.

Imagine if the only options you had when buying a car were Porches, MacLaren F-1s, and Jaguars. Would that make sense?

So my challenge (ringing loud and clear to about five people) is this: Make my future fast, inexpensive, and disposable. Make my data live out in the Cloud so I don’t have to tie it to a piece of physical hardware. Please. For the children.

Netbooks, Sublaptops, Laptots, Whatever. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-06-09.

(Yes, I know this doesn’t apply to *nix, shut up.)

Gripe originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-11-07.

Why can’t we have just one cord with two or three plugs? Certainly the thing that would send information and power to a hard drive could do the same thing for your digital camera, your screen, your video camera, and your network. We could have on kind of plug for removable devices, another kind for semi-permanent devices, and a small version of both for compact devices.

Am I missing something here? Why can’t this be done?

Why do we have so many different kids of cables and plugs? originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-09-19.

Bullet points for a Friday morning. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-08-03.

We must protect the children! To do so the government must be given sweeping power to monitor the populace! We won’t use the newfound powers at our fingertips for evil!

Idiots.

Somebody needs to shoot Ted Stevens with a RPG. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-26.

It was a thing of horrible, dark beauty.

One final cheer for the fallen. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-24.

But the real storm comes at Upstream Version Freeze, and Feature Freeze. After that patches and package revisions come flooding down the pipe. I think I remember something like 50 a day for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t keep up with all the changes with my small simian mind.

So yeah, this is what I do for fun, eh. I’m looking forward to Gutsy Gibbon, whatever the case, as I hear there’s a good chance that desktop effects will finally be integrated into the system. Nice, because the bolt-on and backports don’t always work very well, and I fondly remember running Beryl in all its buggy glory. And while Compiz Fusion is nice, the packages I’ve used are backports and don’t necessarily always work that well.

Today’s Ubuntu Post originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-18.

What functionalities of MSO and OOo do you use? Do you use Word/Writer to make documents? Do you use Excel/Calc to put things in rows and columns? Do you use Powerpoint/Impress to make slideshows?

Then you’ve never scratched the surface of the functionality present in either of these office suites. You might say that they’re both way, way too complicated and unwieldy for you. You need a knife, what you have is the USS Enterprise.

Or, do you use Excel/Calc, for instance, as an application development platform of some kind? (And, tangentially, are you completely and utterly insane?)

I have been emailed a thousand spreadsheets and text documents. Literally. And I have never come across one that did anything other than page layout and a few basic formulas.

MS Office and OpenOffice both suck because they try to be both simple and complex and in trying to be both actually arrive at neither. In your typical office, what do you need to do? You need to collaborate with co-workers, you need to share calendars, you need to email, that sort of thing. None of these things is a single-user process, none of these things exists as an island.

Why then do both the major office suites insist on foisting this single-user mentality from the 1990s on us? I don’t want to edit a document, save it, have someone else edit the document, save it (or even worse, have it emailed around). I don’t want a document with an embedded application.

I want a document that I can edit in real-time while other people edit it in real time as well. Why has no one done this? Why are spreadsheets and text documents still two different things? Why has no one put them together?

Microsoft, at least, has tried, in its dorky, cumbersome way, to remedy this with a Sharepoint Portal, but even that’s a weak solution to a huge problem. Throwing a bunch of wikis and shared calendars at a paradigm that needs radical change isn’t going to solve anything; they’re merely adding another layer of abstraction on a layer of cruft and acting as if this is a new and radical idea.

It isn’t. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice are old and busted. Where’s the new hotness? Why is a company like Google trying to re-re-invent the wheel by replicating this old and busted on the internet with AJAX for crying out loud? Talk about bolting crap to crap! Where’s the new and different and outside the box and productivity-enhancing program that’s going to rock my socks off?

It’s not just that MSO and OOo are boring. They are, but that’s not the problem. They don’t meet my needs. I don’t need to make a document. I consider the idea of a document out-dated. I don’t need to save or auto-save or click through menus or scroll along a ribbon. I consider both those interface ideas out-dated.

Old and busted. So tell me, ladies and gentlemen, where is the new hotness?

Or, who is going to build the better mousetrap?

Microsoft Office and OpenOffice both suck. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-17.

If all the userland tools and common packages like Samba were forked and maintained as GPLv2. Two developmental branches if you will. And if someone were to keep a repository of these forked projects.

And if that someone were Microsoft.

GPLv3 panic in Voucherville… originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-10.

Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Skype, etc, are all exactly the same in Ubuntu. Compiz beats the pants off any other windowing system, period.

And Windows XP is that appliance I put in a box in a closet and don’t pay much attention to except when I need it, which is rarely.

It’s a beautiful thing really. The simplest of simple technologies gives me back the choice I want. As a fanboy might put it, I no longer bow before the golden calf of Redmond.

Running Windows under virtualisation: A retrospective. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-06-20.

Microsoft, of course, has other ideas. Support has ended or is ending for Windows 2000–their most stable OS to date in my experience–and in order to keep a well-patched web-facing server alive, we have two choices. One, we upgrade to Server 2003, and replace the boxes as well, as they’re pretty old and probably won’t handle 2003. Two, we keep what we’ve got, understanding that if vulnerabilities are found, we’ll be, well, vulnerable. Either we pay out a large ($10,000 or so) sum to upgrade, or we cross our fingers and hope for the best.

We’re a small company with a small technology budget. Guess what we’re going to do? I hate crappy hardware and upgrade cycles; there’s no good reason that a well-made server and operating system shouldn’t run for ten years without breaking down or becoming out of date. And not something you need a forklift to move.

On a related note, what is it with operating systems and applications devouring RAM and disk space? I mean, I understand that computing is more complicated than it once was, but Windows 95–piece of all-dancing crap that it was–took something like 25mb of RAM to run. Something like that. These days, only Mac OSX gets faster with each release, and I’m not sure how they can keep that up. Linux gather more moss with each passing day, and Microsoft Windows is positively ballooning with each new and less-needed version.

I ask myself a simple question: what sort of insane processing power, HD space, and RAM will one need to simply check ones email in 2015?

Tech talk; those of you who read Us and People can tune out and wipe the spit off your chins now. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-06-11.

But you know what? That post is wrong. iTunes sucked before, and it sucks now. I have had the unusually annoying experience of trying it out on a computer at work–you know, seconds chances and all that–but came away disappointed again. Let me address a few key points.

iTunes is a system hog.

It just is. Come on people, I know you like it, but let’s not deny the facts that I’m not going to support with numbers. Instead, a worthless anecdote: I initially installed iTunes on a grey box with a fresh vanilla XP install, and it used 46mb of memory fresh out of the box (so to speak). On my sister’s computer, with a large library, playing a good old MP3, it’s using 59mb. That’s far too much memory for something as basic as a music player. WinAmp, even with all the bells and whistles, doesn’t come anywhere close. Without the bells and whistles, it’s at a quarter of the memory used.

iTunes does too much stuff. But not enough stuff.

Really, people. iTunes is wildly functional. Extravagantly functional. It plays video, for crying out loud. It generates a thousand kinds of playlists. It has a built-in music store. &cetera. Except where it needs to be. When I want to write a plugin, how do I do this? How do I play a different codec than the limited pre-chosen selection? How do I easily manage multiple collections? Any player worth its salt–including Windows Media Player, the most worthless hunk of confusing crap ever imagined in the mind of man–can do these things. Why can’t iTunes? Sure, iTunes is pretty easy to use. It’s an MP3 player for crying out loud. But who cares if it does things easily if it doesn’t do what I want it to do at all?

Note to software designers: You will never be as inventive as those who use your software. Design for extensibility. It may be hard, but it will add value you can’t even imagine to your software, and allow those who use it to use it as they see fit.

Wait, I don’t want to use iTMS.

I don’t particularly like the iTunes Music Store. I mean, I know I can get restriction-free music for a buck thirty or so, and their selection is great. So maybe I want to use iTMS and a different music store in conjunction, or maybe not use iTMS at all. How do I do this inside the program?

iTunes is locked into this proprietary iPod -> iTunes -> iTMS channel and won’t let you exit the channel except by going outside the program. Do you see how silly this is? Imagine if you bought your car from Ford, and not only were you only allowed certain Ford-approved fuels, but you had to buy them from Ford-branded petrol stations. Or if you bought a Sony television and it could only be plugged into a Sony brand electrical socket with a patented electrical plug. You wouldn’t stand for that.

Now of course, people are going to say, “Well, iTunes can handle other music store’s MP3s!” Which it does. But that functionality is only a caveat from Apple, understanding that no one in the world would use a player that only played restricted media from iTMS.

So they went another route entirely. iTMS -> iTunes -> iPod is an easy way to buy music. It’s all integrated. You literally just click a couple times, and you’re done.

Boot up Firefox -> Log in to other music store -> Download -> Drag into iTunes -> iPod is decidedly less easy. So of course, only the people know alternatives exist will use said alternatives, and then only sometimes. This is Apple’s right, of course. It’s their software. They can do with it what they like, at least within the bounds of law. But that doesn’t mean that I have to like iTunes, or even use it. I’d much rather nurse an antipathy.

But you don’t have to listen to me. I may think iTunes is annoying and bloated, but you can keep using it. That’s your right. iTunes will fade into history like every other media player has, and eventually neither of will have to worry about it.

iTunes still sucks. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-06-06.

1. Pirate Bay, one of the flagships of the anti-copyright movement, makes thousands of euros from advertising on its site, while maintaining its anti-establishment “free music” rhetoric.

Probably. But to clarify, do the profit from it, or do they simple make enough money to cover the server and bandwidth related stuff? That’d be a nice question to answer. In any case, tPB’s rhetoric is its own, and I doubt many people who use it to facilitate their downloading actually care about the rhetoric.

2. AllOfMP3.com, the well-known Russian web site, has not been licensed by a single IFPI member, has been disowned by right holder groups worldwide and is facing criminal proceedings in Russia.

True. AllofMP3 is pretty much a skank joint, and if you’re buying music from them, you might as well just download it via The Pirate Bay.

3. Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use the sale of counterfeit CDs to raise revenue and launder money.

This may be true, though who really knows. In any case, physical piracy is another beast altogether from digital piracy, and I’m not sure why it’s included on the list. You might remember that no one really (with the exception of the Pirate Bay and the people who index trackers) makes any money from digital piracy.

4. Illegal file-sharers don’t care whether the copyright-infringing work they distribute is from a major or independent label.

Doubtful, but what’s the point here? That people aren’t all a bunch of RIAA-boycotting freedom fighters? Sure. Free music is free music.

5. Reduced revenues for record companies mean less money available to take a risk on “underground” artists and more inclination to invest in “bankers” like American Idol stars.

Absolute hogwash of the worst kind. Record labels are some of the most conservative companies in the world. They’ve always been reticent to develop new artists vs milking cash cows, from the 1930s to today. If piracy went away this very minute, they’d still be doing it, because they’re entrenched companies and are scared of change.

6. ISPs often advertise music as a benefit of signing up to their service, but facilitate the illegal swapping on copyright infringing music on a grand scale.

Good, shoot the messenger. Is it not true that bandwidth providers also facilitate people downloading from iTunes and its ilk as well? Clearly these monsters must be stopped!

7. The anti-copyright movement does not create jobs, exports, tax revenues and economic growth–it largely consists of people pontificating on a commercial world about which they know little.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is why so many people hate labels and copyright organisations. Because they don’t like anything that comes between their hand and your pocket. They don’t like piracy because it costs them money. They don’t like the internet because it makes sharing trivial and breaks up the cartel on physical distribution. They don’t like copyleft and Creative Commons because you generally don’t have to pay for these things, and because if there’s an ecosystem of free music out there, that means less revenue for the labels.

8. Piracy is not caused by poverty. Professor Zhang of Nanjing University found the Chinese citizens who bought pirate products were mainly middle- or higher-income earners.

Are you telling me that poor Chinese farmers with a subsistence living aren’t interested in downloading music from the internet? I’m socked. Shocked!

9. Most people know it is wrong to file-share copyright infringing material but won’t stop till the law makes them, according to a recent study by the Australian anti-piracy group MIPI.

This is partly true. The reality is, however, that even laws won’t stop them, because guess what, there are simply too many people for the law to deal with. Even in the US, where the most strict laws ever are in effect and the most piracy happens. Period. PS: A study by a group with a particular bias comes out supporting that particular bias? You. Don’t. Say.

10. P2P networks are not hotbeds for discovering new music. It is popular music that is illegally file-shared most frequently.

Which is what the labels fear the most. The most popular music is their cash-cow. Their big revenue stream. They don’t actually care about independent music as you might think from point number 4. What they actually care about is money. Pure, hard cash. And they’ll do anything (from suing their own customers to lobbying and bribing the US congress and by extension the world to making ever so slightly deceitful lists of “truths” to support their viewpoints) to make sure that these cash-cows are protected.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. If you can get away with selling crap to people for $20 a pop, by all means, it’s a free country. But if it stops becoming a free country because you want to protect a revenue stream instead of inventing new revenue streams, then at least let’s stop wrapping the truth up in frilly pink dresses.

I mean, record labels can call pirates leeches who eat from their revenue streams, and the pirates can call labels leeches who bottomfeed off culture itself, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a binary issue where one side is right and the other wrong.

Call a spade a spade: they’re both wrong, they’re both scum, and they both deserve to disappear, both labels and pirates.

The Inconvenient Truth about Ten Inconvenient Truths about piracy. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-06-01.