Many years ago I did some freelance writing. Some of it was painfully dull (filler articles for free magazines), some of it bizarre and seedy (your suspicions about readers’ letters in porn mags are well-founded: they are sometimes written by paid writers), but the biggest lesson I got from it was that it’s hard to make a decent living with that as your main gig.

When you need to rely on artistic output to pay the rent, it doesn’t take you long to realise that unless you’re going to get picked up by a large publisher or music label, you’re going to need another job.

Recently I’ve been thinking about this problem and the related crisis in the music and film industries in some detail. At its simplest, the problem is this:

People want to consume entertainment, but they do not wish to pay for it.

Artists do not have the right to be paid whatever they feel they are worth, they must compete in a market and persuade people to hand over cash just like any other industry. Punitive measures such as taxing consumer products in order to force payment of artists is in my opinion pure idiocy. We need to think instead about encouraging people to pay for the entertainment they love. I think that requires a few things:

1. Consumers should not have to fork out more money than they feel comfortable spending
2. More of that money needs to land in the artist’s pockets rather than distributor’s, so that artists on the ‘long tail’ can make a living off a smaller fan base
3. Artists need to find new ways to grow and engage with their fan base

Thankfully, the Internet makes all of these much more practicable than ever before.

One solution to the first problem has recently been played out with mixed results by Radiohead, but wouldn’t it be interesting if we had some sort of “tip jar” system in place for all artists? You download something via P2P, like it, and you can make a donation - of whatever size you want - to the creator. Well somebody is working on that but the question is whether it will ever work.

One artist working with a non-digital medium (paintings) has given this a whirl and it seems to be working. Ali Spagnola will - when it’s your turn - paint a picture just for you based on a theme you suggest and then send it you free of charge anywhere in the World. It’s not a con. I know this, because I’m currently staring at this picture painted for me sometime last year. Payment is completely voluntary. I’m ashamed to admit I still haven’t got around to throwing some money into the tip jar, but I’ll rectify that mistake this week. The painting has grown on me. I would miss it if I lost it. Ali deserves to be able to eat for giving it to me.

Does Ali make money? Perhaps. Do Radiohead? Definitely. So, it’s a model with potential.

As for the distribution problem, well I think it’s clear now that the current relationship with artists and the distribution chain is going to die within a matter of years. A band or a writer can now distribute directly via their website, and even authors can publish books cost-effectively without the need to get men in suits and lawyers involved. There is an issue of how to manage all this and as Kevin Kelly discovered when researching this, being your own tour manager, promoter, lawyer and roadie can be a gruelling and unprofitable exercise.

And then we get to audience engagement. The Internet has blown that apart as well - artists can now have a direct conversation with their fan base via blogs, social networking websites and video sites. It doesn’t scale (how do you stay personal with fifty million fans in 150 countries?), but that would be as they say “a nice problem to have”. Most artists don’t know how to do this well - they’re musicians, writers and film directors, not PR specialists - which suggests there will exist a niche industry helping bands do this very cost effectively within a few years. The current promotion and PR industries are not a good fit for where the industry is heading, they need to change.

As for growing your fan base, I agree with Robert Rich’s words in his message to Kevin Kelly:

Companies can use demographic models and track people’s search patterns to pander to their initial tastes and to strengthen those tastes, rather than broaden their horizons. This problem doesn’t lie within the technology of the internet, but within the realities of capitalism and human psychology.

There is a problem here with collaborative filtering - it’s locking us into tastes, not broadening them. However, it can also be the most powerful tool an artist can have working for them.

Four months ago I had never heard of The Courteeners and yet last Saturday was in the crowd at their sell-out gig at Manchester Academy having paid several times face value for the tickets off eBay. That only happened because last.fm algorithmically said “you should listen to these guys, because you like James”. So far The Courteeners and their label, promoters and distributors have directly received at least £30 off me they would never have got without that technology helping them. I expect they will get hundreds off me over the next decade providing they keep doing something I like.

However, I’d like to share that music. I’d like to say to my friends “look, listen to this, you’ll like it” and give them a copy. DRM and the law prevents me. It is working against them, because I know for a fact I could recruit at least another half dozen fans for their next tour and album release. They are working against me by insisting I do not put their album up on a website for anybody to download and listen to. I will happily work as their unpaid promoter and recruit whoever I can into giving them money, but that little circled “C” prevents me. They could have licensed it under a creative commons license, but they chose not to.

This one act alone has probably cost them a couple of thousand pounds in future lost revenue just through me. Scale it up to the 2,000 people who were at that gig the other night, they’re probably losing millions. Not millions in five years when they try and break America: millions of pounds right now, this week.

So, we need to find more new ways to openly and cheaply distribute art and leverage a fan base so as to be able to make a decent living - perhaps even an indecent living - for artists and fans alike. I have more ideas on how to make that happen, but I will share those with you tomorrow.

I’ve resisted blogging this, as the BCS have been a little incompetent and booked a smallish lecture theatre for what is likely to be a well-attended talk, however there is a backup plan those of us with an ear to the ground will have in place, so here it is:

Free of charge evening talk organised in association with the Manchester branches of the BCS and IET.

‘Free Software in Ethics and Practice’ - speaker: Richard Stallman

Thursday 1st May, 2008 - Talk starts at 6:45pm (ends approx. 8:30pm) with refreshments from 6:15pm.

Venue: Room D1, Renold Building, University of Manchester, Sackville Street, Manchester M1 3BB

There is no need to book a place - just turn up on the night.

Note that last line is perhaps the most stupid move anybody has made for a talk in Manchester involving an internationally-renowned figure in the computer industry, ever. I could be proved wrong, but I somehow doubt it…

Abstract:

Richard Stallman will speak about the Free Software Movement, which campaigns for freedom so that computer users can cooperate to control their own computing activities. The Free Software Movement developed the GNU operating system, often erroneously referred to as Linux, specifically to establish these freedoms.

About the speaker:

Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.

He’s certainly well known as a controversial figure, so it sounds like it’s going to be an interesting evening.

How exactly I ended up agreeing to him staying at my flat, I’m still not 100% clear. I have though, and will be pleased to host him for the evening. I was always brought up to be a good host even to those I sometimes disagree about some issue with so I only hope the fact me being an organiser of the local BSD User Group isn’t going to cause xkcd re-enactments. :-)

The way I understand it, there are two groups inside Microsoft right now: I shall refer to them (even if nobody else does) as the Old Guard and the New Guys.

The Old Guard are the guys who built Microsoft in the first place. They’re the ones that we might consider the Evil Empire. They thought about software as a means to make money in itself. IPR and tools like DRM were critical to their thinking about how software should work. They’re the ones the EU don’t like. They’re the ones we’re a bit tired of in the open source community. They want your money.

The New Kids have seen a little more of the World as it really is. They think that software is a tool to sell services, training, knowledge, and that things like IPR and DRM get in the way of incredible creative freedoms. To them being able to mix in with as many people as possible is more important than trying to make sure that Microsoft locks you in: they want to win by producing the best tools possible. They want your heart and soul, feeling your money will follow.

The Old Guard is, naturally, getting older. They’re retiring. The New Kids are getting more important. They’re rising through the ranks. They’re able to make decisions. They’re the future.

We’ve just seen another small move in the battle that the New Kids are winning.

Give them time. They’re getting it.

Let’s imagine you are a toymaker. No, not some carpenter in a little workshop deep in Old Europe - a multinational that commissions studies on “pester-power” and are only slightly embarrassed by the fact some of your toys contain lead paint.

You have a trademark over a game, that quite frankly went out of fashion in the 1980s. Nobody wants to play it any more because it’s seen as dull, boring and just a little bit “fuddy”.

Then, one day, you notice sales are starting to rise. People are buying the game again. You can’t understand why, so you commission another report (hey, that’s your job) to find out where this new interest is coming from. A few months later, you have an answer - somebody has created an electronic copy of your game and made it available as an application in a social networking site. People are so crazy for it as a result, your brand is now gaining value and you’re going to have to think about how to cater for this new generation of players.

What do you do?

Well, if you’re Mattel or Hasbro and your games is Scrabble and the online app is Scrabulous on Facebook, you naturally send out cease & desist letters and hack off your new fan base.

The idiocy of this decision is monumental. Yes, you need to protect your trademark. Yes, you need to show that you’ve acted to protect it otherwise you can end up losing it anyway. Do they really think this is the way forward though?

I have to admit I’m a tad biased here. Here’s my Scrabulous stats screen:

As you can see, I’m one of those people who plays daily, and plays a lot. I’d hate to see it go. But that’s not why I’m writing about it here.

There is something new about the economy that is spreading around us. In the past ideas, trademarks, patents all were treated as if they had some inherent power that should not be discussed. People say they won’t discuss things because they need to be secret, that they fear the legal consequences. People don’t give up ideas until they’re “protected”. People guard words they invented as if they alone are the secret sauce to great riches.

Here’s the thing: that’s all bullshit now.

You want people to talk about your product, your ideas. You want them to talk, talk, talk, talk all day long. You want people to stand up and shout from the rooftops about your products, your patents, your trademarks. You want them to share their ideas of how your products could be made better. When they start doing that, especially when other people are providing them the tools to do it, you should think very carefully about whether you want to tell them to shut up.

This afternoon, I’ve been playing around with Facebook’s ad platform. Partly for Vagueware, partly for other businesses, I’ve been looking at what Facebook says about its user base to advertisers.

The level of targeting is just outright astonishing. It allows for ads not only to be targeted on demographics such as age range and city, but even on interests and relationship status.

For example, I now know there are approximately (all figures given are approximate to the nearest 20 or so), 120 people in Manchester interested in Programming.

Out of the 2,017,440 UK citizens who describe themselves on Facebook as ‘single’, 998,900 are male, 904,960 are female. The numbers don’t add up because some people don’t define a gender which makes the point that if you don’t fill info in, you can’t be targeted via that info.

There are 1,180 females in the UK who declare an interest in ‘Computers’. The figure for males is around 8,540.

580 UK men say they’re really into shoes, with 14,300 British women aspiring to be Imelda Marcos.

There are around 5,680 people working for BT in the UK on Facebook. In the US, there are around 40 people working for O’Reilly Media who mention it in their profile. I could target either with an advert - handy if you have a product or idea you want to pitch.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Advertisers don’t need to know who your friends are (the social graph), to target you this tightly. If a member of GeekUp wanted to put up a singles ad for all single women between the ages of 24 and 32 who are into computers resident in Manchester (approx. 100 of them), they now theoretically could. Lucky ladies.

The question is, is this really a bad thing? Doesn’t it mean we’re not all going to see advertising that really has no relevance to us? Or does this kind of marketing mean that we are the perfect willing victims for advertisers to go deep into our psyche? I knew this day was coming, but I thought it was still some way off.

A friend just forwarded to me an article called “The Outsourced Brain” over at the New York Times. A sample:

” Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.

Musical taste? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to iTunes and it tells me what I like.”

This is going to gradually become a debate over the next few years as we pass more and more of our thinking and life over to algorithms. Stroustrup once said “Software runs civilisation”. I think we’re approaching the point where we can say “Software runs civilians”. There are obviously issues with this that need to be explored.

About a year ago I developed a hypothesis of what humanity would broadly look like 100 years from now. Some friends found my synopsis of this vision a little ridiculous: “You know the borg in Star Trek? That’ll be us”.

What I mean is that we are slowly moving our thinking out into the cloud and acting as one. Individualism is being lost, group-think is being encouraged. If that sounds a little Orwellian, can I just point out that we’re the ones encouraging it on ourselves - from CCTV cameras to collaborative filtering on Amazon - it is not being imposed on us.

The irony is that for all the menace of Borg assimilation and Orwellian dystopia in fiction, we are shaping parts of our society into something that mimics it in the hope it will lead to peace and harmony within society. Maybe it will, I don’t know.

The hope we have is that if we spend less time thinking about what music to buy, which directions to use to get somewhere, and trying to remember things we can get out of Google and Wikipedia anyway, we’ll have time for more important things. The question is what things are we doing with that time? Are we just filling that brain capacity with other trivia we don’t need?

Not for the first time, I feel that those of us styled “Software Engineers” have a responsibility to ask some questions here.

OK, so I’m having some fun with the title. This is Part III (the final part, you’ll be pleased to hear) of my write-up about the Open Schools Alliance even last week. Part I and Part II are worth a look if you just got here.

First up straight after the break was Liberal Democrat MP for Southport, John Pugh. This particular Honourable Member is well-known to those of us on the open source side of the digital divide: he has a habit of asking what must be for the mandarins on the receiving end really annoying questions of the government about their IT procurement policies. He has a particular interest in IT in schools as he himself started out as a teacher, but in recent years has found an ally in Private Eye for his questioning in the House around the tax credits fiasco and other IT blunders.

He made the argument that the government is progressively getting worse at procurement in that it’s not learning from its mistakes. He argued that many within government departments are unaware of what open source is, are unaware of what it can do, or what it can save. The quote for me from this session was “whilst the government have a road building programme, they don’t argue roads must be built so that they may only accomodate Fords”.

It seemed to me though, that his real bugbear was open standards more than open source - it is the fact we’re producing systems that lock us into a vendor for a lifetime that is causing us problems.

We then moved into a panel discussion featuring John, Ian Lynch, Mark Taylor, Mike Partridge and our strawman for the day, Dr. Stephen Lucy of BECTA.

This discussion ultimately came down to panellists and the audience expressing dismay at BECTA’s attitude towards OSS, and how they were allowing for the propping up of what can be described as state aid of Microsoft. I was quite impressed by how Dr Lucy handled the situation, but was informed by another attendee later that this was characteristic of how he worked - he would attend these events and “play a dead bat” to the air of hostility. I can’t blame him, but BECTA are going to have to realise that it’s going to get worse unless they start looking at how to bring open source into the mix.

There are huge issues around OSS and IT procurement in general - probably more urgent in education than anywhere else - and it’ll be interesting to see the direction the Open Schools Alliance.

There needs to be a shift from centralised procurement to bottom-up organisation, but even with centralised projects like CLEO it has been shown OSS can provide amazing value for money. If BECTA were willing to play ball a little, who knows how much more great software we could see in classrooms over the next few years? As it is, it feels to me like a few senior players in BECTA are positioning themselves for consultancy positions in Microsoft and WebCT.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be interesting to watch, and I only hope that eventually parents and teachers see sense, and give the OSA all the support they need.

This is the second part of my write-up from the Open Schools Alliance event last Friday. Part I is here

The second session was Deborah Murrell from CLEO who talked about trying to deploy Moodle to every school in Cumbria & Lancashire. Some schools have used Moodle as their primary web-site CMS, particularly primary schools. It’s an unintended consequence of giving them something to work with, I think.

In terms of success, whilst the pedagogical case for VLEs has yet to be proved (i.e., nobody knows if they really do help learning), this experiment looks as though it’s helping kids get access to resources even when at home. The areas they need help with are mostly around MIS integration, but part of that problem is that the most dominant provider of school management software is a commercial developer who considers open source a bizarre anachronism.

CLEO is planning on working around e-Portfolios and identity management in the future, so it looks like it could be an interesting experiment for a whole range of VLE-related areas, all possible thanks to the very open nature of Moodle.

Ian Lynch of INGOTs was up next, trying to get us all interested in his new qualifications. One of my bugbears around ECDL and similar qualifications right now is that they think the World revolves around Microsoft. Ian’s work is quite intriguing, but there is still a way to go before he can really underpin the notion of “lifelong learning” around open source in my opinion - the material he has available is still aimed very much at the schools market. Still, every journey starts with a step and I’m sure this is going to go places in time.

Mike Partridge of Stockport LEA stepped up to the plate next and made us ask questions about the nature of technology in the education system. He talked about how since the 1980s technology has led and education has had to play catch-up - he’s now interested in looking at ways that pedagogical frameworks can be embodied in the technology. He talked about social learning, individual learning styles, and independent discovery of skills.

In fact, if he wasn’t from the LEA, I could have easily assumed he was basically advocating Democratic Schooling. He is from the LEA though, so I think it’s more a case of trying to find a way to let teachers and students better understand each other.

GeekUp-regular Richard Smedley from M6-IT then talked about deploying open source systems into schools to the level of one per two children.

Some of the techniques he’s using are pretty innovative, such as recycling old hardware into thin clients to reduce financial needs. The figures he cited were pretty amazing as well - a fit-out that might have needed £100,000 using commercial software and brand new hardware, he was able to complete for £6,000 leaving enough cash lying in the school’s coffers for a building extension and a new part-time teacher.

It’s figures like that which are going to have a real political impact on open source in schools, and it was the politics of the situation we turned to after lunch, which we’ll get to in Part III.

I’m still catching up, but as promised, here are my notes from the Open Schools Alliance event last Friday. Due to the length of my notes, I’m splitting this up into several parts to be posted over the next couple of days.

The Open Schools Alliance have a tricky balancing act to pull off. There appears to be a natural inclination towards giving what is effectively a monopoly to Microsoft in the education market, they have to lobby hard and loud. By doing so, they risk being labelled “religious zealots”, as indeed some have labelled them in the past. This event though was positioned as a way of making educationalists aware of the landscape of open source in schools and aimed to educate and inform rather than proselytise.

Well, that was until some people got stuck in during the afternoon panel session, but we’ll get to that in Part III.

Martin Douglamas, the founder of Moodle - the most developed and widely deployed of the open-source VLEs - was present and gave a run-down on the history and possible future of Moodle and its partners. The open-source business model they’ve adopted is pretty interesting: the code is owned by a trust that is sustained by donations and contract services, but partner organisations can get official recognition as long as they drop 10% of their profit around projects back into the trust. It’s like an open-source, anarchist (in the political sense) multi-national that works. It’s possible this is one future of open source economics.

Martin talked about the scalability of an open source model: 200+ developers which even commercial VLE providers would struggle to match with their exorbitant pricing models, and the relatively flat structure.

What really interested me though was the plans to introduce “community hubs” into Moodle. Teachers in schools in a given geography are likely to be teaching the same curriculum material in a similar style, yet they are all independently creating the same content. How best could you organise it so that once a module was in the system, it could be shared by all teachers teaching that module? The answer will be a hub where courses can be shared (or charged for) amongst a group of people with the ability to connect to that hub. Bottom-up hierarchies: you’ve got to love it.

Tim O’Reilly is calling for Facebook to share social graph data so that systems can leverage all the data you’ve shoved into Facebook and use it within their own apps.

There are a couple of issues here.

Firstly, Facebook isn’t actually stopping 3rd-party API developers from knowing who your friends are, and if your friends agree to add an application, the app provider can see their graph too. What isn’t agreed yet is whether this should be made more open, or whether there needs to be a standard way of describing this data. There are all sorts of reasons why I might not want my “social graph” to be made available in an easily-manageable format, not least because it raises privacy concerns.

There is also the fact that Facebook’s business model relies on not making this data available. The “expose your data, and they will come” argument relies on a simple metric of conversion.

Within a company like Amazon, exposing the product catalogue by API is a no-brainer. The more places their stock list is available, the more chances they have of getting somebody into the system, the more likely they are to convert them into a sale. The porous membrane an API gives an app developer in this instance means 3rd-prty developers do the hard work of getting stock shifted in countless innovative ways the original company wouldn’t have thought of.

Facebook however, is different. The ‘conversion’ in their instance is getting somebody to look at pages with adverts on it. What they need is for their users to actively recruit more users - invite them inside the walled garden - and then try and keep them there. They’ve out-sourced the “retaining” part of the equation to developers (playing games, taking quizzes, sharing links, glorified e-mail), but by allowing their most valuable asset to be easily exported they are reducing their customer’s incentive to stay within the walled garden.

As always, it comes down to whether you have a right to that data, and whether you have a right to move it. I’d argue you do, but I’m suggesting it’s going to be hard for Facebook to allow you to take it wherever you want.

[UPDATE]: I realised there is a way to do this without Facebook’s permission. I’ve written it up on the site.

My good friend and ex-colleague from way, way back, Andy Stothard, is currently on holiday in Vancouver. He loves the place and last time he came back he raved about it.

He’s just posted an article that struck me as an interesting take on file sharing. He’s sat down in front of his laptop, found a nearby computer sharing iTunes and decided to have a listen. It may be that “Gareth” didn’t intend for that to happen, or maybe he did.

What fascinates me about this is that there is an added context to the file sharing given by geography. It’s only people on the same immediate network you can see, and if Andy had really wanted to, he could have found Gareth and had a chat about his music collection (and maybe IT security) whilst he was there. What if it was “Gillian” instead of “Gareth” and Andy had really liked her taste in music. And she had found his iTunes collection to be interesting as well. And they’d made an effort to find each other?

File sharing has been criticised because it allows for an anonymous, amorphous mass on opposite sides of the planet to steal copies of music easily. What Andy was engaged in there didn’t take anything away from the publishers (he didn’t have a copy of the music, if he wants a copy he’ll need to buy one himself), added to his sense of the people around him in a foreign city, and potentially could have allowed for interesting conversation to break out between two previously unconnected people.

There is a lot to think about in the future with relation to the economics of creative works and the rise of ubiquitous digital access, but we need to realise that it’s not “File Sharing” that is the problem but “File Copying”.

Chris Morrison writes up some conclusions on a story suggesting that when Yahoo! told Congress last year that they didn’t know Shi Tao was a dissident and not really a spy, they might have been a bit disingenuous if not outright lying.

The truly exceptional part of his post is the knuckle-dragging moronic comments that Chris has been subjected to. Stuff like this:

“You spoiled brats need to understand that China is not USA. They don’t enjoy the freedoms and rights we do. The police/gov can arrest anyone at anytime with little or no evidence. Many are still wrongfully executed today.

So if you were Yahoo and the police and gov. agencies are knocking at your door what can you do? You either comply or you’re in violation of some bogus law.

As Ven stated, the Chinese Gov. is the problem here. You think any other company would have done something different/morally responsible?”

Superb proof that comments are completely futile if you needed it, but this content is just so astonishingly unintelligent I’m almost lost for words.

It seems to suggest that Yahoo! found themselves playing the part of victim here, that they were just ambling through China one day innocently scooping up buckets full of cash minding their own business and then found themselves being subject to an attack by the Government smashing batons over their heads.

We’re facing an uphill struggle against this kind of idiocy. People appear to have problems understanding that technology companies - the most globalised of all companies in today’s World - have moral responsibilities and instead prefer to blame it all on technocrats getting in the way of good ‘ole capitalist fun.

Yes, Yahoo! has to comply with local laws. That’s why they should be careful about which countries they decide to work in. If I throw an application out the door this afternoon, there is nothing stopping somebody in China using it until the Great Firewall team decide it’s “dangerous”. If I actively set up an office in Beijing and do the paperwork so that I have to comply with state police requests I’m agreeing to step over a line that has certain consequences.

My argument is that we should be careful about making that step with some countries.

Imagine if this were the 1980s and Yahoo! had been asked to help the South Africans track members of the ANC. Would we have said they were perfectly OK to comply with local laws, or would we be screaming that they should get the hell out of Dodge and just accept they aren’t going to make some money there whilst the people in charge are incapable of understanding human rights?

In the same way that IBM has been criticised for its role in 1930s Germany (it is alleged they helped the Nazis identify and round up Jews using their patented card index system) Yahoo! is going to find itself on the wrong side of history until they just accept that running a mail service in China is dangerous as hell. Google might censor search, but they don’t store anything of interest to the police because they tread that line carefully: Yahoo! just want market share no matter what.

It’s not just Yahoo! and Google who have to think about this: it’s something all software companies need to consider in the modern era. If we truly are the people responsible for this iteration of civilisation, do we not have a responsibility to have guide our decisions with a moral or political framework that guarantees certain basic rights to our users? And does running a service in China that requires personal information to be collected put that framework in jeopardy?

Now it looks like the morality at Yahoo! could be so warped that it might involve being less than honest with Congress. And don’t think this is all the fault of the management - they hired an ethics officer but at the last shareholder meeting, they were told by shareholders they couldn’t commit to not proactively censor content or create a committee on human rights in relation to their business: the shareholders are starting to look like the real scum bags here. Given that Yahoo! is having serious business problems with this strategy, perhaps it’s time for a change of direction. Interesting times indeed…

Whilst I might argue and protest about our own action/inaction in the West over the problems of China and the need for democratic reform, there is nothing that is going to be more effective than the 1.2 billion population of the World’s least understood country getting hacked off with the Government themselves

Yang’s fury erupted a few days ago when he found he could not browse his friend’s holiday snaps on Flickr.com, due to access restrictions by censors after images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were posted on the photo-sharing Web site.

Of course, all Governments enforce censorship at some level. Whilst we might umm and err over Western censorship, many find uncomfortable the prospect of Chinese people not being able to talk about politics freely. Many feel rightly concerned that the whole of Flickr gets banned just because of some photos of the Tiananmen Square massacre appearing there.

But concern only carries you so far. Action is what actually changes things. As the above article points out, the Chinese Government are probably right at this point in time that this means they’re going to be able to keep the status quo going:

The battle for control of China’s Internet, however, will remain much more covert than confrontational, according to Liu Bin, an IT consultant with Beijing-based consulting firm BDA.

He believes it will take a long time before the government loosens control over Web content, especially because the Internet-savvy middle class is unlikely to take to the streets – like the farmers of Bobai county – over lack of Web access.

That might be the case today, but slowly, slowly, the real sleeping giant of China is starting to stir: its population. As the clichéd Chinese proverb might point out, “we live in interesting times”.

According to CNET Eric Schmidt is saying filtering of copyright material on YouTube is about to be turned on.

I say that is an amazingly good thing for the Web in general, and UGC sites in particular.

If you go to YouTube today it is full of clips from mainstream media interspersed with attention-seeking idiots and experiments with Mentos and Diet Coke. Right now, mainstream media have nothing to fear from YouTube because it is merely TV cut up and made more convenient for people with ADD. By demanding that MSM-sourced material is removed, they are relinquishing control and demanding that the users compete with them directly.

If we get rid of the mainstream media from UGC video sites, we’ll actually see a proliferation of UGC. Nature abhors a vacuum, and nothing fills it quicker than YouTube users. I think people will quickly get bored of op-ed pieces to camera, and we’ll see a more creative spirit flourish because suddenly the audience will be looking for it, rather than just finding clips of comedy shows and watching them in lieu of doing something more creative instead.

The week of the 23rd April through the 29th is TV Turnoff Week and my own experience shows a proliferation of creative activity when my time is not being stolen by a piece of furniture. Content filtering on UGC sites will have a similar effect - when you can’t watch clips of Family Guy any more, you might try and fill that time with producing something yourself, and if that happens in just 1% of cases, we’ll see a sharp uptick in quality UGC found on the video sites.

People shouldn’t bemoan copyright material filtering on YouTube - they should applaud it, and encourage it as the dawn of a new era in users taking control of the media they consume. Viacom are willing Google to ensure Viacom can’t control their audience any more: that’s to Viacom’s detriment and to our benefit. Viva la revolution! :-)

Right now, I’m quite an angry man. I’ve just read The GIFT of Giving at Yodel Anecdotal, where Michael Samway gives us an account of his trip to the State Department, to talk about Yahoo! is really ‘doing the right thing’. The only comment that he makes about the huge problem human rights protestors have with Yahoo! is this:

The tense moment on the first panel arrived when an Amnesty International representative opened his remarks by directly accusing Yahoo! and the other companies of cooperating with repressive regimes, including handing over information on political dissidents and limiting the free flow of information.

That’s undercutting it a bit. For those of you unaware of the story, you may want to catch up on some background reading

I’m a supporter of Amnesty International. I believe we need to be responsible with the data that we hold as companies working across international borders. Michael goes on to defend Yahoo! by stating that in the second panel:

… we each raised some of the vexing questions we all wrestle with in the field of business and human rights. Partly in response to comments from the first panel, I explained that we condemn the punishment of any activity internationally recognized as free expression and that the relationship between law enforcement entities and technology companies around the world is more complex than commonly understood. Rarely, if ever, will a company know the name, identity, or occupation of an individual connected to a user ID demanded by a law enforcement agency, whether in Munich, Mexico City, or Mumbai. What we do know is we protect user privacy through rigorous compliance practices and careful adherence to law governing government demands for user information.

Vexing questions, eh? The only ‘vex’ is “Do we sacrifice human rights and work with repressive regiemes in order to gain market share?” to which Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google all answer a resounding “YES PLEASE!”. As for not knowing all the details, Yahoo! know as well as I do that you don’t need all the details. An IP address is often more than enough to track down a user if you need to - I know this, because when I worked for a major multinational ISP, it was one of my jobs to work with the Police in order to catch paedophiles, and all I needed to help them get their man was an IP address and a date/time.

Yahoo’s atttitude is not atypical of the industry wanting to break into China right now, but it is typical of the flagrant disregard that they have for human beings, and certain values we consider in a civilised society to be universally true. They claim that they take a stand, but the moment that stand looks like China will lock them out of the market, they buckle. Their reasoning?

…the presence of companies like Yahoo! in markets abroad can have a transformative effect on peoples’ lives and on local and national economies. Information is power. Access to information, especially through the Internet, has changed what people know about the world around them and about events, people, and issues that directly impact their lives day-to-day. People know more about local public health issues, environmental causes, politics, consumer choices, and job opportunities. They communicate and interact like never before with family, friends, neighbors, and people locally, regionally, and even globally with similar interests. And the Internet drives innovation across sectors, including in science, medicine, business, and journalism to name a few.

That would be true, but for one simple fact. The information Yahoo shows to their Chinese audience is regulated in its entirety by the Chinese government, and the moment there is something truly powerful on the net - say, a website suggesting democracy would be a better way to run the World’s most populous nation - Yahoo! calmly assist the Chinese government in making sure nobody sees it, and if the poster of the content was using a Yahoo! mail account, well here, have the IP address they last used when logging in to check their mail, our pleasure.

What really sickens me about this, is Yahoo! just refuses to accept they’re doing anything morally objectionable. They just sit around humming and hawwing and making noises of “difficult questions… it’s a tough one to call… lot of factors to consider…” without once stopping, and thinking to themselves “We’re responsible for people being persecuted, jailed and possibly tortured”, and doing the one thing that any civilised human would do: get the hell out of Dodge.

I doubt my comment on that post making a direct attack will ever get approved, so I’ll just post it here:

I’ll bet a large wedge of cash that this never gets approved, but if somebody at Yahoo! reads this and tries to change internal policy, that would be “nice”

I’m glad you had a nice day out, and that you think Yahoo! is doing something important in helping people change their view of the World.

It doesn’t, however, change the fact that Yahoo! are responsible for handing over information on several dozen democratic reformers in China, who are now rotting to death in jail.

The line “we were just complying with a legitimate governmental request” doesn’t cut it - you guys know you were in the wrong to do it, but you don’t care about doing wrong as long as you are able to keep, and grow, market share.

Yahoo! in China is no different to IBM in Nazi Germany - “we’re not involved, we’re just doing business, our shareholders expect it of us” - but history will judge that Yahoo! were involved in a disgusting chapter of Chinese history and didn’t do a thing to get in the way if it meant it would hurt the bottom line.

I hope you enjoy more cups of coffee with important people, but if you want to make a difference, you have to club together with the rest of civilised society and make a stand that you’re not going to hand over data on people who just want to be able to vote - and take the consequences of loosing market share, or being thrown out of the market. Your shareholders will have more belief in you for doing the right thing, then they will for you doing anything to make a buck.

Until then, I, and many others like me, refuse to use Yahoo! services of any form unless I have no choice. As people hear what it is you guys have done in the past, our numbers will grow. I only hope one day you will realise that helping the Chinese government find and torture democratic ‘dissidents’ hurts your share price more than not being in China.

As ever, opinion and thoughts invited in the comments.