Copyright Extension Critics are Idiots

How many bloggers (TechDirt, a dozen different contributors to CNET - the list is enormous) get to say, "Copyright should be limited" before the creators of original content (including authors such as Cory Doctorow who occasionally gives away online one of his excellent books) stand up and realize they are slowly being conned into agreeing with the vast majority of the self-entitled Gimme generation that is creating less of value than any previous generation while at the same time demanding more for free than any previous generation?

It's a poser as far as I'm concerned. The great Mark Twain addressed the U.S. Congress in 1906 to pitch the idea of extending copyright by at least fifty years and, in related writings and speeches, to extend copyright in perpetuity. His comment to Congress that his daughters needed the money because they were not as well-prepared for life as he, was less a commentary on his lack of foresight for his children than it was a disparagement of the roles of women at that time into which even the great Twain ended up placing his own daughters. Nor, as some pundits have suggested, was Twain's address to Congress a satire.

Earlier, Twain had written a sympathetic letter to the child prodigy Helen Keller in which he commiserated with her about accusations of plagiarism which had been leveled against the 14 year old. In his letter he decried originality of all kinds, noting that that the main part of all new ideas and creations are the sum of worldly influences and utterances absorbed by an individual. Twain essentially stated that there was nothing new under the sun, but rather only increments of originality wrapped in the influences of others; the influences of all who had all directly or indirectly contributed to the final new idea or creation. So Twain consoled Keller by urging her to more good works and to not worry about accusations of plagiarism for "all writing is plagiarism" and so on.

That punduts today could deliberately spin Twain's letter to Keller as a contradiction in terms with respect to copyright is unnervingly self-serving. If some writers, musicians, artists, programmers, scientists, sculptors, inventors or other originators choose wilingly to give up copyright and release their works into the public domain, that is their right in my view. But copyright inherent to the originator should be entrenched in law and held in perpetuity or until such time as the heirs of an originator can no longer be addressed. That some good works might sit unseen or uncopied or unpublished for a time (or forever) is no loss to anyone except the greedy, self-entitled toffs, poorly educated content consumers, text/web/download-addicted content junkies, TV drones and pundits who just want easy access to everything because it will make their lazy lives even less stressful.

Copyright lives in the hearts and minds of originators. Just because it is possible to take something easily from them does not perforce mean that law should be amended to make it easier to do so. And get this right - great writers, artists, scientists and musicians may drive themselves because of a deep and abiding passion for their work, but they must have a payoff to keep going. They must have encouragement, motivation and a reward which consists of a lot more that just, "Great Job!"

Concurrent with the assault on copyright, there is an ever-widening and broadly observed gap between the wealthy and all the rest of us. The middle classes which bridged that gap in so many countries has to a great extent been pushed downward. The gap widens therefore and the chasm between the wealthy and us is being filled with great originators whom the wealthy would prefer earn no more than a shoe salesman or a restaurant hostess. It's a natural expectation - the rich and influential did not get that way by paying too much - and they're slowly convincing the great mass of population on the planet that everything should be free. They're also trying to convince us that copyright is only legitimate if the originator has the mountain of cash needed to protect it when some wealthy thief comes along secure in the knowledge that the originator can outlast him in a lawsuit. So copyright, even amid current law in the western democracies, is less a right than it is a redoubt of the weak which must be defended against moneyed power.

You've been duped, and you really won't realize how badly you've been duped until the day comes when you originate something valuable yourself and someone comes along and rips it off, cracks it, copies it in his own name, and then beats you to the mark because he's got more money than you and can validate his banditry by outspending you in court. He's the one who is contantly urging the Gimme generation to find more and more excuses to simply take for free what others have worked hard to create. While so many content consumers and content redistributors in the online world gleefully build a dense forest of free trade and cosumption, the bandits hide among trees and steal everything in sight for themselves. It's a mess out there: proprietary software code casually traded online for real money, tens of thousands of patents issued for utter nonsense, companies which buy other companies that own patents solely for their litigious value, artists and musicians rights usurped by record labels, artists and musicians left to wade through the morass online to self-promote and self-distribute. National governments, the financial industry which trades on hardship, and multi-national manufacturers of everything would have us all working for minimum wage and turned into content consumers tethered to portable content consumption devices.

Live long and prosper, but don't rely on copyright to put food on your table. You might as well not create anything of value because someone with the protection of lawyers and lots of money will simply come along and steal it to feed the aforementioned masses. The death of originality may be closer than you think.

Facebook Buys Instagram - No Surprise At All

The Facebook IPO will soon launch. Afterwards, all the guys who got in early will likely be quite flush. Those are the guys who took a piece of founder Mark Zuckerberg's enterprise early in the game. Some of those guys also more recently took a piece of Instagram, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that one (currently) private company just paid an absurdly high price for another private company. Now. Before the IPO. Before the board of directors of a soon-to-be-publicly traded company exists to say ONE BILLION DOLLARS FOR THAT? ARE YOU CRAZY?

Why Fujifilm Has A Better Idea

Canon has just announced a 2K- resolution digital SLR. Nikon is (slowly) delivering it's shiny new D800 digital SLR. Canon has truckloads of its new 5D MK III digital SLR cameras on store shelves. Nikon is (slowly) delivering its shiny new D4 digital SLR. Sony is selling its new-ish A77 digital SLR and, like the other cameras here it's receiving rave reviews. My complaint is mainly that all of these cameras designs emphasize advanced HD video as much or more than they emphasize still photography. They are all also very complicated to use.

Fujifilm has just released its X-Pro1 though and it's a revelation. The X-Pro1 is a full-size, 16 megapixel digital rangefinder with extremely high quality interchangeable lenses and a hybrid viewfinder that has to used to be appreciated for its vastly superior design and utility.

What has Fujifilm really accomplished? The simple answer has several parts. First, it's a better digital rangefinder design than the Leica M9 because of its radically accurate autofocus and remarkable hybrid viewfinder. Second, the X-Pro1 handles like the enthusiast and pro street shooter's dream that it is. Third, technical still image quality is startlingly excellent - the only limit is the photographer. Fourth - and perhaps most important - as much as the advanced digital SLR cameras mentioned above are so deeply complex that an enormous number of users are facing intimidating usability challenges, the X-Pro1 by comparison looks and feels simpler and more creatively usable.

Fujifilm has been using its generations of successful experience to re-think conventional camera design and has come up with a genuine winner. If you're primarily a still image photographer you owe it to yourself to give the X-Pro1 a very long look.

Has Adobe Lost its Grip?

Adobe's endless round of frequent Flash updates will soon include an automated feature which should scare the living daylights out of you.

While the frequency of Flash updates is in itself alarming (I mean, just how many hacker-exploitable holes does Flash actually have?), other software is frequently included in the updates - e.g., Google toolbar or Yahoo toolbar - software which you have to opt-out of to prevent it from being installed along with the Flash update. Sun Microsystems doesn't do much better than that either with its frequent Java updates that include the opt-out Yahoo toolbar (which I can't stand). I digress - Adobe is the focus here.

So the problem with automatic Flash updates is basically that you'll run the risk of having anything Adobe chooses to piggyback on the update installed on your PC. Anything. This fact, coupled with Adobe's latest and foul smelling scareware tactic reported by Ed Bott on ZDNet, makes me think Adobe has lost its grip on reality. Has Adobe recently hired a bunch of ex-malware developers? If not, you could have fooled me.

Adobe has been doing some odd things lately - that's obvious. A brand new copy of Photoshop CS6 remains priced out of sight. Photoshop Elements has become top-heavy with far too many features and functions, and is less intuitively usable than ever before (which is a shame for a product we've repeatedly praised in past Kickstartnews reviews). Lightroom seems like a slick, usable and highly effective diamond in the mud compared to the swampy murk of Flash update automation and what in my opinion is a suspicious system optimizer which an initial report alleges alerts users to non-existent problems. That's back-of-the-van-in-a-parking-lot stuff.

I'm really having a difficult time rationalizing all of this in Adobe's favor. If the system optimizer report is as accurate as I think it is, Adobe should be ashamed of itself. Just another bunch of bozos who've lost their grip on common sense and ethical behavior? I hope I'm wrong and I hope Adobe fixes its problems very quickly.

The Biggest Companies Often Make the Biggest Mistakes - Consumers Suffer

How is it possible for a huge company with enormous software programming resources, enormous hardware, online server and IT resources, and enormous beta testing resources to release a product which causes significant problems? Google's recent release of its Gmail app for Android smartphones is a case in point. A noticeable percentage of Gmail app users on Android smartphones are experiencing flickering when they launch the app. Their smartphone screens literally flicker rapidly, rendering the phones completely unusable. The problem results not from a bug or virus or hack of any kind. Rather (I suspect) it's either a bug which wasn't caught due to some fundamental test plan errors during beta testing, or a bug brought on by changes/updates to Google's servers. Lots of angry Android smartphone users right now.

The iPhone antenna problem, fully solved with the release of the iPhone 4S no doubt, was bizarre for its very existence in the first place. How is it possible that induction through hand/finger contact with the peripheral antenna (which seriously reduced phone reception quality) was not noticed during field testing of the device? It's almost impossible to understand how such a problem could have escaped notice by the developers, product managers and beta testers. Pronouncements by Apple, when the problem was acknowledged publicly due to widespread complaints, that people were not holding the phone correctly merely embarrassed Apple and angered a large number of already disappointed customers. Then again, an equally large number of customers experiencing the signal reduction problem actually bought into the initial Apple explanation and tried to train themselves to hold the phone without touching its edges (because they still had to continue using their iPhones after all).

We can go farther back in time. What about Sony's long, goofy foray in Memory Stick land? While the entire electronics industry was stabilizing on Secure Digital (SD) and Compact Flash (CF), there was Sony isolating its products by imposing removable storage only through Memory Stick (MS) media. MS still exists, but it's dying rapidly and Sony is now saddled with legacy compatibility issues by having to maintain MS ports in many devices with the corresponding engineering and design difficulty of accommodating the port/slot in devices which now sport SD card slots and have very little internal space to use for an MS slot as well. Sony, an enormous company then and now, apparently listened only to the sound of its own drum, ignored all obvious trends, and then did its own thing with respect to storage media. Hubris at its finest and most obvious. All those resources (and keep in mind that all the pundits in the 90's questioned Sony's foray into MS-land at the time - this is not 20/20 hindsight here now), and not a lick of common sense? It's hard to believe.

Microsoft contined to fail to learn the hard lessons of the recent past (the debacle of Windows Millenium) when it released Windows Vista. While it's true that Vista was not the disaster-riddled mess that Millenium foisted on us, it is just as true that Vista was an interim operating system (between the excellent Windows XP and the excellent Windows 7) that should never have escaped the company's software development buildings. Upgrades were problematic, a significant percentage of which simply didn't go well and required users to spend hours doing manual reconfiguration and talking to Microsoft tech support specialists. Basically, if you purchased Vista and did not do a clean installation (instead of upgrading an existing Windows XP installation) the chances were good that you were courting aggravation. It is impossible to believe that Microsoft didn't know about Vista problems. Yet the operating system was released, warts and all, to a consumer public interested in upgrading Windows. Vista had the second shortest retail life of any Microsoft operating system.

The list is long. Laptop computer makers selling products containing batteries which last little more than 90 minutes, and which makers then act surprised when consumers return the products. Digital camera makers that release cameras with unbalanced basic color, cheap and unsharp lenses, and containing sensors which generate so much noise that they're unusable under anything but perfect outdoor, daytime lighting conditions. Is it corporate ego or hubris which drives companies to release products with serious, known problems? Is it a belief that, driven by marketing, consumers will buy something cheap in order to participate in a trend (even if the product is obviously junk)? Is it simply risk assessment studies which tell company managers that they'll still make lots of money even with buggy products? Whatever the case may be, consumers are being poorly served by many companies that try to overcome their product shortcomings by trying to psyche us out with clever and relentless marketing. All of these companies can quite easily do better, and that's what we all - as consumers - should demand.

How Apple Makes Money

DigiTimes is a widely read source of electronics and general manufacturing industry information in Asia-Pacific. It's a massive web site that is full of up-to-the-minute information about every facet of technology production, industry trends, buying trends and design trends in every segment of tech. DigiTimes recently did its thing on the new iPad - a teardown of the device and an estimate of actual manufacturing costs. It's fascinating reading.

If you add a total of US$25 per unit to the numbers produced by DigiTimes in order to account for shipping, local and regional distribution, marketing costs and so on, plus a margin for third-party retailer costs and profit, Apple is still making a boatload of money on each and every sale.

Why do we willingly pay so much for these products? We rarely pay full price for anything any more in any other part of our lives. Yet we discard iPods, iPhones and iPads the split second a new one is released, and pay full price for the new one just as willingly as we paid full price for the previous one. We complain bitterly though, when the heavily discounted, daily-use winter jacket acquired at Target or Walmart doesn't last four seasons, while at the same time looking condescendingly at anyone still using an iPad 1, iPhone 3 or fourth generation iPod. We're fools sometimes, and we frequently go into debt to prove it.

The Mike Daisy Effect (or should we name it after somebody else)?

Mike Daisy, according to the Wikipedia page about his life and career, "is an American monologist, author, and actor best known for his full-length extemporaneous monologues. Daisey's book 21 Dog Years is an account of life as an Amazon.com employee. Since that time he has prepared and performed extemporaneous monologues about Nikola Tesla, L. Ron Hubbard, Steve Jobs and Apple's supply chain in China, the Department of Homeland Security, the history of the New York transit system, 9/11, the inventor of the neutron bomb, Wal-Mart and a variety of other topics." It is unfortunate, then, that his recent video release, an excerpt from his one-man theatrical show titled "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" has turned out to contain some details which are somewhat fanciful. I use the word fanciful advisedly. "Fanciful" is sometimes a civilized substitute for the word "bullshit."

Mike Daisy seems to have fallen prey to the same emotional influences a lot of American pundits, commentators, humorists and editorialists have demonstrated. That is, if it's taking place outside of the U.S. it must perforce be less than honorably done. But we always tend to forget, when pointing fingers at others, that our own industrial growing pains resulted in so many domestic horrors. From the Wikipedia description, "The (Triangle Shirt Waist factory) fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women aged sixteen to twenty-three; the oldest victim was 48, the youngest were two fourteen-year-old girls. Because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits – a common practice at the time to prevent pilferage and unauthorized breaks – many of the workers who could not escape the burning building jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors to the streets below. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers."

Since first-person memories of the Triangle Shirt Waist factory fire in New York are now all gone (all the factory owners and workers associated directly with it, in 1911, are now dead after all), along with the memories of many other coal industry, farm labor and illegal immigrant labor abuses apparently (which are taking place to this very day), we look at videos like the one produced by Daisy and react with only detached concern. So what Daisy has effectively pointed out, some fabrications and a bit of extemporaneous bullshit included, is merely that abuses of workers are taking place in some Chinese factories, some of the electronic products we covet are produced by abused workers, and that it's appropriate for us to have second thoughts about shelving our concerns and our consciences when making buying decisions. It's a reasonable point of view.

Ira Glass, the host of This American Life (the show which first ran Daisy's Chinese factory video), has now compounded things by running what Daisy calls a carefully edited story apology interview manipulated to depict Daisy as a hesitant fumbler (something which Daisy is clearly not), and that to me seems more like the first salvo of a legal defense against what the show's producers must think is an impending lawsuit from Apple. Daisy has struck back too, stating quite clearly that the Chinese interpreter has been compromised by so-called truth seekers and by after-the-fact due diligence actions, and that his tale-telling is about the foundational message of real worker abuse.

So who is the fool here? Is it This American Life? Is it Daisy for taking editorial liberties which cross the line into bullshit? Is it the American tech media who rush to tut-tut at Apple and then do an about-face to tut-tut at Daisy? Is it Ira Glass who participates in what in my opinion is a gleeful tar & feather job of Daisy? I think the answer lies elsewhere. I think that the people who tracked down Daisy's Chinese interpreter from the video need to understand how dumb it is to, potentially, out a Chinese woman like that in a country which suffers criticism very harshly. I think the larger issue of rampant labor abuses is masked by the righteous indignation of public commentators who, to a one, can all be accused of manipulating stories of their own to obtain a certain spin.

Mike Daisy is a fool for leaving his story so vulnerable to attack. I'll leave it to you to figure out the number of nanoseconds it took Apple supporters to begin finding some leverage against Daisy through the use of his own tactics. But the essence of the Daisy story remains true - industrial labor abuses exist around the world and right here at home. The Triangle Shirt Waist factory fire didn't put the company out of business and it didn't stop people from buying the clothing produced by the factory any more than knowledge of labor abuse allegations against Foxconn has stopped anybody from buying Apple products.

Seeking out ethically produced goods means dealing with somewhat higher prices, fewer choices and, perhaps, also having less junk you don't really need sitting on your shelves and in your closets at home. This is not a bad thing. As much as commentators like Mike Daisy need to be accurate, so too must Apple and all its competitors conduct business and production in an ethical manner. The liberties taken by Daisy and the worker abuses by employers are all of a piece - one does not cancel out the other. Ira Glass, the tech media, the producers of This American Life, Apple Corp, and any manufacturer that allows worker abuses must understand this and make changes. If we abuse others in the pursuit of some goal, we lose our souls and we drown our humanity.

Apple Online Store Overloaded! Panic in the Streets!

The tech media, dependent as they are for their bread & butter The iPad 2 - Amazon should have the iPad 3 very shortly.(or, depending on the region, rice & yams, borscht & pickles, kapusta & sausage, pasta fagioli, tacos & beer, etc.), get all ditzy and bent out of shape the moment one of their precious icons burps up a smelly one. The Apple Online Store, during the iPad 3 launch, is a case in point called out so roundly by Jason D. O'Grady in his recent C|Net article.

Heavens above, dear heart, the online store ground to a halt under the onslaught of a few million slavering early adopters intent on getting their iPad 3's right bloody NOW if you please. Of course Apple didn't bother to bring on board an additional truckload of bandwidth/servers/processing power to handle the load. I wouldn't have done that either. Neither would any other sane businessperson.

The same goofballs who roundly criticize Apple for making people wait to make a purchase online, actively and cheerfully report from brick & mortar Apple stores about people who wait in line there for many more hours than they would have waited to make an online purchase. And do O'Grady and his minions believe that even so much as a single prospective online iPad 3 buyer didn't logon to the Apple Store a few hours later or the next day to make the purchase?

I think some of the tech media writers have become keenly aware of the fact that they often don't actually do anything productive for a living. So they fear that any crack in the technology sector - even one so innocuous as a boringly typical delay or overload at an online store in the midst of a huge product launch - is liable to add a notch in their employer's "I don't think I need this guy anymore" ledger. Or something like that. Sound the klaxon and forfend some brick & mortar store momentarily outperforms the tech media's precious online retail bastions. Or something like that too. It would mean that the retail side of the Web, with all its flaws, pretensions, inadequacies and repeated failures is not our joyride into the tech future, but rather just another limited creation by the same gang who brought you a lot of other crap you don't really need.

One day, Mr. O'Grady (a serious, respected, savvy tech blogger and tech journalist by the way - let it be noted) will trip over a massive product launch at least as big as the iPad 3 which goes smoothly. Now that would be news.

Google is Starting to Make Sense

Google is a for-profit business. Get that? For-profit. Lots of people - maybe even the vast majority of people who've ever used Google for search - already know that. Problem is, they forget it when media flacks, government flacks and sundry other flacks decide to investigate Google every time the company makes any sort of major move.

The thing is, I actually like what Google has done with search personalization and search integration (back in September 2011), and I also like what Google has done with its integrated privacy policy announced and implemented in February. To put it all in rational perspective, you only have to remember that Google is a real business looking for real ongoing profits and new ways to grow and diversify.

Simply put, if you've got a Google+ account containing some content, a gmail account that you make current use of, and if you're doing searches, Google is going to poke around for search results from Google+ Circles to which you belong (among other places) in an effort to add relevance and presence to the search results it provides to you. The idea seems to be that the 'private' circles you prefer and in which you tend to move might often be a preferential source of search results. If you turn off personal access before doing a search, what you'll get is a more objective set of search results from the broader Web. That's the ticket too - turn off personal access before doing certain kinds of searches. Seems simple enough, albeit yet another technological detail to remember in a world/life/day-to-day sprint already littered with that sort of thing. ...more...

Android 3.x, Android 4.x, iOS 5, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry OS - Too Much to Manage

The Android people at Google, the hardware people at the smartphone makers, consumers who are buying Android-based smartphones and all the retailers that are selling Android smartphones better start being just a bit more careful about how cleanly (if at all) earlier Android versions installed on various smartphones can be updated to newer Android versions. Mess it up too often and consumers won`t buy new Android-based smartphones when they drop, dunk, drop-kick, break or otherwise tire of their existing one.

Blackberry - made by Research in Motion, that former paragon of virtue - is changing operating system horses very soon, and has already introduced one new OS as the foundation for its PlayBook tablet. A new smartphone OS is in the works for Blackberry as well.

Windows Phone 7 - what many reviewers and a relative handful of consumers rave about - that is supported and developed by Microsoft (the most experienced operating system maker in the world), languishes in comparative anonymity. Makes no sense in practical terms.

The biggest problem is not the changing operating system landscape or even the various dead-ends in some of the Android versions out there. Far from it - the problem is a two-pronged fork. First, smartphone operating system makers aren`t working closely enough with the hardware makers to ensure that new OS version installations and updates are a smooth, error-free experience for consumers. Second, OS makers apparently don`t care enough about smartphone owners to do the testing needed to ensure that new OS versions can be used to update all recent, previous versions.

It`s called giving a damn about consumers. You know. Consumers. They`re the ones who ultimately keep all the operating system developers and smartphone makers in business. Mess with us at your peril.