The Cam in winter

Bill took us out on his new boat on Saturday. It was freezing cold in the fens, but eerily still and beautiful. We saw two herons, plus innumerable coots and moorhen.

Copyright thugs mug US Congress — again

The so-called “Intellectual Property Protection Act” (IPPA) now before Congress beggars belief. It’s a ragbag of different measures all of which have the general intent of restricting what you can do with your PC or digital recording device. In its current form, the Bill makes it a criminal offence to fast-forward through ads on a recorded TV show. Yes, you read that correctly. One of the eight bills shepherded into the catch-all IPPA was originally called ‘The Family Movie Act’ (formerly H.R. 4586): This was originally intended to protect consumers’ rights to use technology to skip over and mute parts of a movie that they found objectionable. But lobbyists working for the broadcasting industry and Hollywood studios added a section to take away consumers’ rights to skip over ads in DVDs and recorded broadcasts with a TiVo like device.

There’s more. For example a provision that would criminalize the currently legal act of using the sharing capacity of Apple’s iTunes; the legislation equates that act with the indiscriminate file sharing that goes on via peer-to-peer file-sharing programs. Currently, with iTunes, you can opt to share a playlist with up to three computers on your network. But the IPPA doesn’t differentiate between this innocuous — and Apple-approved — practice and the unrestrained sharing of music files with millions of strangers via Kazaa or Grokster.

VHS is dead. Long live DVD!

UK High Street retailer Dixons has announced that it is to stop selling video recorders. According to the BBC report, Dixons will phase out VCRs due to the boom in DVD players, sales of which have grown seven-fold in five years.

“It ends a 26-year love affair with a gadget which changed viewing habits by allowing people to leave home without missing their favourite programmes. Dixons expects to sell its remaining stock of VCRs by Christmas.”

Sigh. End of an era. I was a TV critic for 13 years, and ran two video recorders for most of that period. But nobody who has spooled backwards and forwards through as much tape as I did would ever decline a TiVO — or even a DVD recorder.