The irrationality of the music industry

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This morning’s Observer column…

Q: What’s a record company?

A: An organisation whose survival depends on suing those who are potentially its best customers.

I exaggerate – but only slightly. Scarcely a week goes by without some salivating music industry executive detailing the latest batch of lawsuits launched against file-sharing teenagers. In an interesting variation on this litigious theme, Candy Chan, an American parent of one of these errant youngsters, refused to settle on behalf of her 13-year-old-daughter, Brittany. When she announced this plan of action, however, the record companies decided to go after the kid directly.But in order to do this they had to find a way of neutralising mummy. So they petitioned the court to push Mrs Chan aside and appoint a legal guardian in her place.

Truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up. The whole saga of music downloading is set to become a business school case study on the lengths to which an industry will go to defend a business model that technology has rendered obsolete…

Update: It looks as though sophisticated use of the Internet by bands is much more extensive than my reference to Arctic Monkeys implied. Here’ for example, is an intriguing Wired article about Myspace.com.

Blender

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This image comes from Quentin’s entertaining spoof about Apple jewellery. It pointed me towards Blender, an astonishing Open Source modelling package. The only problem is that, being a slow learner, I need to take six weeks off to learn how to use it. Quentin seems to have mastered it in a few hours. Sigh.

Convergence, my eye

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Having a BlackBerry makes one reflect on those flyblown theories that all our communications will converge on the mobile phone. I’ve just spent a few days in Donegal where I was for the most part deprived of wired connections to the Net, so the BB became my prime communications channel. And it works fine — in the sense that stuff gets through. But wading through a stack of email messages on a small screen, and replying to them using an ingenious but fiddly keyboard (which, for example, always assumes that when I type ‘see’ I really mean ‘are’), is not something I would wish on anyone. It’s fine for a few days, in extremis, but not really viable as a sole platform. And although it’s terrific to be able to access Google or BBC Online from anywhere with a GPRS signal, browsing on such a small screen is purely for masochists. The laptop has some life in it yet.

Corporate hypocrisy

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Walmart is one of the creepiest firms in the US (and one of Wall Street’s favourites). It pays its employees so little that many of them are eligible for food stamps. And, as part of its ‘human resources’ services, it even provides help desks which advise employees on how to claim for this kind of welfare. Now, according to this week’s Economist, the company’s Chief Executive has said that “Congress should consider increasing the minimum wage.” The thought that Walmart might increase its employees’ minimum wage without troubling Congress doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.

And after you’re finished mopping the bathroom floor, be sure to write up that portable music device contract

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Lovely post in Good Morning Silicon Valley…

At a court hearing to review Microsoft’s progress in meeting the sanctions imposed in a 2002 antitrust settlement, a U.S. District Court judge upbraided the company for handing some of its partners a contract that would have forced them to stop bundling rival music software with their MP3 players (see “Sorry, just an old chunk of monopolist boilerplate we had on a save string”). Microsoft maintains the contract was a gaffe, a proposal drafted by low-level business person who did not understand the company’s obligations under the antitrust settlement, which seems something of a stretch to me. “This maybe indicates a chink in the compliance process,” District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said. “This should not be happening at this point in the decree. I realize people make mistakes, but this should not be happening.”

Old habits die hard…

Facing the storm

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There was a wonderful storm in Donegal on Tuesday afternoon. We went out to Muckross Head to watch it in all its awesome glory. One of the kids just sat staring at the sea as it seethed and crashed on the cliffs below. Unforgettable.

Who Owns XML?

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More IP madness. According to MIT Technology Review,

Executives at Scientigo, a small software maker based in Charlotte, NC, say the company owns two U.S. patents (No. 5,842,213 and No. 6,393,426), that cover one of the fundamental concepts behind XML: the idea of packaging data in a self-defining format that allows it to be correctly displayed wherever it travels.

Scientigo CEO Doyal Bryant says the company plans to capitalize on the patents either  by reaching licensing agreements with big corporate users of XML or by selling them to another company.

That ROKR phone

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From Good Morning, Silicon Valley…

“We got off to a little bit of a rough start. People were looking for an iPod and that’s not what it is. We may have missed the marketing message there.” That’s what Motorola CEO Ed Zander had to say about the company’s ballyhooed ROKR phone, which appears to be sinking like its namesake in the market for converged devices. According to American Technology Research, an exceedingly high percentage of customers who purchased the phone are exchanging it. “As many as six times more customers are returning the ROKR phones than is normal for new handset,” ATR analyst Albert Lin told Bloomberg. “There’s an overall disappointment with the product.” I’ll say. But honestly, what did they expect? With its slow syncing, artificial 100-track limit and ungainly design, the ROKR is a poor substitute for an iPod. And as a cell phone, it’s less than astonishing. You’re better off spending your money on a NAZR.

Nice to know that one’s intuitions are occasionally correct.

Apropos Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court…

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… this from Martin Kettle, writing in yesterday’s Guardian:

Back in the dawn of American constitutional history, Alexander Hamilton set out the reasons why it was important to have the Senate act as a check on presidential nominations of this kind. The Senate, he wrote, needs to make a president “both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same state to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”

Earlier in the week, Bush was asked: “Of all the people in the United States you had to choose from, is Harriet Miers the most qualified to serve on the supreme court?”. The president answered “Yes”.