A Time of Magic

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Just when would you mark the change of year on the Internet?

If it’s the “Internet” then I suppose arguably it should be the time in Washington DC as that’s where the US Department of Defense is based and they’re the people who kicked off the Internet way back in the early 1960s (yes, that long ago).

On the other hand, nothing much happened ’til the World Wide Web was invented by a British guy (Tim Berners-Lee) working in CERN just outside Geneva so perhaps it’s Central European Time that we should all be using? (You can see the very first web server there)

Whenever it is Happy New Year!

Copyright is a long standing tradition whereby those producing creative work own it and therefore generally get paid for it both on the first purchase of the creation (book, play, film, etc.) and also when it is reused.

Well, that was the original theory anyway. In the good old days the actors, director and so on performed live and therefore you definitely had to pay again if you wanted to see the play once more. The arrival of books muddied the waters a little in that you bought the book once and could obviously re-read it without paying for it again. Home video came along somewhat later and similarly took the pay per view aspect away from the modern day equivalent of plays ie films.

Now of course, it’s open season for the most part. The users of YouTube have a very loose appreciation of copyright with many short films being loaded onto the site in breach of copyright as no payment is made to the owners of the films nor to those acting in them. I suspect that’s probably the worst excess of copyright theft these days although google seem set to take it to new heights by making entire books available in due course (project Gutenberg and others have only typed up out of copyright works before).

And, of course, there are original works such as you are reading right now. I’m sure you’re not planning on paying me after you’ve read it (although, if you’d like to pay, do get in touch!) and yet it obviously took me some time to write it. However, what about the various news aggregators that will pick up this particular post? This blog gets around 250,000 readers each week from Reuters which is a pretty respectable readership all by itself and that’s just one of a number of aggregation services that pick up our feed.

Everything can’t be free of course. After all, if authors, actors and other creative folk aren’t paid in some way then the various creations that they produce will eventually stop getting produced.

GPS seems like an idiot-proof application. No more worries if you can’t read a map: just select the location you want to go to and the machine tells you how to get there.

Except that there are lots of places with the same name of course. Only last week a bus driver going for the day from Dover to Lille in France for a shopping trip ended up in Lille in Belgium because he slavishly followed the directions and ignored little things like border crossings and changes of language on the signs along the way.

Also worth noting is that the majority of the software that they used was developed in America where there are nice straight roads even outside the cities and the quality of roads is indicated by their classification. Move such a system to Europe where few places have straight roads and the classification of roads seems almost random at times.  The net effect of this is that in some places those using navigation systems end up taking substantially longer to get from A to B than they would if they used a map, or even just followed the road signs.

Where it is excellent of course is when you haven’t a clue where you are but you know where you want to be. This is very often the case with me in large cities!