Stephen Fry: Time For Politicians To Represent People's Interest On Copyright, Not Corporations

Say That Again

from the like-that'll-ever-happen dept

Stephen Fry is a very well known British actor, comedian and writer. He’s also known as a real tech geek sorta guy — who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty with new technologies to learn about them. He apparently gave a speech (made up on short notice) about copyright and the future of music, where he complained that politicians, such as those who created the Digital Britain report were clearly reflecting the views of various industries and not of the people. Fry made it clear that he doesn’t endorse the idea of widespread file sharing — and he warned against misinterpreting his speech that way — but still admitted that he’s been known to fire up BitTorrent himself to get the latest episodes of 24 or House. And he admits that he feels a bit guilty about it, but the reason is that he can’t really get that content elsewhere. The fault is with the industry, and yet the gov’t is trying to protect that industry, rather than recognize that the real problem is the industry not giving people what it wants. Having the gov’t come up with a plan to try to stomp out file sharing misses the point. The problem isn’t the file sharing — it’s the industry not responding to the market.

This is an important point, actually. Thanks to some of the press coverage, and the way the industry often tries to frame this debate, you get this picture of evil kids destroying an industry by downloading tons and tons of content. And, there are some folks out there who do download a ton of stuff. But the real issue isn’t with that group of folks, who would never have bought any content in the first place. It’s with the everyday folks, like Stephen Fry, who would just like to access the content in the most convenient way possible — and the industry is failing him. The answer isn’t to go after some kids and fine them millions or throw them in jail. It’s to respond to the market.

Filed Under: copyright, corporations, stephen fry, uk

The Google Trends Suicide Watch

Studies

from the well,-that's-depressing dept

Jeremy Wagstaff has done a fascinating (if morbid) little analysis using Google Trends to track the popularity of the search phrase “commit suicide painlessly.” Perhaps not too surprisingly, it appears to track the economy. That is, it was relatively flat for a while, but spiked in October 2008 through March 2009 — though, it’s since come back down. As he notes, this isn’t exactly a small blip — it was over an extended period of time. He digs down a bit in the data, which suggests that while the US is a lot less suicidal these days, things are still a bit on edge over in the UK (you guys doing ok?). What would be interesting now would be to correlate that data with actual suicides. Oddly, Wagstaff notes that a similar boost is not seen in just the basic search of “how to commit suicide.” That makes me wonder if the “commit suicide painlessly” search is suffering from a small sample size problem. Still, it’s yet another fun little “economic indicator” found from public data, similar to the post we had recently on analyzing job trends via Facebook status. While the data might not mean much yet, the fact that there is so much more data so easily accessible is really powerful.

Filed Under: suicide, trends
Companies: google trends

EMI Stops Selling CDs To Indie Record Stores

Culture

from the you're-on-your-own dept

Apparently, EMI has had enough of independent record stores. Via Digg come reports that EMI has been calling various smaller independent record stores and telling them that it won’t sell them product directly any more. Instead, they’ll have to source it from third parties — meaning that it will be more expensive. Basically, this means most of those stores will carry fewer EMI CDs. Of course, some might argue that this won’t really mean much, since independent record stores are smaller (and don’t always sell as much major label product), but it still seems like an odd choice by EMI. You would think the company would be working overtime to keep the few retail channels pushing its product happy.

Filed Under: cds, indie record stores