A Dying Industry (slightly off topic)

The BBC reported today of the next stages of the government and record companies' attempts to crack down on illegal file sharing. Persistent offenders will have their internet connections cut off. Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle in terms of the ability for music to be copied and shared.


In the late 90's, I founded a music company that distributed music by CD. You chose the tracks (from our catalogue) and we cut them to disk and shipped them to you. We also had digital downloads DRM protected with Microsoft's encryption. This was *before* Apple release their iTunes store. At the time, the record labels would not give us any new material and we were restricted to back catalogue and inferior content. This ultimately was the demise of the business as our customers couldn't understand why we didn't have access to any music track in the world.

At the time, the record companies' view was that providing us content that could be distributed on CD was risky and would allow people to copy the music. Well, of course it would, in exactly the same way people were *already* copying CDs purchased from record stores! Their principled approach changed when Apple rocked up with large volumes of cash for access to their catalogue and the digital download era started for real.

Now I see a music industry which for years acted in a protectionist fashion, overcharged for their content and milked the customer with countless re-releases and compilations, trying to target anyone they can in order to protect their revenue stream (a bit like when SCO sued IBM).

Unfortunately the genie I mentioned earlier is out there, alive and well and doesn't need the Internet. Music content can easily be swapped on portable hard drives, CD & DVD-ROMs, memory sticks, flash memory cards and so on. The Internet just provides the opportunity to spread music wider than physical media can.

Ultimately I think all copyrighting and protection systems, whether electronic or legal, will fail or be circumvented. We already know that artists are changing their revenue models away from the recorded content into concerts and other revenue streams. Most record companies have moved back from DRM protected content on digital downloads and Sony scored the biggest faux pas with the rootkit they deployed on CDs in 2005.

There will always be people who want something for nothing, as the release of Radiohead's recent album "In Rainbows" shows. However it also shows that people will pay (the average pay price for the album in a survey was believed to be around £4) for decent content and perhaps that represents the crux of the problem - not selling stuff people don't actually want.

Shock - Escargots n'est pas francais!

The BBC has reported that prices in France for snails are set to rocket. I lived and worked in France for a few years and loved tucking into the garlic covered gastropods. But horror of horrors, apparently most snails served in France are now not French! Is nothing sacred?

UK Email and Phone Database

The BBC reported today that the UK government is planning a tracking database for all phone calls made and emails sent in the UK.

This strikes me as an unbelievably stupid plan. In the first place, every UK citizen will be baulking at this incredible intrusion into civil liberties. Second, it is highly unlikely that the government could ever deliver such a database based on their previous track record with developing and deploying large scale IT projects - think of the UK tax system and new NHS IT system (which will apparently be 4 years behind schedule). Will this database contain all the content of the calls or just a list of who called/emailed who?

Assuming the former, let's do some "back of the fag packet" calculations...

According to the Mobile Operators Association, there were 70 million mobile subscribers at the end of 2006, with an average 100 minutes per user per month and 12 text messages per week. That's 84,000,000,000 minutes and 43,680,000,000 text messages in a 12 month period, the timescale the database is expected to hold data for.

Using the following forum posting referring to Skype, a conservative estimate of bandwidth is 30kb/s or about 225KB per minute. A text message is a maximum of 160 characters. This means the government database would need a 12 month capacity of only 6.36TB to store the text messages (assuming no database or filesystem overhead) but a whopping 17.6PB of storage to hold the voice calls. Let's assume those calls are made consistently over the course of a year, then the system would need to ingest about 600MB/s of data.

Now, I would imagine even the UK government wouldn't be stupid enough to attempt to store the content of all those calls (I didn't even attempt to calculate the email traffic). If they don't, let's face it, you have to question what the point is, if the content isn't being recorded as anyone with any nefarious intent will simply use anonymous pay-as-you-go SIM cards and bypass all the tracking. Still, at an efficiency of say, 40%, the 44PB potentially needed could set up the lucky EMC or HDS salesperson for life! I wonder if any of them have done the same calculation as me....?