Take Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, who said yesterday,

“Technology, and Twitter in particular, is making a mockery of the privacy laws that we have and we do need to think about the regulatory environment that we have.”

The mainstream media, of course, never miss an opportunity to tell their readers that the Internet is the modern-day equivalent of the Wild West, as the Indy ably demonstrates in “Media freedoms in the balance”:

“Mr Hunt raised for the first time the possibility of a new watchdog to ensure that social media such as Twitter and Facebook were subject to controls similar to those faced by the press and broadcasters, saying there may be a case for converging the regulation of traditional and new media.”

And, from this article in the Telegraph:

“Media outlets are supposed to be prevented from disclosing their names by a series of super-injunctions, which prevent them from being identified. Both Twitter and Facebook, however, are based in the US and outside the jurisdiction of British courts.”

The thing is, the politicians and the media seem to be forgetting that this isn’t a problem caused by social media. In fact, this “problem” has existed in one form or another for years. Go back to Jeremy Hunt’s quote and substitute “The foreign newspapers” for “Technology, and Twitter” and you’ll see what I mean.

Over the years, there have been countless examples where injunctions issued in England have no bearing on what gets published by the rest of the world (and rightly so). Here are two such examples – one fairly recent, and one from 2003:

• Irish Times publishes details of Tiger Wood’s injunction against the UK press.
• Prince Charles secures an injunction against the press in England and Wales, but the allegations appear in Italian newspapers.

Sure, the internet means more people in the UK have easier access to that censored information, but is that the only reason to act on this now?  I smell a rat – the Govt seems to be worryingly open to censoring websites at the behest of wealthy groups with Big Media interests; from there, is it such a big leap to include censorship of overseas websites that host injunction-breaking information, too?

All of the items in the Top Stories section link off to their respective source sites. This might come as a shock to Mr Murdoch, but the Times isn’t my homepage; nor is the Sun. If it wasn’t for their headlines appearing on Google News on iGoogle, which is my homepage, I wouldn’t ever need to visit those sites. What else do you notice? No ads. Google aren’t monetising this page, which is another reason to question how this hurts News Corp.

Rather than look at them as some kind of competition, News Corp need to see Google and Yahoo as a (and I apologise for the 1990′s AOL reference) portal into their own content. Let Google send me to your site, and when I’m there, give me content compelling enough to make me stick around. To make matters worse, News Corp’s chief, Rupert Murdoch, has gone on record to say that “we intend to charge for all our news websites“. In the face of falling readership and advertising revenue for their physical media business, the last thing News Corp wants to be doing is putting a pay wall around their web-based content. There will always be other, free places to get the news; if not News Corp’s direct competitors, then smaller, feisty startups like BNO. Today, some of those news sources lack authority, compared to the News Corp sites; as pay walls go up, that will change.

If you were in charge of this multibillion dollar, international news and media organisation, what would you do? Does putting a pay wall around the web-based news content seem like a smart play, or are there better ways to monetise?

gdgt is the new project from Peter Rojas and Ryan Block – the founder and the former Chief Editor of the mighty Engadget, respectively – and something that has been hotly antipicated (at least within the gadget news world, which I like to inhabit) for a year now, so the launch was big news.

The site is great and is going to attract a ton of traffic, but what struck me most, was this article on Engadget, which closes with:

Look, we’ve found the best way in life to learn about something is to scuttle the user manual and dive right in — we highly suggest you do the same and take gdgt out for a spin. We think you’ll like what you find.

Congrats Peter and Ryan!

I know there’s a lot of history between Ryan, Peter and Engadget, but the hard fact is that Engadget and gdgt operate within the same crowded and very competitive market. Yet here we have Joshua Topolsky saying to his readers, “go and check out the competition; we think you’ll like it“.

OK; it’s not all rosy in the new media garden, but I can’t imagine, for example, the Telegraph newspaper saying to it’s readers, “The Guardian have launched a new tech news site, with content from some awesome writers; go check it out!”, can you?

The story unfolds like an episode of 24, with this poor chap being followed on CCTV cameras, which seem to litter the streets of Britain in greater numbers than cigarette butts, before armed police swooped and carted him to have his fingerprints mugshot and DNA sample taken.

The frightening thing about this story isn’t that the guy was arrested at gunpoint – a member of the public called it in, and the police have a duty to act, and where weapons are suspected, of course, they require an armed response. No, the frightening thing is this quote from the Staffordshire Police (my emphasis):

…the man was released and taken home, as no further action was required.

Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’ll tell you what action is required: By the police’s own admission, the guy is innocent. That means his fingerprints, mugshot and DNA information has no place in a criminal database, and it should be removed.

Users “suspected” of having illegally downloaded something will get an e-mail from their ISP notifying them of their anti-social behavior. A second offense will result in a temporary suspension of Internet connectivity and a third will see the contract with your ISP ripped apart.

This is, of course, is being lobbied hard by the music and film industry who are quoted as saying that ISPs had “done little or nothing to address illegal downloading via their networks”. The most laughable quote of all, though, is:

This is the number one issue for the creative industries in the digital age, and the government’s willingness to tackle it should be applauded.

So, it’s the number one issue for the creative industry, and how do they tackle it? By suing the pants of people or bleating to Ministers. What they’re not doing is addressing the real issue: Why do people download copyrighted material? Here are a few thoughts, just off the of my head.

Maybe it’s because they’re frustrated with the “creative” industry’s DRM, which prevents them from playing their legally downloaded purchased content on which ever device they choose.

Maybe it’s because they’re tired of being stiffed by their local cinema, who charge more for a Diet Coke and a bucket of popcorn than the local drug dealer charges for a week’s worth top-notch snort (so I’m told).

Maybe it’s because they’ve shelled out for the latest in DVD player technology, only to watch the “creative” industry render that technology obsolete thanks to a $400m back-hander.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because the majority of the content produced by the “creative” industry (especially mainstream music) is such generic, mass-produced, pop pap that people don’t think it’s worth spending their money on.

I’m tired of being told that the content I want isn’t available for download in my region – even though I can buy it on DVD from my local store; I’m tired of buying stuff from iTunes only to find that it will only play on my iPod; it pisses me off that you think of me of as a pirate before you think of me as a consumer.

So, here’s little tip to the “creative” industry – it’s time to get a little creative. Instead of whining about illegal downloads and hoping that someone else will sort it out for you, how about you look at better ways to make it easy for people to legally download your content.

And here’s a tip for HM Govt, too. You’ve got more important things to worry about than this. Tape cassettes didn’t kill their industry, neither did video tapes or writeable CDs. Nor will the Internet. Their current distribution model is broken and it’s up to them to fix it, not you.