jonathan.rawle.org

Copyright law in the UK allows few exceptions for fair use. People who rip their CDs to make MP3 files for their portable players are actually breaking the law, although record companies have indicated in the past that they won’t pursue people for doing so.

Today, a consultation was announced on changes to copyright law which would, among other things, allow limited copying for purposes of “format shifting” for personal use. The proposal is to make it legal to copy CDs for use on portable players. The consultation is a result of the 2006 Gowers Review of copyright law. At the time, government minister Lord Triesman said that the changes wouldn’t mean people could legally circumvent DRM measures to switch between formats. I think that would make the law of limited use. The new law would probably also only apply to recordings released after is was passed.

The Open Rights Group are preparing their own response to the consultation, and have invited comments on their website. My comments are reproduced (hopefully legally!) below:

How many format shifts would be allowed? Should consumers be allowed to format shift to a range of play back devices and to format shift again when certain technologies become obsolete?

If such a provision is made, it should apply to all formats, including those protected by DRM, and not just to CDs. Any law that fails to address new downloadable formats belongs in the 20th century.

The law should give consumers a right to format shift that can not be “trumped” by contract law. Any such contract would have to contain the disclaimer “This does not affect your statutory rights” or similar, meaning that the consumer always has the right to format shift.

Claims that DRM exists to prevent copying it laughable. The main purpose of it has been to prevent consumers switching formats, which is anti-competitive behaviour on the part of large corporations. If people find they are still restricted by DRM, they will continue to resort to using illicit programs to strip the DRM, or to download unencumbered versions of the music they’ve already paid for via file-sharing networks.

If the new format-shifting law is limited in its scope, consumers will continue to lack respect of the law, which was one of the stated aims of the proposed changes.

Would the exception apply to works created or purchased after the exception was introduced or would it be acceptable to format shift back catalogues?

If the law doesn’t apply to back-catalogues, it’ll only cause great confusion among consumers. How many people understand the difference between the publication date of the CD, the copyright of the recording, the performers’ or composers’ copyrights? If people are told they can’t copy their existing CDs, but can if they buy new ones, they’ll continue to lack confidence in copyright law (and will continue to copy their old CDs anyway) so the change will have been a waste of time.

Restricting the new law to new releases will also discriminate against people who enjoy certain genres of music, such as classical or jazz, where the back catalogue accounts for a larger proportion of sales.

TheTrainLine.com is a website that allows UK rail passengers to buy their tickets online. It has just introduced booking fees, meaning that a ticket booked with TheTrainLine now costs more than buying the same ticket at the station. Fortunately, there are alternatives.

The slippery slope to booking fees started some years ago, when TheTrainLine introduced a charge for paying by credit card. This then increasaed from £1 to £1.50, £2, and is now an extortionate £2.50. The fee could be avoided by paying by debit card. The newest fees are £1 for having the tickets posted to you, or 50p if you choose to collect them from a “FastTicket” machine at a railway station. These latest fees can not be avoided, as you have to obtain the tickets somehow.

So what is the alternative? It is important to remember that it’s possible to buy any rail ticket from any outlet. You don’t have to buy the ticket from the station your journey starts from or from the same train operator, and you can also buy cheap, advance tickets in person. TheTrainLine’s claim that they can save customers £63.28 on an Edinburgh to London journey, for example, is quite misleading as they are comparing an advance purchase ticket with one bought on the day of travel. The cheaper ticket could be bought at your local station, assuming it was convenient to go there.

Of course, it’s not always convenient to go to the station to buy tickets. Even if it’s nearby, there may be long queues, or it might not be manned at the right times. The customer can also never be sure the person in the ticket office has explored all the ticket options to find the cheapest, which can be quite time consuming. Fortunately, most of the train operating companies operate their own ticketing websites. For example, I use the website of my local operator, First Great Western. Once again, remember that it’s possible to buy any ticket from any outlet. Just because you are using a particular train operator’s website doesn’t mean the journey has to involve travel on that operator’s trains.

Most of the operators’ websites are actually provided by none other than TheTrainLine. Anyone used to the latter would feel quite at home. The layout and interface are practically identical, it’s just the colours and branding that are different. It even appears as TheTrainLine on your credit card statement! However, unlike TheTrainLine’s own site, the train operators’ own sites don’t levy the extortionate additional charges and booking fees. At the time of writing, if you book a ticket with First Great Western, it is free to have the ticket delivered or to collect it from a FastTicket machine, and there is no credit card fee either! Therefore, it’s possible to save up to £3.50 just by using a site with different branding. In addition, TheTrainLine insists on selecting insurance for the journey by default, which the customer must remember to deselect. First Great Western leave the insurance option unselected so that the customer need only check the boxes if insurance is required.

According to Wikipedia, TheTrainLine accounts for 20% of all train tickets by value. It also runs the websites of 16 out of 20 of the train operating companies, most of which don’t charge additional fees. So next time you book a train ticket, please try the site of one of the train operators. You’ll save yourself some money, and hopefully reduce the market share of TheTrainLine.com, whose position as the largest retailer of tickets has clearly made it complacent, to the extent that it believes it can rip off its customers without them going elsewhere for their tickets.

The announcement that a new bridge is to be built across the Forth Estuary barely received a mention in the London-based UK press. I only managed to find an article in the Guardian. There was also an article tucked away on BBC News. This is quite disgraceful, considering that it will be one of the biggest civil engineering projects in the country.

The existing Forth Road Bridge, which opened in 1964, is still an engineering marvel, sweeping across the estuary in a single, graceful span. At the time it was built, it was the fourth longest in the world and the longest outside the USA, also making it the first bridge in Europe to have a span longer than a kilometre. Together with the nineteenth century rail bridge, it forms part of a world-famous view that no visitor to that part of Scotland should leave without seeing.

Unfortunately, traffic on the road bridge has outgrown all estimates. Corrosion has also been found inside the main suspension cables, which has caused a few of the thousands of wires that make up the cables to break. Worst-scenario estimates are that the bridge may have to close to lorries in 2013, and close completely in 2020. Hence the apparent need for a new bridge.

So far, amid all the reports (in Scottish newspapers) of the proposed new bridge, there has been little mention of the fate of the current bridge. Suggestions that it could be demolished are quite alarming. The 40-year-old bridge is already an important part of our heritage, and indeed this is recognised by the Category A listed status it was awarded in 2001. Fortunately, The Scotsman suggests that “experts believe it will ultimately be repaired to help cut cross-Forth congestion, which is predicted to continue to grow.” Let’s hope that will be the case, but at the the same time we should not be complacent. A campaign is needed to secure the bridge’s future.

Environmentalists are furious that a new bridge is to be built, as it will lead to increased traffic. They say the existing bridge should have been repaired instead. But they then go on to criticise the Scottish Government for “failure to guarantee the existing road bridge would be demolished once its ‘replacement’ was built.” Demolishing the bridge hardly seems a “green” measure. It would take a huge amount of energy (not to mention money) to demolish the structure, yet most of it is still perfectly sound. Transferring traffic onto the new bridge will allow the old bridge to be closed, making comprehensive repairs cheaper, easier and less disruptive. When the repaired bridge reopens, it can be restricted to cars only, or if the environmentalists object to that, why not use the old bridge exclusively for trams or buses?

The new bridge will have space reserved for future public transport use. Yet this provision has already been criticised as insufficient. One civil engineer has claimed that only 2500 passengers could be carried an hour, leaving 35,000 more people to use their cars. By utilising the existing bridge for public transport, the capacity could be increased many times over.

The proposed new bridge has been labelled as “iconic”, yet the artist’s impression shows a fairly standard-looking cable-stayed bridge. Unfortunately, modern construction techniques, which have made it easier to site bridge piers in water, have caused bridges to become more ugly. One only has to look at the Severn Estuary, where the elegant Severn Bridge of the ’60s has been joined by a modern, functional bridge that is largely just a concrete motorway viaduct, snaking its way across the mud.

The third Forth bridge is unlikely ever to match its predecessors in terms of achieving “iconic” status. Let’s ensure that this symbol of 21st century progress will always have those icons of the 19th and 20th centuries standing alongside it. The campaign to save the Forth Road Bridge should start now.

• Forth Bridges: coverage from The Scotsman
• Edinburgh photo gallery including the Forth Bridges from North Queensferry

Royal Mail have a page on their website where it is possible to find out the last Christmas posting dates for international destinations.

But what do Royal Mail recommend if, after choosing your destination, the deadline for that country has already passed? Under the heading What to do next it suggests: “Try a different service or destination”.

How useful! Instead of sending the parcel to the person it is intended for, I could send it to someone random in a completely different country! I would never have thought of that.

And as for “a different service”, if it’s too late to send by Airmail, the only other option to most international destinations is Surface Mail. Perhaps Royal Mail’s intention is to ensure the gifts arrive in time for next Christmas.

For a while now, I have been using Google Reader to keep track of RSS feeds from websites, blogs and albums that I visit regularly. I had decided it was time I used feeds rather than continually visiting the sites directly in a browser to see if anything new had appeared, and rather than choosing a feed-reading client for my computer, I thought I’d try an online client. The advantage of this is that I can access my feeds from a web browser on any computer, rather than having to wait until I’m at home. My feeds – and more importantly, information about which items I’ve already read – are available in the same way regardless of where I’m accessing them from.

Today, when I opened Google Reader, I saw a message telling me that my “friends” from Google Talk could now view feeds that I’m subscribed to. On reading more carefully, I realised it was only “shared items” that others would be able to see. I had never chosen to share any items, as I see Google Reader as an application to allow me to use RSS feeds, not as a way of telling other people what I like to read. Had I chosen to share any feeds, they would have previously appeared on a web page with a long URL that is totally unconnected to my username. While anyone can in theory view the page, in practice, only people I’d given the address to would have been able to find it (it isn’t indexed by search engines either). Following today’s change, everyone in my Google Talk contact list would be able to see my feeds. Contrary to Google name for this list, “Friends”, my contact list contains all sorts of people. Gmail actually adds anyone who sends me an e-mail to that list. It’s easy to see that people could soon find that their competitors, their boss, or people they are in dispute with could suddenly see all their RSS feeds, which they previously had assumed only their real friends, who had been given the long URL, would be able to see.

Recently, social networking sites such as Facebook have been becoming more popular. I currently refuse to use these sites because I don’t like the way they work: specifically, that anyone on your “friends” list can see details of everyone else who is on the list. Now, generally, I’m not too concerned about privacy online. I write on my website under my own name, I contribute to forums and newsgroups on various subjects under my real identity: all things many people do under aliases. Yet I have to draw the line at other people seeing my contact list or a list of what articles I like to read. That’s analogous to letting someone flick through my address book, or watch over my shoulder to see what I’m reading in the newspaper. I would rather maintain an e-mail address list of my contacts, and bookmark their sites or blogs using my web browser.

With Facebook becoming more popular, many people are using it to display their photographs, for example. They might say, “the photos of my trip are on Facebook – I’ll add you so you can see them.” Unfortunately, that means people have no choice but to use Facebook if people they know are using it, regardless of whether they like the service. (In a similar way, I’ve had to use MSN Messenger for years, despite not wishing to use services provided by Microsoft. If other people are using it, I have no choice.) When I was looking into Facebook, it appeared that there is no option to hide contacts from other contacts. However, there was a suggestion that it’s possible to add individual contacts to a list of people who can only see a “limited profile”, which can be made to contain only a minimum of information. This would have to be done for each person who was added as a “friend” individually, if the idea was to keep the contact list private.

The trouble with the all the privacy settings on site such as Facebook or Google Reader is that they soon become quite complicated. It’s difficult to figure out exactly how the account is set up. If we were talking about settings to change the layout of a page or the colour scheme, it wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t quite right. However, revealing too much information to the wrong people could be extremely damaging. Yet it’s very difficult to determine exactly what other users can see, as the owner of the account can’t see their own profile through the eyes of others. The only sure way of doing that is to register an entirely separate account, and switch between the two until everything is set up as desired.

The other major issue is that the online provider can change the service at any time. What if they suddenly decide, as Google have just done with Reader, that more information should be shared? A previously hidden list of contacts could suddenly become visible. Carefully fine-tuned options could become obsolete. Of course, the issue of providers amending services doesn’t just affect privacy. Features of the service could be altered, or even disappear. As users of Yahoo Photos recently found out, services can be discontinued altogether.

Facebook is already no stranger to controversy after changing the way the site works. In October, Facebook profiles began to appear in search engine indexes, with users only having a month’s warning to opt out. Then more recently, they introduced a new advertising system called “Beacon”, which tracked products users had bought on other websites, then displayed ads related to the products on their profile. This staggering invasion of privacy caused a backlash from users, and a 50,000-signature petition caused Facebook to make the system an opt-in one (although I can’t imagine why anyone would want to opt in to that!)

The only way to avoid these potential pitfalls is to avoid using online services altogether. Perhaps it’s better to use a mail client, RSS reader, and bookmark manager on your own computer? To make it a bit more convenient when out and about, an alternative would be to store any information on your own web hosting. That way, it’s possible to control what other people can see, and what is only visible to the owner, safe in the knowledge that this can’t be changed on the whim of some service provider. The same is true of other services such as blogs and photo galleries: many people use sites such as Blogger, but who’s to say Google won’t change that service for the worse too? A self-hosted blog means no-one else can change it.

Removing control over people’s privacy should put some people off using services such as Google Reader. However, even if they have real concerns, popular services such as Google and Facebook know only too well that they already have sufficient market share to ensure people continue to be tied to their services whether they like it or not, with people having to sign up it they want to keep in contact with others. Perhaps we should start to look at these companies in the same, unfavourable light that we look at Microsoft, then abandon the lot of them to regain control of our own online lives.