Razore

Today the six major ISPs in the UK (BT, BSkyB, Carphone Warehouse, Orange, Tiscali and Virgin) decided that enough is enough and they are going to clamp down on piracy in order to make sure that the music industry doesn't lose any more money due to piracy than it already does. They are planning on doing this by sending out threatening letters to people's houses and, if that doesn't work, throttling internet speeds in order to make downloading illegally so slow that it is no longer worth doing.

Unfortunately, the music industry and ISPs are wrong in doing this for a whole number of reasons.

First of all, the people that pirate music were probably not going to buy the album anyway. A large amount of mainstream music that comes out today is a load of crap and isn't worth the extortionate prices that they charge.

In a recent study it was found out that pirates buy up to three times the number of albums than people who don't pirate music. This could mean that people download illegally to see if the album is worth buying, effectively "try before you buy". Trying the whole song is a lot better than listening to a 30 second sample at a poor bit rate.

Finally, only about 3p per album goes to the artist. The rest of the money goes to people such as the RIAA of BPI (like a protection racket for music), and to the label. The artists would much rather thhat you downloaded illegally and go to their concerts and buy other merchandise that buy their album and not go to see them live.

The worst thing is that the music industry keep releasing propoganda
talking about piracy meaning an end to the music industry and how the
world will be rubbish without music. They also talk of destroying livelihoods. There are many people who make good music and charge nothing for their music in download form or at gigs, they just do it for fun and still earn a decent living doing other things.

My suggestion, like many other people's is to innovate and create a new business model for online distribution. People don't want to pirate, the music is just not worth the money.

A couple of days ago I received an email from the Clicksor publisher network which I found quite funny.

Clicksor is in the process of improving our overall network quality and performance.

The purpose of the quality control process is to maintain and increase the
earnings and traffic volumes of our publishers. Clicksor will continue
the quality control process in a regular basis to focus and maximize
our resources to provide fastest responses and services to our valued
publishers.

Now, I'm pretty sure that the only reason that people actually used Clicksor was because they didn't meet the requirements for a decent network. I had 10,000 impressions on one site and made about 10 cents, that shows you how good quality their adverts are, so why would they want to weed out "bad quality" publishers?

In case you don't know, Clicksor is one of the spammiest ad networks ever; forcing people to have popups/popunders on their site, slowing sites down, ignoring SSL connections and causing certificate errors. They have also been involved in all manner of imorral internet advertising. It's a wander that they are still operational.

Well, at least when I am removed from their network I will get my 10 cents of advertising earnings. I can't say that I am too unhappy to see the back of them.

After trying Wordpress for about a week, I realised that it is not flexible enough for my needs. The addons are also quite hard to locate using the WP.com website. As a result, I moved back to Drupal.

The main reason that I found Wordpress inflexible was because it had very limited options for content types and even with added modules, it was difficult to manage static pages. I found a great page about the relative merits of both content management systems here which I should have read before choosing Wordpress.

But with great flexibility, comes great complexity though so I spent the best part of four hours installing modules so that it could work satisfactorily as a blog.

I will post the changes that I had to make at a later date so that anyone else who needs to set up a blog using Drupal can.

Today, I was burning backing up a lot of photos onto a DVD and I realised that it was taking absolutely ages (it estimated 2 hours). I guessed that this was something related to the slow Zip extraction bug, but after a bit of Googling, I found out that there is no patch or KB entry for this bug.

I worked out that this bug is caused by vista trying (and failing) to multi-task. Basically, it it burning one file and trying to create a thumbnail over and over again resulting in the CD drive spinning up and down over and over again.

The only way that I could overcome this problem was closing all explorer windows related to the files that are being burned ie. the source folder, and the CD drive window.

I have filed this bug with Microsoft, but they have so far made no response…

Well, this domain has just been re-purchased after a previous registrar held it hostage and finally realised that they couldn’t earn enough money to justify owning it.

Anyway, if you want to find out more about this site, just check out the “about” page.

The next post will be a lot more interesting - I promise.