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Patents, pirates and iPods

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 30 Apr 09, 12:56 GMT

Did the patent system slow down or speed up the development of the steam engine in 19th century Britain? Just one topic for debate at a conference I've been attending in Prague on the impact of patents and other forms of intellectual property protection on innovation. It might seem a dry topic - but it sparked some impassioned arguments between Europe's creative businesses and the ICT industry.

Round One saw John Kennedy of the IFPI - the music industry body which led the fight against Pirate Bay - laying into all and sundry with some gusto. The Swedes behind Pirate Bay were "not Robin Hood but robbers", backed by a "right-wing fascist", hiding money away in overseas banks accounts and stealing from artists and the Swedish taxpayer.

But that was just for starters - his real target was the internet service providers and Europe's politicians. The ISPs needed to step up to the plate in the battle against piracy - they hadn't even blocked Pirate Bay since the IFPI's court victory - and Brussels was hesitant at a time when strategic leadership was needed. "Engaging ISPs in the battle against piracy, " he ended, "is the single most important priority for the music and creative industries today." An Italian consumer organisation fired back with protestations that it wasn't the job of ISPs to police the net - but Mr Kennedy was on the front foot.

But it was the content creators who were on the defensive in Round Two at a seminar on a subject which may shock British readers. How would you like to pay a "private copying levy" every time you bought an iPod, a printer or a blank CD? No, I thought not - but in many countries across the EU, it's the norm.

Europe's consumers are "lucky" - according to a media rights organisation at the seminar - to be granted an exemption from copyright law allowing them to make private copies of films, musics, and articles they own. But in return a price is paid by the electronics industry in the form of levies, with revenues going back to the content creators.

Apple and HP are among the companies who must exact these levies - and their representatives outlined in hair-raising detail what it meant. In Belgium, according to the woman representing HP, you can end up paying a levy on a printer which is more than its basic cost. In Sweden, countered the man from Apple, the levy on an iPod was related to its capacity - and with Moore's Law continuing to operate, that meant the cost was rising to ridiculous levels.

Each country applies the levies in a different way, and the Apple and HP executives both described the system as a "nightmare", fiendishly complex, and costly to administer. But neither was arguing for its abolition - a hopeless quest apparently - just for a bit more uniformity in its application, and for consumers to be told why they were paying.

So does it serve any purpose? The woman from the media rights organisation said the levies supported artists and media companies across Europe - and, confronted with my slightly amazed questioning, she pointed out that the 91热爆 was a keen collector of some of the cash from countries where its programmes are sold.

But an executive from Nokia insisted it was a brake on innovation - his company had chosen to launch its "Comes With Music" service in Britain partly because the levies were not applied here.

So is there any chance that UK consumers could eventually be "lucky" enough to be forced to pay up too? Under UK legislation, copying music or video to a blank CD or an iPod is still technically illegal, and there's talk of a change in the law. The UK music industry says that if that happens an "iPod tax" should be brought in here, although it's difficult to see ministers selling that to the public.

But make no mistake: content creators who are struggling to get consumers to pay for movies or music in a digital world are on the warpath. They're telling ISPs and consumer technology firms that they must help plug the hole in the creative industries' finances caused by file-sharing or copying. And they seem increasingly confident that governments will listen to their message.

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Web video - who can make it pay?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 28 Apr 09, 15:36 GMT

What's the most powerful force on the web right now? No, not - still a minority interest - but video, in all its forms.

In the last couple of weeks we've seen three examples of the popularity and importance of moving pictures on the internet. But each of them raises a few more questions about the economics of web video.

When Susan Boyle first appeared on Britain's Got Talent, 11 million people watched her on ITV. But within a day or so, , and a fortnight on, her various clips online have given the 48-year-old singing sensation a bigger audience than even Barack Obama achieved.

So has that produced a windfall for ITV, which could certainly do with a boost to advertising revenues right now?

As well as looking at YouTube, viewers could also go to for and it has certainly seen a big boost in its traffic.

But on YouTube, there is no advertising to be seen near the Britain's Got Talent clips, and there's not much on itv.com. Even if there were, each online ad viewer would be worth a fraction of anyone catching commercial breaks on the television.

For another media outlet, a different kind of web video hit. by police at the G20 protest - or rather the video acquired from a member of the public - was a major scoop.

But did it do much for the sales of the newspaper? I doubt it, because most people will have seen the video - either on the Guardian website or more likely on television news broadcast the night before.

The pictures will have driven plenty of traffic to the Guardian's site - but again, the advertising rates there will not match what is achieved in the newspaper. Video content on newspaper websites is becoming more and more important, but is still struggling to find a business model.

One online video service which doesn't need to make money, of course, is the 91热爆 iPlayer. Last week it went HD, making it an even more attractive alternative to live television.

But an HD iPlayer is also more expensive - for the 91热爆 (how much, I'm told, is commercially sensitive), for some viewers who may have to buy extra bandwidth from their internet service providers, and for those ISPs, who've already complained about the strain the standard definition version places on the network.

Still, the iPlayer - along with the online services from , and - is proving why we might need to build a faster broadband network across the UK, as more and more television viewing migrates onto the internet. So that leaves us with only two simple questions to answer.

Who will pay to bring that HD-capable broadband network to every home - because, as we know, and only plan to cover half the UK with super-fast broadband - and who can work out how to make money by pumping video along it?

Update: Many thanks to Shravan Nagraj in the comments for pointing out that our friends at the 91热爆 Internet Blog are hosting a conversation about how these issues relate to 91热爆 iPlayer in their Open Post.

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Winners and losers in a tech recession

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 24 Apr 09, 12:48 GMT

So how's the recession going for you? We now appear to be in the very eye of the economic storm - but in the technology world there are a few winners as well as losers.
It's been a week of results from the tech giants - Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and Apple are among those who've given us updates about their finances. So what have we learned?

Mournful Microsoft

The biggest noise in software has since it floated as a public company in 1986.

A quick scan of the results shows revenue falling in most divisions - but it's the core Windows business which has suffered the biggest fall, with revenue down from $4bn to $3.4bn. So Vista has very quickly stopped being the money-spinner that was promised - no wonder Microsoft is keen to create a buzz around Windows 7.

Last October, when I interviewed the chief executive Steve Ballmer in London, he was already gloomy about the prospects for technology spending. Now those fears have been realised - and Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell seemed almost to revel in the gloom: "We remain more cautious than most," he said. "While we'd all like to hope that the recovery will be short and painless, we unfortunately think it will be slow and difficult."

Upbeat Amazon

By contrast, the online retailer seems incapable of putting a foot wrong right now, except for the odd row over a "cataloging error".

Consumers may have taken fright on the high street - though rather less than some retailers have claimed - but they're still spending freely online, or at least at Amazon. Sales for the quarter rose by 18% compared to a year ago.

The big rise was not in Amazon's old core business - books, music, DVDs - where sales were only up 7%, but in sales of what is classified as "electronics and other general merchandise", which were up 38%.

In other words, Jeff Bezos' mission to become the world's online shopkeeper seems to be proceeding according to plan. The company has also being making much of its electronic book Kindle 2 and its cloud computing initiative - but it's the millions of shoppers buying everything from lawn-mowers to leisurewear who are providing the profits.

Yahoo Still Struggling

But if online retailing seems to be weathering the recession quite well, the online advertising market appears to have stalled. Yahoo's earnings press release was headlined "Company Exceeds Midpoint of Operating Cash Flow Outlook Range" - a classic case of burying some pretty poor news under a piece of gobbledegook.

Further down, you find that search advertising revenue was down 3% and display advertising down 13%. Now, it was only a couple of months ago that internet advertising types were telling me that their industry was going to keep on growing through the recession, as companies sought the better value that the web could offer. While Yahoo has its own particular problems, it's not the only firm finding that those rosy predictions are not being borne out.

Oh, and another embarrassment for Yahoo today with , the free homepage service it paid more than $4bn for at the height of the dot com boom.

Apple Advances

It was Apple which produced the week's most sparkling results, with sales of iPhones and iPods both beating expectations. Even a fall in Mac sales - down 3% - didn't depress the Wall Street analysts, who rushed to upgrade Apple shares. In a home computer market forecast to fall 11.9% in 2009 - its worst ever decline - it looks as though Apple may increase its market share.

I keep expecting the high price of its products to deter cash-strapped consumers - especially now that you can get a netbook for about a third the price of Apple's cheapest laptop. But so far, that hasn't happened.

And with Steve Jobs' stand-in Tim Cook describing netbooks this week as having "cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, and very small screens", it seems that the company is determined to stick to its premium pricing policy.

So the recession is hitting corporate technology spending and online advertising hard. But a few companies are showing that hard times are the best time to steal a march on your rivals.

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A Budget for broadband?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 22 Apr 09, 14:54 GMT

Earlier this week I wrote that we were still no clearer about who would pay to bring superfast broadband to every corner of the UK. But after we are perhaps a little more clear about the way the government plans to get bog-standard broadband to places that don't have it now.

The chancellor put his weight behind the proposals in for a for broadband. He even suggested a speed and who would pay for it. The answers? 2Mbps (not "up to" I note) and you, the 91热爆 licence fee payer. But relax, he's worked out that there's enough money swilling around in the pot set aside to help with digital switchover.

拢803m was ring-fenced from the licence fee to help people who might struggle to afford new equipment as they were obliged to switch to digital television. The National Audit Office recently calculated that as much as 拢250m of that might not be spent. All sorts of people were looking at that money and licking their lips, but it looks as though it will now be transformed into the Broadband Switchover Fund.

But there are still a few questions to be answered. The chancellor said in his speech that the aim was to reach "virtually" everyone by 2012. Right now, depending on whose figures you believe, just 1% of the country - or around 250,000 homes - cannot get broadband access. So who will still be left out after 2012?

Then there is that 2Mbps - will that be enough to count as broadband by 2012 when around half the country will have access to 40Mbps or more?

And finally - is 拢250m really enough? I suppose that depends on what kind of technology is employed. A friend who knows about these things told me the other day that covering the country with Wimax masts - which should supply 2Mbps - would only cost 拢750m, and you'd think there would be enough of a commercial market in Wimax to cover the shortfall.

In any case, the government says that any extra cost could be met through "additional funding mechanisms", whatever they may be.

In short, it does look as though we've taken a significant step towards universal broadband coverage. Now all we need to do is sort out who will pay for the next generation network the government says is even more vital for our economic future.

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The App Economy

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 20 Apr 09, 15:23 GMT

As Apple prepares to celebrate a billion downloads from its , I've been talking to some of those making a living from building mobile applications - and trying to work out whether the UK is developing an app economy.

We set out to track down solo developers who were making enough from their applications to live on - and found three. But none of them was really sure that the app economy was going to provide them with a long-term living.

Malcolm Barclay has created , which helps Londoners find their way across the capital's underground system. He built this paid application after starting with a free app, , which has been downloaded more than 100,000 times. Right now, he's getting around 11,000 downloads a month for Tube Deluxe, earning him about 拢4,000.

Malcolm is a freelance software developer who usually works for major corporations but has taken a couple of months out to see if he can make it as a phone developer. He's put many hours into building his application in the kitchen of his London flat, which has become a temporary development studio.

From his home in Edinburgh, Matt Farrugia, has created , which gives iPhone users a better way to display their photos. He's another freelance developer who decided last autumn that the market for enterprise software was looking pretty ropy and he needed to try something new:"The only market that wasn't shut down was the iPhone," he explains.

Unlike Malcolm Barclay, he began with a paid option, but business was slow until he launched a free "lite" version three weeks ago. That, along with promotion in the iTunes store, appears to have worked the trick. He reckons that at times he's now earning at a rate of 拢100,000 from Slideshow Builder, though that's only on the best days.

But Michael McNeela has perhaps the best success story. He is a 17-year-old schoolboy from Harrow in London, who's so far made something like 拢15,000 from one very simple iPhone app. He realised that 02 customers on monthly contracts needed a simple way to find out how many of their minutes they'd used. So he came up with , which tells you exactly that. So far, 40,000 people have downloaded the app at 59p a time, of which Michael gets 36p. He's now planning to buy himself a very expensive laptop.

So a new breed of young software developers are finding ways to make a living from the iPhone. And this is a market that is going to get much bigger, with Google's beginning to take off, and Blackberry and Nokia also getting their app acts together. With the sales of new handsets falling off a cliff, no wonder the industry is excited about this new source of revenue.

But our three UK solo developers seem unconvinced that they will be doing this in a year's time. Matt Farrugia told me that apps had settled down at a price which was just not sustainable. "People have it in their heads that 99 cents - 59p - is the right price. The price point makes it difficut to make a living.When I tot up all the hours I've put in, I'm working for less than minimum wage."

He says the only developers that are likely to make serious money in the longer term are games businesses - and a look at the top sellers in the App Store seems to prove his point.

Malcolm Barclay is working away at a number of other transport-related applications, but thinks he'll probably be looking for another contract as a developer with a major company soon. "It's halfway between a business and a hobby," he told me.

And Michael McNeela is enjoying a windfall that might turn any teenager's head, but is realistic: "I think it's a one-off - a lot of the applications that are big hits are also short-lived. I doubt I will be making another."

Just as in the early days of any gold-rush, there are some fantstic stories emerging of lone prospectors striking it rich. But in the longer term, it will be the bigger established software houses who really stand to profit from the app economy.

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Digital Britain - who foots the bill?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 19 Apr 09, 20:29 GMT

Everybody who was anybody in Britain's digital industries was there. The bosses of BT, Virgin Media and Universal Music mingled with the likes of Stephen Fry and Feargal Sharkey. Oh, and the prime minister and three senior ministers turned up too. But did the at the British Library on Friday take us anywhere further down the road to, well, Digital Britain?

I was at the event for a couple of hours, before rushing way to cover a much bigger story, the end of the . But nothing I saw at the event - or read about afterwards - convinced me that we were much further advanced in deciding what must be the biggest issue at the heart of Lord Carter's forthcoming report on our digital future. Namely, who's going to pay to build a next-generation broadband network which reaches every corner of Britain?

Sure, there were more than enough rousing calls for a new age of digital wonders, where every home would be able to host live video conferences with the doctor, where every child would be given the skills to build Britain's rival to Twitter or YouTube and make us a world-leading knowledge economy.

Before I'd even arrived at the British Library, one technology company was offering me the chance to speak to one of its executives at the summit about the exciting possibilities that lay ahead if Britain invested in the high speed internet.

"With a high bandwidth connection just imagine what UK citizens could do...", the e-mail began. I replied, asking whether this IT services business was a)planning to invest in the building of this new Jerusalem, b)hoping that state aid would do the job? The company beat a hasty retreat, making it plain that this was one area it would rather not discuss.

The conference started with the prime minister comparing the digital revolution we are now experiencing with the industrial revolution, and insisting "we must invest or we will fall behind." That investment, he went on to explain, would not only be in skills and education but in the technical infrastructure required to make Britain ready for the next stage in the development of the global economy. But I wasn't clear who "we" meant - the market or the government?

After I'd left, Lord Mandelson took to the stage and appeared to go further than Gordon Brown in hinting at the possibility of state intervention. He mused on whether we could be comfortable with a situation where only half of British homes would get super-fast broadband in the next few years, and, when asked about the possibility of public investment, said that was a "possibility". Mind you, from the accounts I've read, he made it clear that the governemnt would much prefer to leave it to the market.

That, of course, means BT and Virgin Media. While each of those firms has been talking up their plans to roll out fibre networks to parts of the UK over the next couple of years, neither is at all keen to move beyond the territory they've sketched out for those networks. That means half the country will be left out of this brave new digital future - unless new money can be found.

While BT welcomed Ofcom's move a few weeks back to encourage fast broadband investment with light-touch regulation, the company seems, if anything, to have become even more cautious about promising more investment. It believes it has gone as far as it can to bet billions (ok, about 拢1bn) on rolling out fibre, without antagonising its nervous shareholders.

Its message at the summit, as voiced by its chief executive Ian Livingston, was that the economic case for fibre to the home was "not proven", and that it wasn't clear that consumers really wanted high speeds.

Away from the summit, BT has been spinning vigorously about broadband. Its message? Britain hasn't fallen behind its rivals - indeed in terms of take-up, availability, and price, we compare well with most major economies.

At this point mischievous journalists will mention the two words bound to make a BT executive's blood boil - South Korea. The nation that has provided 100Mps broadband to much of its population with little fuss is often cited in articles decrying Britain's poor performance in the speed tables.

But BT will then point out that in Korea, and in just about every other place that is investing heavily in fibre-to-the-home, government money is playing a big part.

BT - or Virgin for that matter - isn't saying it out loud but the message to the government is clear. If you really want us to build Digital Britain, you're going to have to pay for it.

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How smart is Nokia?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 16 Apr 09, 16:45 GMT

Apple's iPhone may be the world's best-known phone, Google Android is making a growing impact, and Samsung, LG and Sony seem to bring out smarter phones every month - but make no mistake it's still Nokia which dominates the mobile phone industry. So when the Finnish phone-maker released results showing a 90% drop in profits the industry could have been excused for running in panic.

So has Nokia, which still has 37% of the global mobile market, lost the plot? Well its share price leaped ahead after the results came out, despite a fall of 19% in the number of phones sold this year compared to last. The market was happy because the news wasn't worse.

Nokia reaffirmed an earlier forecast that the overall market would shrink by 10% this year, pretty shocking for an industry which was used to 20% growth every year, but investors latched on to the idea that the gloom wasn't getting any deeper.

But there are still questions over how well Nokia is competing in the one area of the market that is still growing - "converged mobile devices", as Nokia calls them, or smartphones to the rest of us.

The company only managed to sell 13.7 million smartphones in the first three months of 2009, compared to 14.6 million in the same period last year. But the company's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo still managed to extract some good news here, claiming that its share of the market had actually ticked up a little since Christmas.

He trumpeted the success of the 5800 Xpress Music phone which was Nokia's number one seller in the first quarter of the year. But this device, touted an iPhone rival, was the company's first mass-market touchscreen phone - and arrived many months after just about everyone else had brought out similar devices.

Nokia seems to have been caught napping by the way smartphones have moved from early-adopter business devices into the mainstream. I remember visiting their Helsinki headquarters in 1999 and finding everyone there tapping away on the first version of the Communicator - and telling me that it made business meetings a bit tricky because colleagues were messaging each other across the table.

That device seemed extraordinarily advanced at the time - and Nokia has continued to develop the kind of phones that appeal to well-heeled early adopter executives. Now, though, everyone wants a device that is both smart and simple, and Nokia has struggled to deliver that combination.

A lot is now being staked on the N97 which arrives in June, and looks an attractive combination of touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told the investment analysts that he hoped it would sell a million a month, if the price charged by the operators was right.

But one analyst reminded me that June might be a difficult month to launch a smartphone because that's when a new version of the iPhone may be unveiled. Nokia probably sells forty times as many phones as Apple but the N97 could still find itself overshadowed by the glare of publicity surrounding a new iPhone. Perhaps the Finnish company needs smarter marketing, along with its smarter phones.

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My YouTube shame - part two

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 15 Apr 09, 08:53 GMT

For the second time in a year, I'm in trouble with YouTube - and finding out just how closely the video-sharing service is now policed for any whiff of copyright infringement.

Last year I received a warning that a video I had uploaded of my family playing in the park featured copyrighted material in the form of a Cat Stevens song, used as a backing track.

In that case it was allowed to remain on the site, although advertising appeared alongside my video, as a result of an agreement between Google and the record labels on "monetising" music videos.

But now a video I uploaded at the weekend has been deleted - and I've received a stiff warning that my whole account could be closed down if I fail to behave myself.

This time the copyright issue involved not music, but football. I'd visited one of the big matches of the weekend - Brentford v Exeter City - and uploaded exactly 37 seconds of action.

It wasn't exactly "Match of The Day" - one shot of the teams walking out, two attempts on goal by Brentford and a penalty miss. But I wasn't trying to record match highlights - my aims was to try out a new mini high-definition camera.

I wanted to see what kind of pictures I could get out of the camera - and how they would look when uploaded as a large file to YouTube, which now offers an HD option.

I'd somehow forgotten that the Football League are policing YouTube closely - and also assumed that they were looking out for material grabbed from the television, not a few frames of video shot from the crowd.

It looks as though my camera doesn't belong to me once I go through the turnstiles at a football ground. Maybe they should have the same signs that you get at cinemas, warning against the use of a video camera.

But here's a funny thing. I uploaded another video to YouTube last week , featuring by Billy Bragg at a press conference. He was part of an event staged to demand better terms for musicians - from YouTube's parent company, Google.

I've not received any warning notice about this video, and when I searched, I found plenty more material featuring Billy Bragg, much of it shot by fans. In one clip you can actually hear the songwriter asking people to sing nicely because they may well end up on YouTube.

So it seems there's a simple message - it's worth taking your video camera or mobile phone to a gig because the artists and their labels won't really mind too much, whatever their views of YouTube. But if you're going to a League Two football match, take my advice - leave your camera at home.

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What caused the Amazon firestorm?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 13 Apr 09, 08:22 GMT

Over the holiday weekend, messages suddenly started arriving thick and fast urging me to boycott Amazon. The reason? Apparently the online retailer had suddenly decided to block "adult" books and DVDs from searches and best-seller lists.

What caused the outrage was the way that "adult" appeared to mean books or DVDs with gay or lesbian themes. That meant that they would no longer turn up in searches, or, when found, would no longer include their Amazon "sales rankings", the one number that every modern author really cares about, and checks, ooh, at least a couple of times a day.

The result - at least according to lots of American bloggers - was that , from "Maurice" by EM Forster [pictured, right] to Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" virtually disappeared from view. As far as I could see, the "deranking" didn't affect books on the amazon.co.uk site, though some British authors say that their US editions were affected. Attempts to contact Amazon by authors who'd seen their works lose their rankings yielded little in the way of hard information.

Then an author called , who is also a publisher and therefore has what he calls a "special way" of contacting the retailer, got this reply when he asked why his novel had been sent into the wilderness:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude 'adult' material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Within hours, an internet firestorm was spreading, with Facebook groups formed to decry the apparent censorship, online petitions gathering thousands of signatures and "#amazonfail" becoming a trending topic on Twitter.

Of course, you might think that it's perfectly sensible for Amazon to decide to filter its content, making "adult" content less accessible, and so protecting younger users from seeing unsuitable material. I put that point to Zoe Margolis, whose own book , had its ranking removed. "Amazon's argument doesn't stand up," she told me, "you have to be over 18 to purchase from the site." And, she wanted to know, who defines adult? "As we've seen lesbian and gay fiction - featuring NO erotic content whatsoever - has been deemed 'adult'. One has to wonder if someone at Amazon is pandering to a right-wing contingent, who want to restrict access to non-conservative authors/topics."

But then the plot thickened. Amazon appeared to change tack, insisting that the apparent censorship was instead "a glitch in our system which is being fixed."

That of course did not quieten things down. New conspiracy theories started to circulate - that Amazon really was intent on quietly making its service more "family friendly", that Christian fundamentalists were behind the whole thing, or that someone had somehow managed to by which Amazon responds to complaints from users about books. And then a and claimed that this indeed was the explanation for the whole affair - he wrote that had "gamed" the system, extracting a list of every gay and lesbian book on the site, and sending thousands of complaints by an automated process.

Finally, on Tuesday morning at around 0630, I got a more complete statement from Amazon, which described the incident as "an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection."

The statement went on:

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

So was it a glitch, a bizarre cyber-conspiracy, or a ham-fisted cataloguing error? I'm not really any clearer - but I think that there are some lessons to be learned.

First of all, that it's a bit of a nightmare being an online retailer. If WH Smith or Waterstone's decided to put gay literature on more obscure shelves (remember - the books weren't banned, just made harder to find) would anyone have made a fuss - or even noticed?

Secondly, that in the days of "real-time" social networking, a PR storm can break over your head within hours, even over a holiday weekend, and you need to be ready to respond rather more quickly and coherently than Amazon managed.

But thirdly, that the culture wars that have been fought bitterly on dozens of blogs, with small but passionate audiences, are now spreading to mainstream sites like Amazon. You may think you just popped in to the online store to buy a book - but prepare to duck as lobby groups, libertarians, religious groups and mischievous hackers lob brickbats at each other.

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The battle over content

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 8 Apr 09, 09:12 GMT

It's a month since saw all professional music videos withdrawn from the video-sharing service in the UK. And there's no sign of peace breaking out - indeed the row appears to be getting more heated.

French and German musicians are also in dispute with YouTube - with music videos now blocked from the German site, and the threat of similar action in France. And later today the Performing Rights Society holds a meeting in London where musicians will press their case for what they're calling ".

What this all signals is a growing revolt by creators against the idea that "free" is the only model that works on the internet - or that getting into bed with Google is the only way to secure their online future. The musicians say they're getting peanuts - and a number have been giving chapter and verse on what exactly they earn from YouTube.

Pete Waterman says he's never made more than 拢11 for 100 million plays of Rick Astley's Never gonna Give You Up. Brendan Graham, who wrote You Raise Me Up, a song which appears and has been viewed milions of times says he got a "a very impressive royalty statement from PRS... of about 30 pages of YouTube royalties... coming to about 30 pence."

So do these figures stand up? Well neither Google - YouTube's owners - nor the PRS will give chapter and verse on their previous licensing agreement, but neither are they disputing the size of the payouts. But the problem, in the words of someone close to the negotiations, is that the PRS seems to have signed "a rubbish deal " - at least as far as the songwriters are concerned. And that's because it was struck when YouTube was in its infancy - oooh two or three years back - and nobody saw it growing into a major force in the music business.

Now the PRS has demanded a rate per stream from YouTube which Google says is just completely unrealistic - and would mean the search firm would lose money every time someone watched a music video.

Mind you, the German songwriters union has apparently looked at what the British are asking for - and demanded a rate 50 times higher.

So there's still a large gap between what the songwriters want and what Google is willing to pay. But there's a wider issue here.The YouTube business model - acting as a free platform for content and then advertising around it - just isn't working either for Google or for the content creators.

In a recent study, analysts at Credit Suisse calculated that running YouTube would cost $711m this year - that includes the huge sums needed to store videos as well as the cash paid out in licensing fees. But Credit Suisse says the revenue the site would earn from advertising would amount to no more than $240m, even assuming a 20% rise this year.

You don't have to be very good at maths to see that the sums just don't add up - and will look even less attractive if Google has to pay out more to the content creators. But the PRS says that's not its problem - "Why should our members subsidise YouTube's failed business model?" a spokesman asked me.

And they're not the only creators asking whether handing over their content to Google is quite such a good idea. Newspapers are also beginning to grumble again about the return - or lack of it - they get from Google News.

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, hit back yesterday of "dropping the ball" when it came to online distribution.

On one side you've got content creators, from songwriters to journalists, seeing "analogue dollars turning into online cents", as they describe it. On the other, you've got the only business that's really mastered the art of making large sums from online content - without producing any itself. Prepare for a long battle.

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Red faces at the 91热爆 Office

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 6 Apr 09, 19:18 GMT

When an e-mail arrived from a reader earlier this afternoon about a story we'd written on new EU regulations on data retention, I have to confess I was rather slow to react. Then I had another look and noticed this in the second paragraph:

...the 91热爆 Office is linking to a Chinese porn website.

Mike Riley had been wondering whether the new directive applied to his company. He needed to know if he was a "communications services provider", and so under an obligation to retain his customers' data.

Off he went to the 91热爆 Office website, and eventually burrowed his way . On the right, he noticed several links, including one to a body called the Technical Advisory Board (the link has since been removed). This, according to information elsewhere on the 91热爆 Office site, is a "non-departmental public body that advises the 91热爆 Secretary on whether the obligations imposed on communications service providers (CSPs) under the terms of RIPA are reasonable". But when Mr Riley clicked on the link he was directed to what appeared to be a porn site.

After reading his email, I too clicked on the link - and ended up on the same site, though it appeared to be Japanese rather than Chinese. I contacted the 91热爆 Office press office, and provided them with the first news of this embarrassing glitch.

Within minutes, they had broken the link, then removed it altogether from the page. The press officer thanked me - and stressed that the site had not, as we'd both at first assumed, been hacked. Instead, she said someone had taken over what was a redundant site, which had once belonged to the Technical Advisory Board, and occupied it with something rather different.

So is this a serious matter - or just a moment of embarrassment for a government department which has had its fair share in recent days? Mr Riley says it does matter. He says he's still not sure whether he's covered by the new directive and has "little faith in getting an answer from the 91热爆 Office who seemingly are unable to monitor and securitize, their own site let alone the communications data of millions of email users in the country".

On the other hand, this kind of stunt happens to a number of prominent websites - and causes red faces rather than real damage. A bigger threat appears to come from the Chinese group which has allegedly managed to hack its way into government departments around the world in a cyber-warfare operation. But I can imagine the 91热爆 Office will be hoping not to hear the word "porn" again for at least a few weeks.

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The Battle of Broughton

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 3 Apr 09, 14:00 GMT

On Wednesday, Paul Jacobs spotted a Google Street View car in his village.

It was executing a nifty turn in the dead-end street just outside his home, and that made him cross, because it appeared that the camera mounted on a pole was peering over his high fence to get a view. He and a neighbour John Holmes rushed out of their homes to confront the driver.

A short while later - after an amicable chat with the man from Street View - . It appeared that Broughton could rest easy, with no prospect of cameras shoving their lenses where they're not wanted and invading the privacy of this quiet backwater.

Two days later, I'm here with a large 91热爆 satellite truck and a cameraman - and at least two other camera crews have been spotted in the village this morning. The village was also featured in the local papers yesterday and much of the national press this morning. So how private is this place now?

But make no mistake, the battle of Broughton is another embarrassment for Google - and gives us another interesting angle in the debate over privacy. Just hours after Street View was launched last month, about unblurred faces and embarrassing incidents caught on camera.

Google acted quickly to deal with those issues and it appeared that the controversy was over. Millions of us have been using the service - not so much, I suspect, to visit landmarks but to check out that house we used to live in years ago and tut-tut over the nasty shade of paint the new owners have chosen for the front door.

But now - for the first time, as far as I can see - a whole village has revolted. Paul Jacobs insists he's no Luddite or Nimby - and uses Google himself for navigation. He just feels they've overstepped the mark, coming a little too close with their cameras. "I've no objection to them taking wide shots of vistas - it's when they're taking close-ups of people's homes, that crosses the line." His neighbour John Holmes puts it more firmly - "an Englishman's home is his castle" - and wants Street View out of the village altogether.

You may point out to them that estate agents pictures of people's homes are widely available on the internet - they'll respond that those shots are taken with the owners' agreement.

Google says it isn't breaking any law by taking these pictures - they're always shot from the public highway. And by agreeing to black out homes if people aren't happy to have them shown, they're going further than they need to. After all, if you or I want to take a picture in the street and then post it online, there's nothing to stop us.

But what Google is finding again is that its sheer scale and reach makes people nervous. So the people of Broughton seem relatively relaxed about having our cameras pointed down their street. But the idea of any one of Google's hundreds of millions of users making their way down the village streets and peering over the hedge? That, they believe, is a step too far.

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Do anarchists tweet?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 2 Apr 09, 15:08 GMT

It's clear that there has been a huge amount of social media activity around the G20 summit, and the demonstrations in the City and at the Excel centre. But some are suggesting that these new tools - in particular Twitter - have been vital to the organisation of the demos. I'm not so sure.

It does seem as though just about everyone involved in G20 - from the politicians to the journalists, from bloggers to demonstrators - has been snapping, filming recording everything in site and uploading it to the web to share with the world.

I spent Wednesday trying to monitor events via Twitter, Facebook, AudioBoo, and various websites. One good place to go was , created by a group of journalism students who set out with mobile phones to record the day's events. Alex Wood, who masterminded the project, even ended up providing this video from his mobile phone to the 91热爆.

My own Twitter searches came up with some useful insights - though it was as ever hard to pick out the genuine eyewitnesses from all those simply reprocessing what they'd just seen on the television. I particularly liked this message from one frustrated Twitterer trying to get the word out from the Bank of England:

"Mobile coverage v bad prob due to number of anarchists also using iPhones".

Just a minute - anarchists using iPhones? Or Twitter? Does that really compute? One is a mobile phone that you might think was more of a yuppie toy than a revolutionary tool - the other is a social network used principally by an older, more establishment crowd than, say, Facebook. Or maybe those are just my preconceptions?

I asked Alex Wood what his impression had been yesterday. He said there were a surprising number of people around him using both Twitter and iPhones, but he wasn't convinced that they were the main ways that the demonstrators had been organised.

The had been the place to go to find out what was happening next, and he said there was also a more old-fashioned method: "They still used the good old megaphone - people were announcing on megaphones that they were putting on an alternative summit in East London."

And he says there was just a small core of people bent on trouble: "The core of the anarchists, who were smashing up RBS, did what they did and got out quickly."

Did they organise that via Twitter? I'd be surprised - it's a very public place to talk about something you don't want the police to hear.

There certainly have been plenty of fresh insights into the G20 events from sources other than the mainstream media. There are AudioBoos - sound clips uploaded to the internet from outside the Bank of England. There are hundreds of photos on Flickr, . And there are .

But as far as rallying anarchists is concerned, maybe a megaphone is still proving more useful than an iPhone.

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Goodbye "Knock-off Nigel"

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 2 Apr 09, 00:00 GMT

If you've visited the cinema or watched a DVD over the last few years, you've probably also been on the receiving end of a pretty stark warning. "You wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal a handbag " says the trailer before the film, hammering home the message that piracy is a crime.

But now those trailers - and another anti-piracy series involving "Knock-off Nigel" will be seen no more.

They've been replaced by a series of short ads promoting British cinema and thanking the public for supporting movies by buying a ticket or a DVD. And, as far as I can see, there's not even a mention of piracy.

So did the get-tough tactics fail to do their job - and has the industry now changed tack?

"Your campaigning needs to evolve over time and have an appropriate message for today,"Eddie Cunningham, president of Universal Pictures International told me. He was explaining the new strategy to me on behalf of the Industry Trust, the body producing these trailers and fighting to promote the copyright cause for the UK film and TV business.

Mr Cunningham insisted that I was wrong to suggest the previous robust campaign against piracy had failed. '"If you went back to 2004, the majority of people didn't realise it was a crime, by the end of that campaign the majority of people realised it was. Research shows us that most people now find it unfashionable - there's been a gradual change in attitudes."

There's no evidence yet though that the tide has turned when it comes to the sheer scale of piracy - though the film industry has commissioned some research which it says could provide at least a hint that progess is being made.

But it seems the real news is that the nature of the anti-piracy battle has changed in two ways. Just like the music industry, the movie business has decided it's not worth alienating its own consumers and the focus has moved from physical piracy to the online variety.

In 2004 most people didn't have a fast enough broadband connection to make it worth the bother of downloading a movie via file-sharing software - now it's becoming a relatively simple "hobby".

And what really struck me about my conversation with Eddie Cunningham was his strong words about the internet service providers and his conviction that the government would force them to co-operate in the battle against piracy. "if you or I owned a house in which prostitution was taking place," he said, "or where drug dealing was happening, we'd be responsibile."

In other words, the ISPs are looking on as the crime of film piracy takes place down their broadband lines, and doing nothing about it.

In France the to bring in a "three-strikes" law, which would mean persistent film and music downloaders could have their broadband connections cut off.

Mr Cunningham thinks the same thing could be imminent here, if the ISPs don't agree to self-regulation: "It's absolutely critical for the creative industries which are terribly important for the UK, that the government steps in and does something. It's theft and it's only happening because we're making it a bit too easy at the moment."

So behind the softly-softly approach to piracy, there's still a threat. It's just aimed at what the film industry seems to regard as the "Knock-off Nigels" among the internet service providers, rather than at film fans.

UPDATE, 09:40: In a surprise sequel, the Industry Trust has got back to me this morning to say that Knock-off Nigel hasn't been consigned to history after all.

While the "piracy is theft" will be withdrawn, Nigel will llive on, alongside the new "thank you" adverts. So the strategy is even more complex than I thought. Filmgoers will be complimented and mocked at the same time.

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