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Rupert's Weekly Roundup (3/7/2000)

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Rupert Goodwins AnchorDesk

Published: 30 Jun 2000 14:33 BST

MONDAY

A la i-Mode
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that any group of telcos in agreement on anything, are probably in search of a new way to shaft their customers. Which is one, but only one, reason why so many people are suspicious of WAP. Another reason is that it's not working very well. A third and more cogent reason is that non-WAP services such as Japan's i-Mode have done much, much better in delivering services people want.

But can you find a European telco planning to roll out i-Mode? You cannot. Is this because WAP is better? It is not. Are we being denied the right to choose the service we want? Ho yus, me beauties.

Fortunately for us - and fortunately for the telcos themselves, if only they'd have the guts to admit it - we live in a global marketplace. And that means more than just a place where big companies can do Olympian deals between themselves to stitch up the punters on five continents, even if they behave as if that's all it is.

Thus, DoCoMo from Japan, who owns the i-Mode standard), and Logica from the UK, who do clever things with software, are forming an informal vanguard to get the new idea to European shores. There'll be a prize for the first incumbent mobile phone operator to have the danglies to get on board, and flat batteries for the losers, but expect a great deal of pith and wind to be expended in the meantime. Take me there...

Lights out for the colonies
It's hard for yer average Brit to comprehend, but those wonderful high-tech, world-leading, chip-churning Californians have a bit of a blind spot about some things we take for granted. Take electric power, for example: the stuff that comes out of the walls and makes lights glow, tellies burble and your Aunty Mabel's electric blanket compensate for Uncle Ted's freezing tootsies. Pretty essential for civilisation, you'd think, and doubly so for all that high tech manufacturing plant that dots the road from San Jose to San Francisco.

Only it doesn't work very well over there. Come the summer, come the air conditioning. With the same awful inevitability that makes UK train companies go into catatonic shock at the first snowflake of winter, the US power companies go brown around the edges. The lights go out and the chip factories turn into so much hyperexpensive industrial art.

It's weird. They can't make mobile phones that work properly, they can't work out that there may be something odd in giving people guns but no happiness, and they can't even persuade the humble electron to move from A to B. Yet they carry on running the world economy as if they were born to it. And I thought that particular mix of muddle and megalomania went out with the fall of the British Empire. Take me there...

An' it harm no-one...
One of the underlying principles of copyright infringement used to be that the seriousness of the sin is directly proportional to the harm done. If I make a photocopy of a magazine article and pass it to a friend then yes, in the eyes of the law I've been naughty. But not very naughty: if that friend then takes a subscription to the title in question then any case against me would get short shrift in court.

Which is why the RIAA, those bastions of consumer protection composed entirely of big business interests, has made such a show of figures that purport to demonstrate that Napster has been eating away at their legitimate sales. Fair enough. But it's odd that when figures turn up that suggest that no harm has been done - in fact, as you'd expect, rather the opposite - this is decried as supporting widescale piracy.

I'm with Courtney Love (no, not like that). In a masterful speech recently she gave a cogent exegesis of how the real villain is the record industry itself, which is designed to extract every cent from music and keep it firmly for itself. Perhaps if the RIAA came out and said that, and said that furthermore it was going to damn well make sure this state of affairs was going to continue, it'd have some rigour behind its arguments. As it is, we remain completely entitled to stand on the sidelines and boo with vigour. Take me there...

Losing memories
This is a story with some serious long-term ramifications. Rambus, who makes expensive, fast memory, has long claimed that it holds patents essential to the making of other, less expensive but almost as fast memory. The rest of the market disagreed, and held out for ages. Now Hitachi, one of the companies that makes the competitive memory, has caved in and said that it will pay Rambus licencing fees for that less expensive memory. Which will make it more expensive than the expensive stuff, and gives Rambus a potential stranglehold on the whole market.

And we know what that means, don't we? Better keep those booing muscles in good fettle. I feel we may be needing them again. Take me there...