July 2004 Archives

Bootlegger who amassed £15m fortune from pirate CDs jailed says the Guardian with a similar report yesterday on BBC news. Ah, you might think, this is where all that piracy that the RIAA and other blame their falling sales on  - when they're not blaming internet file sharers of course - is coming from.

However if you read the article more closely you realise that the correct part of  the headline is in fact bootlegger. This man is not copying offical CDs and selling them on as cuonterfeits to unsuspecting 10 year old Busted fans. He's selling recordings of live shows and other otherwise unavailable material.

Now obviously there are copyright issues here - it's not fair for him to be making £14 profit per CD and the artist making nothing.  Of course with legal CDs the artist always gets a cut of the sales don't they (answer: no). However the repeated claim that the irecord industry and artists are losing millions is just rubbish - note also the order of importance "not only to recording companies but also to performers and composers".

What fan buys a bootleg of a concert for £15 in preference to a legal recording, probably for a tenner off an online CD store? You buy a bootleg once you've already exhausted the official material available by that artist - or at least the stuff that you are interested in. It's incredible to me that these people believe they would make even a penny more without bootlegs around.

The only scandal here really is the high price he charges for the CDs. Up front costs are small so he could sell them for a fiver and still make a tidy sum. Of course at that point he would also be undercutting the official releases and so there would be a temptation for some to buy the cheaper lower quality release over the more expensive, but better produced, official live album. So really the record companies should be grateful that he was so greedy.

Clerks the 10th Anniversary Edition has recently been announced. I heard about this a while back when we were wondering whether to upgrade our Laserdisc copy to DVD. It's a triple DVD with two versions of the movie, the old and new commentaries and loads of extras including the flying car sketch.

Official info and pictures at View Askew.

Sadly it doesn't actually appear to be available for order yet.

If the Daleks do make it into Dr Who eventually then it'll be "the Sun wot won it".

See also some different looks for the possible redesign courtesy, I assume, of the Sun graphic design department.

This follows on from the earlier announcement of the breakdown in talks between the BBC and the Nation estate in which Tim Hancock, current agent for the estate, reveals himself to have a severe reality problem. Also possibly naming the next Dalek story if they do resolve their differences.

He apparently said that the BBC was trying to "ruin the brand of the Daleks" and that he wanted to "protect the integrity of the brand".

Right.

Well the blog has really been living up to its name recently. So in an attempt to get back into the habit I've installed a plugin fror FireFox called Deepest Sender; apparently it's an anagram, but at the moment I can't be bothered to work out of what.

Anyway I've got it set up with a toolbar button which opens a sidebar into which I am now typing this entry. This has to be about the least effort adding a blog entry can be so if the posting rate doesn't pick up soon then I am just rubbish.

I was amused by an article in yesterday's Guardian about the current premium rate dialler problem. What most amused me was in the advice section.

The risks of falling foul of these problems can be significantly reduced by switching to broadband, though some experts say it is not entirely safe.

Well actually as long as you've unplugged your phone line from your computer then I would say you are 100% safe from these particular problems. I'd like to see a web site get my cable modem to dial an 090 number.

But the best is:-

With broadband you should be okay if you are linked to the web via an external modem and use micro-filters.

Huh? This sounded like complete rubbish to me - aren't micro filters what you have in your vacuum cleaner? So I did a quick google and discovered that micro filters do mean something in the context of ADSL. Unfortunately for the author of the article unless he's saying that a website can cause your ADSL modem to cause exactly the right kind of interference on the line to convince it do dial the premium rate number then he is in fact still talking bollocks.

Maybe I should send it into the Bad Science section...