Filed under: Tech, law | Tags: dispute resolution, glenn beck, Internet, UDRP, WIPO
He lodged a complaint with the WIPO under the UDRP against a domain name owner he said was violating his trademark (see what I did there). An American individual registered a domain name which linked his name with various criminal acts — however the site didn’t accuse him of doing the acts, they just wanted to know why he won’t come out and publicly deny the serious allegations, a satirical reference to Beck’s own interviewing style — Beck promptly took legal advice and this led to the WIPO hearing. The extra-legal Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy is not perfect, it’s been widely criticised from the very outset for issues of accountability and bias not least in that the initial source of the policy is the World Intellectual Property Organisation and asking the WIPO how you should deal with copyright disputes between trademark owners and domain name owners is a little bit like asking the KKK how you should deal with disputes between white people and black people.
On the other hand, this dispute is quite a reassuring note that in the case of fairly clear situations the process does work. The UDRP deals with trademark violation and this is not a trademark violation so the action can’t succeed and that’s what’s been decided, although on a different ground because the domain name was held to be similar enough to be confusing.
It’s the specific details of the dispute which are quite entertaining. The reason behind the registrant registering the specific domain name he did is because it’s an Internet meme. It’s not the registrant making false allegations of felonies by Glenn Beck, he’s just copying a joke that’s on FARK. The third pillar of the test requires the trademark owner to prove bad faith so this is a huge deal. The thing is that Internet memes are elements from a (primarily American) subculture and it’s impossible to assume that any particular WIPO panel sitting in Geneva will know a lolcat from a rickroll. This means that the respondent’s submission needed to include a potted history of the Internet meme in between naturally quite dry analysis of relevant precedent and procedural (as opposed to legal) argument. It’s inordinately awesome to read about Leroy Jenkins on letter headed paper.
Perhaps most hearteningly of all is the statement released by the registrant after the decision was made – in the statement he gives Beck control of the domain (despite the panel ruling in the registrant’s favour) and says that the only reason he even disputed the point was to defend the American Constitution’s protections of free speech from Beck. It’s a surprisingly powerful and elegant declaration of patriotism for a dispute that came out of an Internet in-joke.
Arstechnica have a good, factually oriented review of the dispute that’s worth a read.
4dd6465fc78a86d0987870f88dffcb9c
Filed under: Tech | Tags: details, device independent, documents, image, pdf, plain text, rich text, text, word processing
The Pirate Bay is a great source of material for blog posting. Oddly enough this isn’t about the issue of, you know, their big court case. This is actually about their rather entertaining “Legal Threats” page. The Pirate Bay has (had?) a policy whereby if you found someone had posted a torrent with your copyrighted material on the Pirate Bay tracker / search engine you could write to the Pirate Bay and they… will promptly ignore it. Or they’ll send you a cheeky reply.
They post the letters they get on this page. Generally what they have are copies of emails which are very simply the plain text listings of the emails, generally with lots of lawyerly signatures including the words of “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL” etc. However, one of the documents is interesting because it’s a PDF. The Pirate Bay took this and replied back with a 1 megabyte image in .BMP format which looked a lot like this:
“I can use annoying formats too” they say. But is PDF annoying? I’m not so sure.
With my techie hat on I know that the best form to find text in is simple, human readable plain text, the sort of thing you’d get if you typed it in Notepad. It’s just the words, you can do anything with it, you can copy and paste it into any other program and every computer can interpret it in such a way as to let you see it on any computer you can find. However, with my (law) student hat on I happen to really like the not so humble Portable Document Format.
What is PDF?
It’s probably worth talking about what PDF is by comparing it to the other options for text.
1) Plain text
Examples, created by: Notepad, Text Editor
Pares everything down to the words themselves. There is no option for formatting, fonts, colours, pages, anything. All you do is type a long sheet of contigous text. The great thing is the sheer efficiency of what you produce. The document provides all the substantive content of the fancier formats but without messing with formatting issues.
Pros
- Very lightweight
- Easily transferred
- Easily modified in many different programs running on many different systems
- Easily adapted into other forms, not burdened by extra code put in for formats etc.
Cons
- No formatting, at all. Need to use things like *bold* or /italic/ to distinguish formatting
- No diagrams. It’s possible to do using letters and symbols but no chance for images in the text
- Can be hard to set out – things like footnoting and tables of contents pretty much need to be set out by hand in the vast majority of plain text editors.
- Can be very elegant, can be very crude.
2) Rich text
Examples, created by: MS Word, OpenOffice
Pros
- Most common kind of text – every web page and every Word document are rich text.
- Allows visible formatting – select text and make it bold, italic etc. Allows fonts
- Allows image imbedding, depending on the specific format this can be within the file itself (eg, Word documents) or through referencing (eg web pages)
- Can be very feature rich – templates, automated footnoting, automated table of conents etc are all possible.
Cons
- Extra features means compatibility suffers. Documents created in MS Word may have compatibility issues when opened in slightly different programs, eg. OpenOffice, Word Perfect, Abiword.
- Although you can choose various fonts for your documents these fonts will only appear on other people’s computers if they also have the same fonts installed. If they don’t they’ll see a fallback option which you may not have chosen. There are ways around this.
- Will not look the same on every computer, settings will vary and the resulting document can be affected.
3) Image
Examples, created by: Paint, Photoshop
I might surprise some people by including this option here but I really do think that image formats are a real option (of sorts) for conveying text on a computer. The flexibility that allows the same picture format to contain a picture a funny cat or a world famous old master also allows it to hold the shape of words.
Pros:
- Document looks exactly as it did on your computer for everyone
- Very easily shared between users – every modern computer can understand the common picture formats, so no need for specialist software to view it.
- Very, very good for diagrams. Will look exactly as intended, allows full colour and photorealistic images to included directly with the text.
- Very flexible layout – not bound by justification or layout tags, can put elements in anywhere on the document
Cons
- Very big files for email etc (the Pirate Bay image was 1 megabyte for 7 words)
- Can be hard to edit, and editing it well requires specialist software that’s hard to use
- Can be hard to add extra pages
- Not actually text – only an image so can’t be copied and manipulated like a text document
4) Device Independent formats
Examples, created by: Acrobat, Foxit, TeX
Pros
- Will look the same on every computer (is device independent). Designed to be transferred between computers
- Allows you to rely on page, line numbers because it is identical to each user
- Allows direct embedding of images, allows for diagrams to be laid in text exactly where intended by the creator
- Is still text, so can be copied and pasted as text. Possible to also have original image as well as text, for example if scanning a book, in the same document
- Can be pretty immutable, so provides quite a good historical reference. (eg, harder to edit a PDF report from Westlaw than an RTF)
Cons
- Can be “annoying” – that is if you’re browsing the internet and you come across a PDF document your browser will need to load an external reader.
- Can be expensive. PDF is officially created by Acrobat and that is not cheap. On the other hand DVI,free PDF and so on are open-source and can be produced by many different formats.
- Can be pretty immutable, it can be difficult to just change something in a PDF document.
Now, if I point you to 4ii) I think I will show you a huge reason to like PDF (and other device independent formats). The reason here is to look at the ability to rely on the page numbers – so that useful summation of a case’s ratio at the bottom of page 4 is at the bottom of page 4, on everyone’s computer.
I can’t really understand why you would email someone a PDF version of a letter instead of writing your message in the email itself. I find that strange but I don’t think that means that the format is annoying. Feel free to use these formats in your own workflow. They’re good.
Filed under: General | Tags: advertising, ASA, broadband, Internet, throttling
ASA Adjudication British Sky Boardcasting Ltd t/a Sky – 16 September 2009
Sky ran an advert claiming that their customers were not going to face a reduction in speeds at peak times, they said that BT would. Naturally BT complained about this. That is hardly unexpected, they’re allowed to complain to the regulator if they disagree with an advert. The ASA then has to take a look at the advert and decide if it actually goes against any rules.
The ASA have uphead their complaint and Sky are not to run their advert again – despite BT admitting that they throttle users’ connections at peak times. How is this possible?
BT use a Fair Use policy — this is the thing that makes the unlimited internet packages economic for the ISP. If you use the service heavily they will slow you down, if you don’t draw too heavily on the service it comes at you quickly. “Effectively unlimited” is the language used.
Fair use policies are marketed as a fairness issue — they’re to stop certain users hogging it for everyone. The complaint to this is that they’re used to hide the fact that the ISP is trying to spread too limited resources between too many users. Heavy users of P2P software are likely to run into fair use policies at some point but other users may also, depending on the strength of their policy. For example, and this is the sort of thing that Sky was talking about, users on Option 1 have their video streaming throttled at peak time. That’s iplayer,
This is an example of fine distinction – the reason that the advert wasn’t allowed was because that it suggests that every BT user would be throttled at peak times (quite an image) rather than the fact that it says that BT throttles users at all. I think the best response to this would be along the lines of Ryanair’s “Sooo sorry” adverts in which, having been ordered to stop saying they were 5x cheaper than a competitor and to apologise, conceded that they were only roughly 4.5x times cheaper and said sorry. Sometimes the letter of the law is the only way to go.
Filed under: General, University | Tags: economy, ethical, food, recession, wastage
Economy Gastronomy is a recessionary BBC food programme which basically has the central principle of “avoid throwing food away.” This is frankly not a bad thing. I think a person really should be looking to avoid wasting all that much food in their life, both to save money and just for ethical living. The case studies they use in their programme are really quite over the top though – with groups of people who really show quite galling wastage of food. I’m not talking about them not going as far as using brains and connective tissue in their food, I’m talking about throwing a quarter of it away. You really do get the sense that they end up saving the people on the show money would be more down to giving the people a right good slap than teaching revolutionary food preparation techniques. I was speechless when one child threw away a three egg omlette because he’d folded it unevenly — that was his dinner
Regardless of what I or anyone else thinks of the particular people involved the principles being taught are extremely worth while. It relies on having access to long term food storage and being able to cook large amounts so it may not be suitable for all students but for people sharing flats with groups of people it might be a sensible way of splitting the expense of food. It’s cheaper to live off shared, home cooked dishes than to keep separate shelves in the fridge and fight over crumbs. It’s not going to be suitable for everyone’s situation and awkward flatmates can ruin this but its advice of planning out meals, using what’s left after a meal to make a new meal instead of throwing it away, processing past prime fruit into smoothies and spritsers and so on is all sound advice
The BBC Food site is available here
Filed under: General | Tags: anonymity, comments, discussion, employment, racism, religion, walmart
There’s a fairly straight forward seeming employment law issue brewing in Walmart Arkansas, the law suit argues that a straight up and productive senior consultant was fired into a poor economy with a bad review a little while after after his co-workers didn’t want him to use the company washroom to prepare for his daily prayers. That’s basically the sort of religious discrimination action many would sell children to be able to represent. It seems a pretty hamfisted handling of the situation by Walmart. Regardless, it will run and run, the case is still in early days yet and Walmart has its right of reply and so on. The interesting thing is the sort of reaction these stories get in terms of anonymous comments: http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2009/09/wal-mart_deloitte_civil_rights.php
There are two main sides to the discussion in the comments thread. Very few people leaving a comment don’t have some sort of opinion on the topic. There are two lists, one is comments from people who give if definitely not their real or full name and the other are people who give a not a name as their handle. I’m cherry picking for the two lists but I think it’s a trend I’ve noticed by other users anonymous commenting. Remember, all of these people had the choice (and may have) to leave a false name. Why do the people who leave a name not advise that the Muslim worker commit suicide while those who leave a handle do?
I blog anonymously, I really like that I can make infantile, ill-thought out comments on law without a future employer googling my name and discovering that, back in 2007-2008, I knew pretty much nothing about whatever topic. I’m not particularly right wing, if you’re not liberal when you’re young you’ve not got a heart, so it’s not really comparable for my sort of anonymity but my plan is to avoid writing anything on the blog that I can’t defend in real life discussion.
Examples of the first list:
Simon says:
“Wudu is the process where muslims clean themselves up(face,hands, foot, mouth rinse) with water from any dirt or germs that they may have collected during work or any other activity. This entire process takes less than 5 mins. Being a businessman and handling 74 employees i can’t think of any burden/complexity/hardship this process can bring to the employer. Shame on Walmart.”
David Ross says:
“Just terrible. Why can’t Muslims enjoy the same rights and freedoms in America that Christians and Jews enjoy in Saudi Arabia?”
blutenhalbmond says:
“A Muslim prayer is essentially a few minutes (5 minutes max) devoted to gloifying the Lord and he/she emerges after that short experience cleaner, more relaxed relieved of tension, anger and hostility, in short, with a more positive attitude to one’s workplace. This is why the afternoon prayer is ordained and the corporate world should in fact welcome it.The “wazu” or wudu (former spelling is more common in Non Arabic countries) is a psychological gesture of purification as well as a good reason to clean up. Its a healthy thing to do. We all should at least once in the middle of our work should rinse their hands up to the elbows, splash some cold water on our faces and behind the necks, gargle and clean our throat and noses of junk that may have accumulated therein. A most commendable hygienic habit if you think rationally, laying your angers prejudices aside for a moment.”
Examples of the second list:
kidding? says:
“Kidding right? What if my religious beliefs required me to spend a few minutes upside down each day at work? Or required me to smoke some dope? Or, what if I walked the aisles praying aloud to my God of choice in whispers? What if I chose to wear a dull sword or a light wand to symbolize my religious faith?
This is medieval superstition, pure and simple, whether the guy is a Muslim or evangelical Christian or a devotee of Thor or Wohan. If people want to delude themselves by talking to some non-existent being, they are free to do so at home. Tolerance of religion is not a virtue, it’s a regress into the past. Just like the dumb-ass judge who wanted to hang the 10 Commandments in his courthouse, this foolishness ought to be rewarded with a good-bye, please work elsewhere.”
Good Riddance says:
“I think it’s good he was fired.
Fundamentalism should not be tolerated.
If he is unable to integrate into a secular society(work a whole shift without being disruptive) then he should move to Pakistan.”
US Citizen says:
“His religion prevented him from doing a standard professional job. Walmart should hold its ground here. If they don’t, Walmart will lose my respect.If he wants to be a Muslim, he can go back home. Or he could kill himself, which would be much better.”
On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog. But they might guess you’re just a tiny bit racist.
Filed under: law | Tags: acceptance, carrier, complaints, consumer protection, courier, damage, delivery, immediately, quality, reasonable time, repair, replacement, return, rights, sale of goods act, statutory rights, waiver
“If this tape is broken or if the package is damaged, check entire contents in front of carrier and sign carrier’s cheet in accordance with actual condition and quantity of contents. It is not sufficient to sign “Unexamined.” Written complaints must be made to the carriers and the senders immediately, otherwise no claim can be entertained.”
No claim can be entertained? Really?
This was written on some packing tape wrapped around a new computing purchase and it caught my eye because I believe it is simply unenforceable. I’ve not given the retailer a right of reply so I won’t identify them here but I thought I’d take the opportunity to give a bit of consumer advice. You have a right of rejection which you only lose at the point you accept the goods. That lets you return the goods for a refund, a replacement or a repair. Acceptance is a legal term which has a legal definition beyond the normal one.
The legislation someone should point to if they’re directed to this sort of sticker is s35 of the Sale of Goods Act 1979. This talks about what acceptance actually means. In particular, point them at subsections (2), (3) and (5) and which gives you, as a consumer, the statutory right of a reasonable time to examine the goods after they are delivered and the protection as a consumer against losing your rights “agreement, waiver or otherwise.” The retailer simply can’t change legislation by putting a message on the parcel, and even if they were trying to, it needs to be very, very clearly pointed out on the parcel. This is slightly different for people who are purchasing in the line of business but you’re still allowed to catch your breath before your right of return expires. If you don’t examine a parcel that’s delivered to you you should write “unexamined” – it’s the truth.
Obviously if your carrier brings a half destroyed, collapsed and burnt box with the tape broken you should check it right there on the door and not sign until you confirm that it was delivered to you in such a sorry state. You should because that protects you from assertions that it was delivered to you fine and you broke it. You don’t need to though, your contract involves the goods inside the package — not the parcel itself and your statutory rights are not affected.
Filed under: General, Tech | Tags: a href, academic, anchor, HTML, link, reference, snippet, Wordpress
1: <a name=”1″><a href=”#f1″>[1]</a></a>
2: <a name=”f1″><a href=”#1″>[1]</a></a>
These two lines of awkwardly nested code will provide you with clicky footnotes in HTML pages. It works fine for WordPress posts. It is pretty straight forward HTML but since it appears not to be an automated function in WordPress it needs done manually. I assume this would work in all blogging platforms as it just uses HTML, the markup webpages are written in. You need to be using the HTML view of the WordPress post screen to apply this, otherwise it will convert the greater and less than symbols etc into text rather than code and it will show up in your post instead of links. It’s how I did it in the previous post here and here.
I don’t believe anyone should copy and paste anything into their website/blog/program/terminal/contract/etc without knowing what it does so: The code works in four parts.
The first section of 1, <a name=”1″>, defines the content falling in between it and the </a> as an anchor called “1″. The second section of 1, <a href=”#f1″>, defines the content falling between it and the next </a> as a link to the part of the page defined as f1. This is applied to the superscript number in your body text – so in my previous post: “…at all times<strong>[1]</strong> a vindication…” Clicking this number will take you to the bottom of the post.
The first section of 2, < a name=”f1″>, defines the content falling in between it and then </a> as an anchor called f1. The second section of 2, <a href=”#1>, defines the content falling between it and the next </a> as a link to the part of the page defined as 1. This is applied to the superscript number in your footnotes – so in my previous post: “…<strong>[1]</strong> The arrests” Clicking this number will take your back to its reference number in the body text.
You need to rename each part of the footnote. In this example I’ve used 1 for the reference in the body text and f1 to refer to the footnote. I would increment this to 2 and f2 for the next footnote. I would rename this entirely for the next post, however, because it gets confusing to have links which effectively point to other posts on the main page of your blog. In this case if you put a letter in front of 1 and f1 to create “a1″ and “af1″, in the next post you could use “b1″ and “bf1″ and the two could coincide in full on your main page with no problems.
Feel free to email or comment for clarification. I’m not a technical writer for a reason.
Filed under: General, Words | Tags: 90ml, air port, air travel, baggae check, bomb plot, conviction, definition, email, justified, liquid explosions, OED, reasonable, restriction, security, snooping, terrorism, vindicate
The news coverage of the conviction of the people behind the “water bottle bombing” plot has literally used the words “this has vindicated the heightened security measures” (BBC News 24) which were put in place after the plot was uncovered.
Does it really? I’m going to be pedantic here because vindication is a powerful word, here’s what it means:
vindicate
vin·di·cate / ˈvindəˌkāt/ v. [tr.]
- clear (someone) of blame or suspicion: hospital staff were vindicated by the inquest verdict.
- show or prove to be right, reasonable, or justified: more sober views were vindicated by events.
The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English, 2009
I do appreciate the job that the security services have done in keeping what turned out to be a fairly clever and probably, had it not been detected and watched by the largest surveillance operation the UK had ever seen from an early stage and then immediately stopped once it moved beyond planning ending in the conviction of all but one of the suspects, damaging attack out of the skies over my head. That’s really, really fantastic news. I’m not pro-terrorist, make no mistake, and I’m very glad that the attack was stopped. This is a post on the use of words.
The security measures
My issue is that I do wonder if it really does “vindicate” the fact you couldn’t take enough baby food (baby food is now excepted from the restrictions, thankfully) on a transatlantic flight to feed a baby. Or how it now means that you can no longer bring water that you didn’t buy from the departure lounge onto a plane. Drinks that you pick up in the airport and quietly bring onto the plane unquestioned are clearly more friendly to allies of America than drinks from home that are subject to an x-ray scanner and security checkpoint, obviously. This isn’t as flippant as it seems because the explosive that the plotters planned to use was basically energy drink mixed with cleaning fluid. You can just buy that in the departure lounge.
You could even bring homemade liquid fiery death entirely legally “so long as the items are carried in a clear plastic food storage type bag with a capacity of no more than one quart” remembering that “each individual container must have a capacity of no greater than three ounces (90 ml)” And your friend could also bring his own clear plastic bag of liquid fiery death to top yours up if you wanted a bigger explosion and so on. Are we really safer with little bottles? Can I go out there and suggest that you could put it into a container of baby food which is exempt from the restrictions?
One of the main tricks of the trade when investigating a terrorist attack, or most crimes in fact, is asking the question “who benefits?” because if you know who had an incentive to commit a crime you narrow down the people who were likely to have committed it. By this metric, “who benefits from banning liquids from being taken through the baggage scanner?”, you end up with WHSmiths and Starbucks who get a legally enforced monopoly in the departure lounge shops because, legally, you haven’t got any other option unless you want to end up becoming a terror suspect. Is one textbook, wonderfully well executed police operation that kept us safe from even the slightest chance of harm to our air traffic at all times[1] a vindication of these measures?
Definition 1: to clear (someone) of blame or suspicion
This is probably not what the reporter meant when they dropped the v word. My comments above aside I don’t actually think WHSmith plotted to blow up planes to create a monopoly for their airport shops so it’s probably just commercially convenient rather than actually a dastardly conspiracy. The measures themselves have viewed with no greater and probably some lesser suspicion (I think everyone’s wondered in their heart of hearts if you actually can blow a plane up with a bottle of Oasis outside of a movie) because of this conviction but it is not “cleared” because of the trial and that’s what the definition of vindication requires.
Definition 2: show or prove to be right, reasonable, or justified: more sober views were vindicated by events.
This seems more sensible and probably what the reporter meant. This is what I’m not convinced about, the main problem is that the instant case just doesn’t seem to have needed the actions that were rolled out to protect anyone. Basically the liquids prohibition (now relaxed to pretty awkward restrictions) was just a belt and braces extra on top on a mind bogglingly thorough UK police operation as far as this case was concerned. This case didn’t actually need the prohibition at all.
The prohibition was for other people.
This case only showed the real and present threat of liquid explosives passing through the baggage checking process at airports disguised as other liquids. The restriction on liquids was levied to stop other attempts. The vindication will come when the measures, not the police and intelligence services, stop an attack using liquid explosives disguised as other liquids to defeat pre-”jet plot” baggage checking procedures against a commercial aeroplane. That is the difference. The success or failure of this conviction does not relates to the restrictions at all – the restrictions were never tested by the plotters.
What the trial is is a vindication of the police surveillance operation, not all of them but this one was certainly justified, and also justifies its snooping on email traffic. Admittedly the sort of snooping on email traffic that is justified in this case is that being sent to or coming from a known terrorist mastermind living in Pakistan so it’s still not reasonable to snoop on just everyone’s email because of this trial.
The problem of security precautions is that it’s next to impossible to tell if security measures have stopped an attack. I suppose if we test every 95ml bottle of baby food that’s left at the baggage check for explosive and find some then we know we’ve dodged a bullet. On the other end of the scale if someone manages to blow up a plane regardless then we’ve bought overpriced airport drinks for nothing and that’s the horrible dilemma. We simply can’t tell if the restrictions are sensible or not from this case. We should all celebrate the successful conclusion of a ground-breaking multi disciplinary police operation which has almost certainly saved thousands of lives but at the same time it’s important not to take lessons from it that it’s just not teaching us. The effect of baggage search on anything is irrelevant unless you actually go through a baggage search. I think the police and security services involved in this investigation have kept us very safe and they are to be applauded but throwing away sealed bottles of water at the scanner is still to prove its worth. It certainly hasn’t in this case.
[1] The arrests were sped up when the well known Pakistan based mastermind of the plot was captured, not because the hitherto unknown plotters were suddenly spotted getting on a plane. The UK plotters were had well in hand and under constant surveillance.
Filed under: General, law | Tags: file sharing, Government, statistics, figures, BPI, More or Less, reporting, secrecy, estimation, rounding up, 7 million, 136, survey, industry insider
Statistics are a great tool. It is pretty crucial for a lot of tasks that some very unclear, even indeterminate, things can be drilled down into some very specific figures.
One particularly sensitive statistic is the number of file sharers in the country. Firstly there are obviously two kinds of file sharing – there is legal and illegal file sharing. The legal file sharers are actually the cornerstone of the “information economy” we’re all supposed to be entering into while the illegal file sharers are potentially the worst threat to international peace and commerce ever seen and are pursued accordingly.
The two kinds look very similar but both take place in the legally protected privacy of the home. Without actually being able to put a camera in everyone’s house the only way you can find out if people are sharing, legally or illegally, files is to ask them.
It is well reported that the figures the Government put forward for file sharing are, if not categorically wrong are involved with a lot of guesswork and seem to be estimated at the high end of the range. The report is an amazing piece of statistical reporting which effectively took 136 affirmative responses and decided that people don’t adequately report on illegal file sharing and rounded up to around 7 million. It’s pretty terrifying even for a secret industry report.
Oh yes, the figure came from a secret industry report. That’s probably worth mentioning. The figure is officially cited as coming from a consultancy firm but it actually doesn’t, it’s from an unpublished BPI funded report. This means that the Government figures comes from an industry report that no one can read while telling everyone who reads the published, official report that they come from another source. Nothing can go wrong there.
This discovery was made by the BBC Radio 4 program More or Less, a program basically conceived for this situation – it deals with the “the powerful, sometimes beautiful, often abused but ever ubiquitous world of numbers” and is very good and worth listening to. The episode which revealed the file sharing figures also asked “why do England lose?” to which, of course, my heritage maintains perhaps a less than mathematical explanation.
