HK Central Building HMV Group shop (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

HMV is in administration, Jessops is closed, and, in the last few minutes, we hear the Blockbuster is going into administration as well. It sounds as if the bad old days at the start of the recession of the death of Woolworths and Zavi are back with us. In reality, these three are symptoms of the wired world.

Jessops was the first of the three victims. It had been troubled before: it avoided administration a couple of years ago through a debt for equity swap. I have to say that as a larger than average consumer of photographic supplies and equipment, I put my hand up here. My first digital SLR, a Nikon D100, was purchased from Jessops in 2001. My second, a Nikon D2X, also came from Jessops. When I moved on to the D3, though, Jessops didn’t have them, as they were only available through ‘professional’ suppliers to members of NPS — Nikon Professional Service. Having rung up Gray’s of Westminster to check availability, my camera arrived by courier 24 hours later.

It was the ability to get you any lens or any camera which was anywhere in Jessops in the UK which set the Leicester-founded company apart in the 1980s and 1990s. I once bought a second hand 35mm lens from Jessops. It turned out to be faulty, so I rang them up and they had delivered to my local store three second hand 35mm lenses for me to choose from as a replacement. When I bought my wife a Nikon D70, I wasn’t happy with the kit lens that they had in store, so they sourced the kit with the higher quality lens from Glasgow. It arrived within 24 hours.

Back in the day, this was a beyond-heroic level of customer service. eBay and Amazon, however, have led us to demand more. Now, if I want a second hand lens, I can not only choose the one I want, but also how much I’m prepared to pay for it. Buying on eBay can be a bit scary, but, then, there are people who would never buy a second hand lens at all.

If looking for new, Amazon will not only offer me one of the best prices on the market, but will also offer me a selection of dealers who will sell me the item for less. eBay’s returns policy may be a bit hard to navigate, but Amazon allow you to print off a single sheet of paper, stick it to the box, and hand it in at a local garage or post it, and the money is back with you in a few hours.

Jessops wasn’t a badly run shop by any means. Its staff were generally knowledgeable, loved cameras, were polite and did whatever they could to help. The trouble is, the goods they were selling were all branded goods available anywhere in the world. With the likes of DPReview to tell you whether a camera was any good or not, and Nikonians.com to help you decide which particular Nikon you wanted, spending half an hour talking to the assistant was no longer as valuable as it once was. If you were still in doubt, Amazon’s own user reviews would help you make your mind up, usually with much more assurance than you would ever get by examining the goods yourself in store.

HMV was the next to topple. Starting with 78s, HMV successfully navigated every development in music reproduction until the iPod. 78s, LPs, reel-to-reel, 45s, the cassette, CD, the ill-fated DAT, and Laser Disc, not to mention Beta, VHS, DVD, HD video and Blu-Ray. All of these, of course, were physical media — but why buy the media when you can buy just the music?

Personally I still prefer CD to MP3. I like to listen to a whole album, and I like to be able to look at the sleeve notes. There’s no doubt, though, that if you’re out and you hear something you like, perhaps using Shazam to find out what it is, you can download it straight to your iPhone for less than a pound without even having to think about it. HMV had a great range, but if you wanted a little-loved track recorded in 2001 by a super-model, they almost certainly wouldn’t have it. Quite possibly iTunes wouldn’t have it either. The double whammy is that if it didn’t exist as MP3 at all, either Amazon or eBay would be able to broker it for you — all without getting up from the cafe table where you heard it.

Blockbuster must have come as no surprise to anyone who recognised the causes of Jessops and HMV’s demises. For a long time it made sense to rent DVDs from Blockbuster because it was more convenient than filling up your attic with films that you watched once and probably wouldn’t watch again even if they were on TV and you hadn’t got anything else to do that afternoon. Amazon’s experiment with Love Film was all very well where you mail the films back, but it’s still fairly awkward. Then the streamers began. Cable was the first. Virgin’s early selection of films to rent via cable wasn’t always amazing, but it was a lot more convenient on a Friday evening to leaf through their offering than to nip down to Blockbuster, plus you didn’t have to go back to return the film. Apple came along with films that Virgin didn’t have, and then Netflix with a convenient monthly subscription, with LoveFilm getting into the world of over-the-wire downloads through LoveFilm Instants. If you really wanted to own a film, you could still get it, but you would be more prone to get it from Amazon than chancing your arm with Blockbuster.

In a buoyant market, Jessops, HMV and Blockbuster might have survived a little longer, but only a little. Specialist photography shops like Calumet will continue to serve the very high end camera users who spend thousands of pounds every year on equipment, and where repair, rental and short-term loans are as much a part of the offer as stock and advice. HMV’s space on the High Street is more likely to remain empty for ever. It’s hard to add value through human contact when the physical object you sell is shrink wrapped, can be previewed online, and delivered instantly through 3G. As a rental shop, Blockbuster was already the tail end of a tradition which is now almost completely died out, as far as the consumer is concerned. When I was a child my parents rented their TV. We knew people who rented their furniture. The name RadioRentals harks back to a time when the good old valve wireless was an item too expensive to own. It is customer affluence — symptoms of a rising market — as much as anything which has killed the entire rental market.

It would be odious to try and predict the next High Street victim of the wired world, particularly when thousands of jobs are on the line. It would be a brave pundit, though, who argued that, with these three gone, the rot was stopped and the remains of the High Street was safe, even for a while.

Related articles

• HMV chain considers administration(bbc.co.uk)

  ---

• Jessops ‘set to go into administration’(itv.com)

  ---

• Fears for 300 jobs as HMV goes into administration(independent.ie)

  ---

• Blockbuster UK goes into administration, following fellow ecommerce victims HMV and Jessops(thenextweb.com)

  ---

Related articles

At the outset I need to admit I have not read his 2,000 page report. I doubt many have. In a sense, it is already irrelevant, because what matters now is not what Leveson said, but what government will do about it. We are already looking at the prospect of a bill put forward by the government which will have the support of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, but not by David Cameron’s Conservatives. Whether such a bill can actually make it through the House of Commons is another matter.

The upshot of Leveson’s inquiry, though, is to sharpen the question of whether the press is a part of democracy, or above it. The Conservative view is that Parliament should have no role in setting limits to the press — the press needs to do that itself. The Liberal Democrat (and, it seems, Labour) view is that having attempted non-statutory self-regulation, and found it wanting, the case is clear that Parliament should assert its authority.

In a sense, this is the difference between Liberalism and Libertarianism. Liberalism is about maximising the freedoms for everyone, even if this means limiting the freedoms of some. Libertarianism is about refusing to limit any freedoms, even if the upshot is that the rights of some are infringed by the freedoms of others.

No British political party welcomes government by the arbitrary restriction of freedoms. In that sense, Britain is a liberal democracy. The question is, what freedoms must be restricted, to what extent, and by whom.

In most cases this depends on the people exercising them. Although Parliament has the power to legislate on anything, it tends only to legislate either to promote the specific policy objectives of the party in power, or in response to abuse of existing freedoms.

At the same time that we are looking at regulation of the press, we are also looking at the regulation of pay-day loan companies, and at a minimum per-unit price on alcohol. Both of these other issues are the result of abuses. In the case of pay-day loan companies, interest is being charged at many thousands of percent per annum on those least able to manage their own financial affairs. While the responsible end of credit companies have worked hard to assure that people do not put themselves in financial difficulties through borrowing, the pay-day companies have exploited people’s financial difficulties in order to profit from ruinous borrowing. With alcohol, the availability of cheap ways to get drunk at home has had a savage effect on the health and well being of many, and, incidentally, a destructive impact on pubs and restaurants.

We would not be debating any kind of regulation on the press if the existing system of press regulation was working. I’ve commented on that elsewhere, which prompted a long phone call with the communications lead at the Press Complaints Commission who felt I had been unfair. In principle, I agreed with her — when functioning as advertised, the PCC would have done the job. In practice, my experience was I set it out. Leveson seems to have come to a similar view.

The reality is that the vast majority of articles published in the vast majority of newspapers are honest, as accurate as the journalist could make them, provide a valuable service to the readers, and were generated through a legitimate and upright process. The problem is that a small minority of stories were anything but — and it was often those stories which provided the big headlines, the scoops stories and the enormous sales on which some major national titles depended.

The reign of terror inflicted on the JK Rowlings, the McCanns and the Dowlings, among many others, should not stand in any democratic system.

At the moment, no-one is proposing a government-run body to supervise the press. Government supervision of what the press can publish would set our democracy back hundreds of years. We need a free press as part of the way we hold politicians, big companies, rogue traders and pressure groups to account. We are already beginning to see the impact of inadequate protection of the press in the way in which scientific journals are receiving threats of legal action because they are publishing papers with which vested interests disagree. We need more protection for the press to publish those kind of public interest stories, not less.

What we are looking to is an independent regulator with statutory teeth. The possibility, for example, of genuinely large fines that threaten the viability of the most profitable and frequent offenders is something that self-regulation cannot provide. In a self-regulatory regime, a paper faced with a choice between going out of business or ignoring the regulator would — from a commercial point of view — most likely ignore the regulator. Self-regulation organisations are aware of this, and are therefore unlikely ever to attempt to impose tough sanctions that they cannot enforce.

Leveson does not go far enough for the McCanns — as we heard eloquently put by  Gerry McCann on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. He goes too far for David Cameron, who described his proposals as a Rubicon we dare not cross.

It’s easy to dismiss Cameron as making a political judgement to keep his friends in the media on-side. Certainly the investigation, and the arrests which have been linked with the same issues, are difficult for him politically. But his concerns are legitimate. We must not put a tool into the hands of parliament which a benign government will only use for good, but which opens the door for manipulation at a later stage.

Nonetheless, the current situation cannot continue.

It is now the task of parliament to turn Leveson’s proposals into something which does not realise Cameron’s worst fears, but which provides a remedy so effective and substantial that the worst offenders change their practice to something which — in the rush for headlines — does not trample the rights of the innocent in the name of freedom.

Related articles

• Cameron ponders next Leveson move(express.co.uk)

  ---

• Alex Salmond’s thoughts on press regulation — BBC News(bbc.co.uk)

  ---

• Leveson report: David Cameron rejects call for statutory body(guardian.co.uk)

  ---

• Leveson report: David Cameron refuses to ‘cross rubicon’ and write press law(guardian.co.uk)

  ---

• David Cameron calls for unity as Coalition braces for split over Leveson(independent.co.uk)

  ---

• Leveson: Cameron Faces Political Fallout(news.sky.com)

  ---

• Leveson Report: What the papers say(itv.com)

  ---

• Leveson: Press needs new watchdog(bbc.co.uk)

  ---

• Leveson report: Work begins on draft bill — BBC News(bbc.co.uk)

  ---

• Leveson plunges coalition into uncharted territory(guardian.co.uk)

  ---

The iPad has two huge benefits over a laptop. First, it’s truly portable. I always thought my laptop was portable until I started with the iPad. The truth is, anything bulkier than the very latest MacBook Air is not so much portable as luggable. If it has a hard disk, you have to be careful how you handle it. Screens are fragile, as are laptop keyboards. Don’t believe me? Try this experiment (your liability not mine!) just lift your laptop about five inches from a hard stone floor and drop it. Actually, the result of dropping it wasn’t the experiment — the experiment was that you didn’t do it. Why not? Because deep down you know that a drop like that might well kill it.

The other benefit is absence of distractions. The iPad does one thing at a time — well, you can listen to music while you type, but the only way to quickly update Facebook is to leave your word processor and go on to the web browser. If you do that, you  are making a conscious decision to distract yourself. On a desktop or laptop, open windows beckon to you. Facebook wants you to check it, the Cricket Score must be looked at (that’s a bat and ball game if you’re reading this in American), email must be answered.

Actually, when you are writing a novel, everything becomes a potential distraction. Marketers should identify the month of November and target it for their spam emails, because even the dreariest marketing email (“Get Free Cable Insurance When You Buy From USB-is-US”/“Spa Days for the Over 90s — Hurry”) suddenly becomes worth reading. If you want to release a trivial but addictive game, do it in November. The budding novelists will flock to it.

The two other components of my iPad writing regime are a bluetooth keyboard — handy for that typing stuff — and a little-known word processor called Daedalus. Daedalus is so hard-core iPad that it doesn’t even have a search function. Instead you swish and pinch pages, and it is all so much like paper that you almost want to tear off the sheets and hand them to people.

The other question you want answered, I suppose, is, what’s the novel about?

Well, in 2009 an enormous horde of Anglo-Saxon treasure was discovered near Penkridge in Staffordshire. Known as the Staffordshire Horde, its origins are completely unknown. All the treasure is damaged in some way, and all of it is taken from military equipment. There are the remains of 150 swords there — a fantastical number, given how valuable the Saxon pattern-welded weapons were.

The Saxon Thief is the story of how it came to be there — and also the story of how the last Roman city in Britain, Wroxeter. It’s about heroes and weapons, about the dating of Easter according to the Ionan calendar, about the death of kings, about revenge, forgiveness, and young love. Most of all, it’s — as far as I know — England’s earliest mystery story, set in AD 660. It ends with fire, and flood.

One day, you may get to read it.

Related articles

• Do You Nanowrimo?(capitareafagiolo.wordpress.com)

  ---

• NaNoWriMo challenge, getting there(laurieanichols.wordpress.com)

  ---

• Participating in NaNoWriMo?(ctwesting.com)

  ---

US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron trade bottles of beer to settle a bet they made on the U.S. vs. England World Cup Soccer game (which ended in a tie), during a bilateral meeting at the G20 Summit in Toronto, Canada, Saturday, June 26, 2010. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Elections are upon us again. In the USA it’s Romney or Obama, and in the UK we have our first ever police commissioner elections. For some people the choice will be easy: they will vote the way they always vote, even though, as fixed voters, it means that their political influence is minimal. But what if you are a floating voter? Or what — as, for many Liberal Democrat voters facing the police commissioner elections — your party or favoured candidate is not on the list?

We once organised a meeting on this subject in the city of Ghent, Belgium. Unfortunately, most people who came to it did not want to know how to vote, but what to vote. They were not intersted in the principles for making up their own minds, but simply on an instruction  as to which candidate they should select.

If you’re a fixed voter, and your candidate is available at the next bout of elections, you’ve probably already made up your mind. But, even then, there are a large number of things in modern life which call us to make a choice where there is no party candidate standing. X Factor votes may not be particularly significant, but choice of school governors, staff reps in a job negotiation and even club elections are potentially substantial choices which will shape the future.

People vote for essentially four reasons, two of which (I argue) are good, and two of which (I maintain) are bad. This isn’t just me. Aristotle, in his Politics, describes six kinds of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and polity, versus tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. Monarchy he saw as one ruler ruling for the benefit of all. Aristocracy was the noble ruling for the benefit of all, and polity was the citizens ruling for the benefit of all. Tyranny, by contrast, was a single ruler ruling for their own benefit, oligarchy was the powerful ruling for their own benefit, and democracy was the people ruling for selfish purposes.

Most modern thinkers would argue that monarchy and aristocracy inevitably lead in time to tyranny and oligarchy. However, we have appropriated Aristotle’s demeaning term democracy to describe the polity which he recommends: citizens, deciding together for everyone’s good. Equally, though, we recognise the tyranny of the 51% vote where the majorrity rule at the expense of the minority, and we deplore it.

My belief is that people vote for four reasons:

• Rationality
• Reaction
• Prejudice
• Self-interest

You may yet be saying that you always vote with your gut instinct, and you can’t trust the politicians anyway. Unfortunately, being nice and being honest don’t necessarily equip someone to lead a country, or even a police authority, any more than being nasty and brutal do. It’s still necessary to ask the question: what will they do?

Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party (Getty Images via @daylife)

In a not-unexpected court ruling yesterday, a judge ruled that a Christian Bed and Breakfast owner was in breach of the law in refusing to give the same treatment to a homosexual couple that she would have given to a heterosexual couple. Her case was backed by the Christian Institute.

The case itself was an important continuation of the debate about to what extent the rights of one group should supersede the rights of another. As a matter of law — if all the training I’ve been on about discrimination is correct — the ruling was the only ruling possible. The Christian Institute’s underlying argument was that the law is wrong.

It is entirely appropriate that debates of this kind take place, and right that lobbying groups like the Christian Institute continue to make their case in the public arena.

However, the proceedings and the verdict have been overshadowed by the intervention of Nick Griffin MEP, of the British National Party, who tweeted the address of the couple and appeared to urge his supporters to organise a demonstration outside the couple’s house.

This is not the first time that Griffin and other BNP members have tried to insinuate themselves into debates and news issues which have a Christian tinge. In a separate issue the BBC reported yesterday on peaceful protests in Northern Ireland relating to a Mari Stopes clinic which were mainly led by Christians, but which the BNP had decided to attend, despite having no elected presence in the province. Earlier in the year their attempt to attend an Orange rally prompted a sharp rebuke from the organisers.

Griffin’s own comment is revealing. Mr Griffin told Sky News: “I was very angry in the way in which left-wing political activists and a minority of gay activists are working with left-wing judges to use the Human Rights Act to persecute ordinary people, especially Christians.

It’s the “especially Christians” bit which is revelatory. Why Christians? Griffin has no known link with an established church, does not attend church regularly, and has never made any pronouncements outside of a politics which have a Christian flavour. His comments were immediately denounced by the Christian Institute, and Christians — including myself — have frequently highlighted the disparity between what he believes and the teaching of the New Testament, including ‘love your enemies’, ‘do good to those who persecute you’ and ‘do not judge others’.

From his published oeuvre, Griffin’s only interest in Christianity is in trying to harness it for the promotion of his own political agenda. Of course, he would not be the only person doing this. At a General Election debate I was once baffled by one of the candidates who professed that all of his actions were motivated by love, because he was a Christian. I wouldn’t claim to be able to judge the thoughts and motivations of anyone else, but I have never met anyone else — including some very saintly people — who would go so far as to claim that everything they did was motivated by love. Interestingly, he only said that at that particular debate — which was the Churches Together debate. He never mentioned Christianity at the others. I don’t doubt that he sincerely meant it at the time.

The difference, though, between some other politician trying to pick up a few Christian votes at a Churches Together debate and the BNP is that Griffin actively tries to wade into areas of Christian concern, and does so in the most unChristian way possible. He was censured for the way he described Irish Republicans recently, using an expletive in his tweet.

What we must understand before going any further is that Nick Griffin’s view of ‘Christian’ has nothing to do with Jesus Christ. Griffin has never shown any public interest in Christ’s teachings. The notion of forgiveness is something that never appears in his policies.

Rather, for Griffin, ‘Christian’ is short-hand for ‘Anglo-Saxon White traditional English intolerance’. Not that Griffin wants anyone to realise that when he uses the word. He wants the resonances of the word ‘Christian’ to galvanise those who feel warmly towards Christianity, but don’t actually practise it themselves. The 70% or so who say they are ‘Christian’ in surveys, but probably don’t go to church more than at Christmas, at weddings, and at funerals.

A few years ago we picked up a BNP leaflet in Yardley, Birmingham, which claimed that Muslims from Stechford were attempting to close down Yardley Old Church, a well known landmark which dates back to the Anglo-Saxons. Nobody who actually attended Yardley Old Church would have believed it for a moment. No church in Britain has ever been closed down by pressure from Muslims (though, sadly, historically churches have been closed down because of pressure from other churches). If there is a threat to Yardley Old Church, it is non-attendance by those who reckon to be Christians. The claim was laughable, but to those who did not attend but liked the idea, it may have had some resonance.

A couple of years later a friend of mine picked up a leaflet from the BNP. It talked about the importance of the family, abortion, traditional morality, and such things. Over tea she told us that was impressed with the leaflet and would even consider voting for them. Her husband — was was black — gently pointed out the incongruity of this. Put this down to political naivety, but there was nothing in the leaflet that hinted at racism or intolerance: it had been carefully constructed to appeal to people like her, and to conceal what the BNP is really about.

If you are a Christian reading this, then I would urge you on every occasion that Griffin attempts to link himself to Christians, or presents himself as defending the rights of Christians, to immediately repudiate it, and make clear to anyone listening what the difference between Christianity and the BNP really is.

If you are Nick Griffin reading this, then let me urge you: read the New Testament, join a church, attend an Alpha course, find out what Jesus Christ was really about. You may decide that it’s time you stopped trying to link yourself to Christians. Or, better, you may decide that it’s time to follow a radically different way, and renounce the BNP and everything it stands for,

Related articles

• BNP leader Nick Griffin posts address of B&B case gay couple online(guardian.co.uk)

  ---

• Police examine Griffin B&B tweets(bbc.co.uk)

  ---

• Calls to arrest Nick Griffin for ‘incitement’ after tweet of gay couple’s address(thetimes.co.uk)

  ---

• Nick Griffin’s tweets ‘a damp squib’, gay couple say — BBC News(bbc.co.uk)

  ---

• Nick Griffin facing investigation over gay couple tweet(standard.co.uk)

  ---

• Police probe ‘Nick Griffin’ tweet(express.co.uk)

  ---

• BNP’s Nick Griffin Defends Twitter Posts(news.sky.com)

  ---

English: Apple iPhone 3G(left) and Samsung Blackjack II(right) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday, Apple won over $1 Billion in damages against Samsung for infringement of its patents and trade dress. Earlier in the week, a  US music file-sharer was ordered to pay $675,000 in damages to record companies after his request for a retrial was turned down. Between the two events, a Korean court ruled that both Apple and Samsung were infringing each others patents, and ordered them to pay each other damages, with the balance going to Samsung.

Whichever way you look at it, it’s been a good week for holders of Intellectual Property — but not everyone is happy.

Samsung, naturally, issued a statement saying that the real loser was the American consumer. This seems a little self-righteous, given that they were suing Apple at the same time and for essentially the same reasons.

Thousands of internet commenters posted their own take on the many hundreds of articles which all essentially told the same story: Apple won almost all, but not quite all, of its arguments, and Samsung was found to be the infringer. Most of the comments I’ve read took the opposite view to the jury: the patents should not have been issued, Apple was abusing a monopolistic position, the things Apple was suing on were trivial or obvious, Apple was the real abuser, the US patent system was broken, the jury was biased, a fair trial could not be had in the USA, and so on.

There were also some rather more thoughtful comments by people who know something about the way this changes the game. Engadget, for example, ran an article with a number of its regular contributors pointing out that their own modus operandi was to borrow software ideas, and that was the way in which intellectual property ‘ought’ to work.

Apple’s troubles with Intellectual Property go back a long way. I remember in the the late 1970s (or was it the start of the 1980s?) the first Apple II we had at school was quickly supplemented by an ITT 2020, a more or less exact clone of the Apple, except for some very minor variations in memory addressing which meant that PEEK and POKE functions were different on the two machines. A few years afterwards, Apple introduced the Macintosh, and by the end of the 1980s the computing world was transitioning to Windows 3.0 with its Mac-like Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer environment. ¹. Apple and Microsoft became embroiled in a long running ‘look and feel’ dispute, which eventually was settled when a near bankrupt Apple was bailed out by Microsoft at the back end of the 1990s.

The advent of the iMac immediately saw a number of Windows machines designed on a much more eye-friendly basis, though very few of them looked anything like any version of the iMac. There was some trouble about iPods, but the storm really hit when the iPhone was released.

In essence, before the iPhone, there were lots of competing visions of what a smartphone should look like. There was Blackberry’s vision, eerily recreated in the Samsung Blackjack pictured at the top of this page, which was device which was half physical keyboard, half-screen, whose principal function was Outlook email and calendaring. There was Nokia’s vision, with slide-out keyboards on cigar-box shaped devices. There were semi-smartphones like the Sony Ericsson I had for years until it died. There was the beautiful (but sadly not very smart) Motorola KRZR I had after the Sony which was encased in glass and flipped open, thereby stopping you from making 999 calls by accident (911 if you’re reading this in American).

After the iPhone, smartphones increasingly looked more or less identical to the iPhone, and they worked in much the same way.

Apple, however, had learned its lesson. Having failed dismally to stop the rise of Windows and discovering that unregistered ‘look and feel’ had not done it much good, the Cupertino company took out specific patents on many aspects of the iPhone’s design. When Eric Schmidt, Google CEO who was then on Apple’s Board, revealed that Google was going to release its own iOS-like phone operating system and give it away for free, Steve Jobs was incensed and vowed to his dying day — and beyond — to go to thermonuclear war to haul back what he called a ‘stolen operating system’.

The result was a spate of cases around the world, some which have gone Apple’s way, a few which have gone Android-phone manufacturers’ ways, and many which were essentially overturned or rendered ineffective after an appeal.

The Samsung-Apple California case, though, was the big one. It was big for three reasons. First, American courts are well known for awarding the highest settlements in most kinds of cases. Therefore, the actual monetary value of any settlement was liable to be huge. Second, because, taking place in Apple and Google’s own back yard, and with Google understood by many to be Samsung’s shadow partner in the case, it was the big fight on home territory. Third — and to my mind most important — because the American system creates many opportunities for compulsory disclosure of information by one party to another, much of which might well have influenced the other cases that have been fought elsewhere if the information had been available.

For those who buy into the anti-Apple culture which seems to be mainly alive on the internet, the disclosures seemed mainly embarrassing to Apple, and they were frequently covered in blogs and online news reports. Most objective observers — at least, that’s how it’s being described on the BBC et al with hindsight — saw Samsung as the underdog going into the trial. However, very few people were prepared for the scale of the jury’s decision. At the moment, it is the largest surviving patent-case judgement in history. There is a fairly unlikely possibility of Samsung’s appeal getting it overturned, a rather more likely prospect of it being mitigated at appeal, but, at least as probably, it could be increased, going as far as being tripled, because the jury found that Samsung had ‘wilfully’ violated Apple’s intellectual property.

So,who wins?

If you follow Samsung’s school of thought (or, at least its public statement) and the ‘information wants to be free’ / PirateBay / Wikileaks crowd, then everyone is the loser in this judgement. Innovation is stifled when people can’t freely copy and then improve on what they’ve copied. If you follow the traditional Intellectual Property line, then the creators of new ideas have the right to profit exclusively from their inventions for a specified period, until they become a free-for-all some years later. The traditional rationale is that this stimulates true competition. A much-loved example is the way Canon was forced to innovate its own photocopier business because Xerox would not license its patents. As a result the technology which enabled the desktop laser printer to be produced was born.

Certainly there have been times in history when only the free-flow of uncredited ideas has allowed society to progress. In the Middle Ages, it was the copying of manuscripts (often without permission, and numerous underhand methods were employed to obtain them) which ensured the transmission of classical learning which eventually blossomed into the Renaissance. If steel making innovations had been limited to the land around Ironbridge in Shropshire, then the industrial revolution would not have been a revolution at all.

On the other hand, in an innovation age such as our own, it does not become worth anyone’s while to innovate if they can’t profit from their innovation, and if they can more cheaply take someone else’s ideas. ARM holdings, for example, a major British success story whose chips are in most mobile devices, does not manufacture at all. It licenses its patents to almost everyone, and grows from the profits. But how long would ARM survive if those patents could be freely flouted?

This is how I think it pans out:

Related articles

• Apple’s billion-dollar win over Samsung is a huge breakthrough — but it’s not thermonuclear(fosspatents.com)

  ---

• Apple-Samsung ruling suggests South Korea is a FRAND rogue state(fosspatents.com)

  ---

• Verdict in US Apple-Samsung trial(bbc.co.uk)

  ---

• Disaster for Samsung: Jury awards Apple billions in patent case(gigaom.com)

  ---

• What You Need To Know About The Apple-Samsung Verdict(huffingtonpost.com)

  ---

• News: Apple vs. Samsung: jury finds Samsung violated Apple patents, trade dress, owes over $1 Billion(ilounge.com)

  ---

• The Apple vs Samsung Verdict — Here’s what it means for you(thenextweb.com)

  ---

• Samsung Owes Apple $1.05 Billion In Damages Following U.S. Trial, Says Jury(androidpolice.com)

  ---

Kevin Pietersen (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

When — for a moment — the second test match between South Africa and England looked like it could end in an England victory, it was Kevin Peterson, hero of the first innings and called right up the order for the second innings, who was the man we had to thank for it. Just a couple of weeks later, Peterson is out of the squad, and England now face an uphill battle ¹ to win the final test and thus defend their coveted world number 1 status.

The reason Peterson is out of the team? He texted derogatory comments about his team mates to the South African team. In a parallel furore, England team mates were accused of setting up a parody Twitter account in Peterson’s name. Nothing has been proved, and it’s all been swept into the shadows.

I have some sympathy with Peterson. He texted rather than tweeted — a point to point method of communication which only goes wrong when someone forwards (or tweets) your text. Evidently Peterson’s friends in the South African team weren’t as careful about his interests as he would like them to be. The spoof twitter account seems a rather more unforgivable offence, and my guess is it’s only anonymity which has saved the perpetrators.

What Peterson got wrong, though, and what has been got wrong far more tellingly by a range of politicians, sports heroes and general celebrities over the years, is the false notion that when you say something by text or tweet, you are doing it in an off-the-cuff sort of way, just as you might make a remark. Diane Abbott’s ‘white people love playing divide and rule’ tweet led her into making an apology to Ed Milliband. During the Olympics  Piers Morgan (allegedly) tweeted that he was disappointed that Bradley Wiggins hadn’t sung the national anthem. The slap-down response, supposedly from Wiggins, (which, it turns out, was misattributed) was all over Facebook in minutes. Morgan’s response was: “Dear Trolls, that Bradley Wiggins tweet to me’s a fake. So maybe send it to yourselves instead of me? There’s a good of bunch of dimbos.” A fair cop, but his mistake — I feel personally — was in criticising a national hero at all through the all too reforwardable medium of tweeting.

I have enormous sympathy for everyone who has ever sent out what they thought to be a neat text, tweet or email which then got forwarded elsewhere (or simply read) and put them into a lot of trouble. Which of us has never said something dreadfully witty, off-the-cuff, only to realise afterwards it actually came across as crass and petty. What’s worse is the apology: ‘I made an uncharacteristic remark’ never works, because the ones that really trouble us are the ones which most reveal our true characters.

It’s all very well to use the now tried-and-tested (but never credible) “I mis-spoke”, but when it’s there in forwardable electronic text, it’s actually very hard to ever pull it back.

And then there’s Facebook. We’ve all heard the stories about people sacked because of their Facebook updates (though, like all stories, it’s possible there was rather more going on and this was just the final straw), but wall-messages are even more dangerous. You may think you are sending a message to a particular person, but anyone who is interested to be actually reading their wall can see it as well. Of course, everyone knows this, but it’s surprising how much does surface, and more than one celebrity has been burned in this way.

That’s the problem of course: celebrity. When I was a child we didn’t have celebrities, just famous people. The people who are famous for being famous now (and not just in an Andy Warhol sense) thrive on publicity, but publicity also poisons them.

When the celebrity is fending for themselves, it’s all well and good. When they’re part of a corporation, or a sports team, or something else which tries to run a tight ship and keep its PR and brand well focused, there is a problem.

The solution — though — is not to have your PR Officer write your tweets. As one senior politician remarked to me and a crowd of others recently ‘I don’t write those emails that come from me’. We sort of knew that, but it was bitterly disappointing to hear. When politicians have tried to calm their Twitter problems by claiming that an aide wrote the Tweet — and then sacking the aide — we despair.

Twitter, email, Facebook — they all put us directly (we believe) in touch with someone we very much admire. I love seeing Jessica Ennis’s updates on Facebook, and I love Suzanne Vega’s updates, especially when she posts on my Facebook wall (you really don’t know how much I love it when she does that). The fact that there’s no third-party help at work makes me feel a real connection.

Some people are outrageous by nature. If Russell Brand tweets a picture of his ex-girlfriend without make-up, I for one, am really not that bothered. For the non-outrageous, though, some simple rules might help a little.

So, if you’re a celeb, or advising one, here’s my three simple rules:

1) If I was my tiniest fan’s mother, would I be happy to see this Tweet/txt/message?

2) If anyone I mentioned in this found out about it by reading in the newspaper the next day, would they be happy?

3) Will I really be glad I sent it in the morning?

If not, maybe just don’t send it…

And England? Right now they have South Africa 65/4, and they seem to be running right up that hill.

Related articles

• Battle to decide Test No. 1 begins(cricketnext.in.com)

  ---

• Pietersen apologizes but England future in doubt(3news.co.nz)

  ---

• ECB demands further Pietersen discussions(espncricinfo.com)

  ---

• Broad denies role in KP’s fake Twitter account(cricketnext.in.com)

  ---

• Pietersen dropped from England Test squad(cricketnext.in.com)

  ---

• Let down: England skipper Strauss reveals frustration at Pietersen over texts to Proteas opponents(mirror.co.uk)

  ---

• Piers Morgan Slams Fake Photo (No, Really)(order-order.com)

  ---

• Pietersen texts ‘banter’, say SA(bbc.co.uk)

  ---

Actually, for my money — and, as a taxpayer, it is my money — it should be the Advertising Standards Authority who gets the job.

Here’s why.

Today, the ASA published the latest in a long running line of proactive research. You can read about it here BBC News — What is it that really offends people about adverts?, or in full on the ASA’s site here: ASA Harm and offence report. If you’re an advertiser, you might also like to take a gander through their archives, which include The public’s perception of advertising — February 2002, a seminal study which has been one of the foundations of my career and is why, when I was looking after it, NHS advertising across the West Midlands took the exception step of using humour and went on to the even more exceptional step of demonstrating measurable results.

What’s really interesting and important about the latest ASA report is not the conclusions it comes to, though they are highly apposite, but the fact they ran the survey at all. The rationale behind going out to the public to ask what they think is that most people who are offended will never actually bother to complain, and those that do complain may be unrepresentative.

Revolutionary?

For an organisation which exists to investigate complaints, it is. The Press Complaints Commission and OfCom are entirely reactive in determining what is and is not permitted. OfCom has a measure of independence, but the PCC is run by newspapers, and represents a consensus not of what the public is prepared to put up with, or even the courts, but what newspapers believe to be fair journalism. In a recent landmark ruling, for example, the PCC (see link below) ruled that the Independent was entirely justified in using subterfuge (also spelled ‘lying’) to get a story they couldn’t otherwise have got, even though no crime was proved as a result.

As a nation, do we really believe that it’s ok to lie your way into someone’s life or business for the purpose of stitching them up? Normally we call this a confidence trick. Somehow, newspaper editors seem to think not only that it’s ok, but that it’s their duty.

I love the Independent. It’s stuck to its guns over many years and very rarely gets embroiled in this kind of nonsense. But the ‘victory’ they report below is just another nail in the coffin of self-regulation.

There’s another reason why I think the ASA is the right body for the job: it has teeth.

Back in the days of Swine Flu, when I was putting together a campaign that formed the basis of one of the national campaigns, I spent a lot of time working through exactly what the right message was with senior public health doctors. We needed to get the facts absolutely right, because we knew we only had one go at it. One of the things I learned was that just washing things with soapy water was enough to kill residual H1N1 virus.

I was a bit surprised, then, a couple of years later to see a big TV ad for Vanish (a product I’ve known and used for years) claiming that ordinary washing powders couldn’t kill the flue virus, but Vanish could. I emailed the ASA. I got a very prompt reply saying  they would look into it. Not so long afterwards, I got a letter telling me that Vanish had agreed not to show the ad again in that form. Job done.

With the ASA, this is not unusual. They don’t go on volume of complaints — otherwise it would be a popularity contest — but when the complaint is valid, they act, and the advertisers comply. What’s more, when they do comply, they do it seriously, even if that means a lot of money to reshoot the ads or in some cases advertise a correction. Which is why, by and large, advertising in this country is largely truthful, and provably so.

Contrast with the PCC. If there ever is an adjudication against the paper, the apology gets published on some distant page very small. Technically it should be with equal prominence, but, somehow, that never really seems to happen. Witness the apology given to Vince Cable by the Daily Telegraph for its unacceptable subterfuge against him. Did you see it? Very few people did, but the original story was in all the papers for weeks.

What’s more, journalists know that they will usually get away with it. Going to the PCC is a real hassle, takes a long time, and, in most cases, if the adjudication is in your favour, it just refreshes the story. If it isn’t, expect exultant headlines in the newspaper, as below. This must be the only kind of confidential complaints process which results in public humiliation for the complainant if the panel decides that the paper was not sufficiently in breach to be forced to apologise.

The ASA’s proactive stance on finding out what really offends people, its simple, confidential and sure-handed way of dealing with complaints, and the very real business penalties suffered by adverts which are in violation are all reasons why it is such a respected body. Advertisers like it as well — it means their competitors can’t scoop them by making outlandish, unproveable claims. If you’re a small advertiser, their copy advice line will tell you over the phone whether you’re allowed to run the ad you want (which is how we got to run “Don’t be a prat” as a youth alcohol ad in Walsall, even though the bus company originally wanted to reject it for fear it might offend). ASA research is also invaluable, and it’s free.

Right now the newspaper industry is proposing a ‘son of the PCC’ with editors sitting on the panel. The PCC didn’t work, and a watered down version will work even less. Politicians are proposing fines of up to a million. Great for the Murdoch press, as it will limit the chances they’ll be sued for even greater amounts. If you’re the Ross Gazette, on the other hand, even a comparatively trivial penalty could see you pulled under. The ASA doesn’t need million pound fines, because everyone knows that they will get you, so it isn’t worth running deliberately misleading ads. The ASA’s rulings are usually accepted by everyone, because they make sense, based on a very simple, very clear code (contrast with the 10pt print poster that the PCC has to provide, and takes a lawyer to interpret). The ASA knows that they make sense, because it consistently commissions research into what people who don’t complain actually think.

Naturally, it’s a lot easier to make someone withdraw an advertisement than to roll back a story from a newspaper. It isn’t the newspaper which reported it, but all the other newspapers which reported that paper reporting it which do the damage. But an ASA type approach, where, once a story was ruled to be in breach, every organ that covered it would be forced to issue an apology, whether they used the defence of ‘we were only reporting that another paper had said…’ or not, would very quickly clean things up.

Newspapers have nothing to fear from a consistent and fair hard-touch regulator which rigorously applied the same standards all the time. Yes, it would hold back the Independent from its little adventure with Bell Pottinger, but, then, the Independent wouldn’t be competing with the salacious gossip which flowed from the hacked phones of celebrities. A level playing field benefits everyone.

Of course, OfCom could claim that it is a similar type of operator, but it isn’t. OfCom works with a very few high profile organisations, all of which are licensed because without a license, they can’t broadcast. Print journalism isn’t licensed, and it is geographically dispersed and highly diverse. Back when Romeike and Curtice still published the physical Editors books listing all the print and broadcast publishers in the UK, the broadcast section was one very thin volume. Print was four very thick volumes. This is exactly analogous to advertising, where there are many thousands of outlets currently covered by the ASA.

My belief is ASA could do the job, and OfCom can’t.

Related articles

• A victory for investigative journalism as PCC rejects complaint by Bell Pottinger against The Independent(independent.co.uk)

  ---

• Newspapers should face £1m fines for ethical failings, Leveson is told(scotsman.com)

  ---

• Surge in number of warnings over press behaviour(guardian.co.uk)

  ---

• Leveson inquiry enters final phase(bigpondnews.com)

  ---

• Leveson inquiry: Lord Black and Lord Hunt — live(guardian.co.uk)

  ---

• Leveson Inquiry: George Osborne denies Rupert Murdoch meeting before general election in 2010(independent.co.uk)

  ---

• Leveson Inquiry: Lastest updates as Jeremy Hunt gives evidence(scotsman.com)

  ---

• Ofcom chief hits out at newspaper industry’s plan for new regulator(guardian.co.uk)

  ---

• Press regulation plan ‘robust’(bbc.co.uk)

  ---

David Gauke, Exchequer Secretary, (Photo credit: HM Revenue)

BBC News — Paying tradesmen cash in hand morally wrong, says minister David Gauke, Treasury Minister, is the most recent Conservative politician to argue the moral case for doing what government wants you to do. The problem is, morality is none of government’s business, and by attempting to take the moral high ground, Gauke is simply ceding it.

In America they have separation of church and state. It doesn’t always work that well, but at least it’s something. In Britain we have a constitutional state church which often seems to have better separation. But it does prompt calls from time to time for the church to stay out of politics which is i) unconstitutional ii) unnecessary and iii) not a good thing. When Thatcher was in power, it was bishops and archbishops who formed the phalanx of the intellectual opposition.

The Americans created a church state divide not to keep the church out of politics, but to keep the state from interfering in the conscience of the individual to worship (or not) in the way that he or she thought fit.

The thing about the state is that it has exactly two functions: executive and legislative. On the executive side it takes our money and spends it (or should) for our collective benefit. Margaret Thatcher never actually said ‘there’s no such thing as society’, but it became a meme because the phrase represented what she seemed to be trying to do. She should have saved her energy. The very fact that we have an executive arm to the state means that there is definitely such a thing, and without it the state has no meaning. We may not agree with what the state does with our money, but the days are long gone when the sovereign gathered in taxation for the exploitation of her or his own agenda without any obligation to the people.

On the legislative side, parliament creates legislation. It doesn’t quite create law, because law is what happens when the courts get round to testing and interpreting the legislation. But parliament does its best.

Unlike medieval sovereigns, that is where the power of the British state stops. It doesn’t own the English language (though the French government believes it owns the French language), it doesn’t control the medals at the Olympic Games, it doesn’t control what goes in history books or in science books, it doesn’t get to control our religion, and it most certainly doesn’t get to set out what is right and what is wrong.

Related articles

• David Cameron: tax arrangement of comedian Jimmy Carr ‘morally wrong’(telegraph.co.uk)

  ---