The entertainment industry always likes to take the digital world and compare it to the physical world as if the two were the same -- often making claims like unauthorized downloading is "just like stealing a CD from a store." However, they don't seem to like it when you do that back to them to prove all the inconsistencies in their arguments. Lee Griffin wrote up a good blog post about the Digital Economy Bill in the UK, wondering how people would feel if the same rules were applied offline: Would you appreciate being put under house arrest not because of any court determined guilt, but because of someone making accusations of copyright infringement against you for something that may or may not have occurred in your property at the time? Is it even remotely justified to put you under house arrest, to stop you from going to the library, to work, or to socialise with your friends because of those accusations alone?

Or how about point 4...how would you feel if the police were stopping you from accessing your local community centre because a single individual or organisation had threatened the local council in such a way that it is too much for the council to risk the financial cost of allowng it to continue functioning for the community? Imagine arriving at your local pub only to find it inaccessible to you, even though anyone that is visiting from another town can use it freely; not for anything that you or your town have necessarily done, but because of the implications made by an individual in a completely unscrutinised manner?

Finally, point 5 would be very interesting. Could you imagine the police coming and turfing you out of a building you've legitimately bought, and putting it back on the market without paying you a penny, simply because you knew it was in a good location and could make some money off of the future sale? Somehow I don't think that's all too likely! Of course, supporters of the DEB will claim that "this is different!" but they seem to be the same people who will still insist that infringement is no different than theft. Funny how that works.

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Anyone with any personal experience with these? The residual value is horrible (ie. Great used buy). Fuel economy is not spectacular but I love the look of the car and it does fantastic in crash tests. Its made in Japan so theoretically that should mean decent reliability.

The more of ACTA that leaks, the worse it seems. KEI has the details on another portion of ACTA that had not leaked yet, which focuses on setting up new institutions that would manage ACTA after it was implemented. Basically, it would be an ongoing organization tasked with continuing to update ACTA's rules -- sort of a parallel organization to WIPO, which already exists, but which has recently committed the mortal sin of actually listening to consumer rights groups. The scary part is that this group would be allowed to amend ACTA provisions on the fly. And, while this new organization can "extend invitations" to governments, it's still being debated what non-governmental organizations will be able to take part. KEI notes that the "USTR has told members of Congress it is their intention to marginalize the participation by consumer interest organizations in the new forum," though does not provide a citation for this point.

Either way, it seems like the goal here is to create an extra-governmental body that effectively controls copyright law around the globe, with little input from the actual governments or the people they represent. And, of course, if the folks involved in ACTA negotiations are any indication of who will be involved in this group, you can assume that they will be strong supporters of the viewpoint of the legacy industries: that intellectual property law is designed solely to protect those industry's business models, and not to promote the wider progress of culture and the economy.

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During my recent trip to India, I flew down to Bangalore for one reason: To meet N.R. Narayana Murthy. Murthy is the co-founder, executive chairman and former CEO for 21 years of Infosys, the first Indian company to go public on Nasdaq and effectively the company that began the $30 billion Indian IT outsourcing market.

Murthy’s idea was so successful that it quickly became controversial—not only within the United States where some Americans feel Indians are “stealing jobs,” but also in India where many are concerned about a tech economy that doesn’t make anything. I wanted to meet with Murthy, because in many ways he’s the best person to address what Indians at home and abroad are facing and where Indian entrepreneurship goes from here.

Here are a few highlights from our meeting:

His Day Job. Murthy thought he was stepping down from Infosys back in 2002, but he couldn’t fully let go. As such, he still works pretty much full time for the company, traveling to meet with customers and running a lot of the company’s mentoring and training programs. The more surprising aspect of his job: He personally signs off on the architecture of every building on each one of Infosys’ campuses that employ some 17,000 people around the world. The one we were sitting in was spread of eight acres and had some remarkable buildings, including one that looked like the Luxor casino in Las Vegas.

I asked why this was a top priority—after all, many Valley campuses are plush but from an architecture standpoint look about the same. He said when GE and other American multinationals were starting to come into his business everyone thought Infosys would lose the local talent war. So Murthy studied why people want to work at a particular place. One of the results was the comfort and design of the facilities. That was in 1994 when Infosys was designing the very building we were sitting in as we had this conversation. “I’ve been in charge of every building since– all over the world,” he says.

Hurting or Helping Local Entrepreneurship? Given exactly how plush Murthy and his colleagues have worked to make Infosys, has he indirectly hurt Bangalore’s entrepreneurship scene by making the risk of leaving so daunting? He smiled when I asked this and said, “We may have unwittingly. But I do feel like the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and kicking in Bangalore.”

Further, I asked about Bangalore’s Zippo-flipping, free-spending generation of young techies who’ve graduated to a huge wave of multinational jobs that pay them far more than their parents ever made, in many cases more than the rest of their families combined. Murthy didn’t deny that that instant-gratification, “gimmie” contingent was strong in the city he helped build, economically speaking. But he blames the Internet and the mass-cross-pollination of Western pop culture, not the bigger paycheck from companies like his.

“We are moving towards a uniform, global culture with an intense competitive spirit and an intense desire for instant gratification,” he says. “But I have a firm belief that each generation is better than the previous one. The Indian entrepreneurs today are more daring than we were.” (This from a man who became a capitalist after after hitchhiking across communist Eastern Europe and getting thrown in jail for chatting up someone’s girlfriend on a train. “More daring” is a tall order, young Indian techies.)

Is India’s Tech Community Too Addicted to Services? Clearly, services has been a great business for Infosys and the hundreds of dollar-millionaires and even more rupee-millionaires that the company’s generous stock program has created. But a lot of Indian CEOs and investors complain that in most cases services-based tech businesses are a great way to get revenues quick, but not a way to build a huge, high-growth business. There’s a big question of whether India’s tech sector has a worrying lack of product-building know-how.

Murthy says it’s a progression. “India missed the industrial revolution, but Indians had intelligence,” he says. “We had to make do with pen and paper. We were always forced to look at the abstract. What is happening in India today is the creation of jobs. Let’s create jobs as long as they are legal and ethical, it doesn’t matter, as long as we make money. The time will come for creating products. I wouldn’t lose sleep over this. If we create enough jobs we’ll raise the confidence of the youngsters and they’ll create products.”

India’s Infrastructure. Here’s something it’s hard for even Murthy to be upbeat about: India’s shoddy physical infrastructure. Murthy has traveled the world and it’s frustrating that so much money has poured into the country he loves, and yet, the infrastructure is still so shockingly bad.

There is progress—Infosys for instance has benefited from a new overpass that cuts down on the drive to the campus by more than thirty minutes. (See!) But it’s not moving nearly fast enough, he says. “I don’t know if we will reach the level of the United States or China,” he adds.

Murthy gave a more nuanced explanation than the usual “it’s corruption” answer you get in India. He explained that 65% of India’s population lives in rural areas and 35% live in cities. And there’s such polarity between the quality of life that politicians have to appear to be doing more for the villages than the cities if they want to get re-elected. That leaves prosperous economic cities blighted by poor sewage systems, pollution spewing generators and beggars weaving through traffic tapping on car windows. “Different emerging nations take different paths,” he says. “In China, they chose to emphasize giving people economic freedom first and political freedom second. In India we chose the opposite path.”

Hurting or Helping US-based Indians? All you have to do is read the comments on one of Vivek Wadhwa’s posts to see the ugly, anti-immigrant, anti-Indian fervor that’s been whipped up in America, post-recession. A lot of it has to do with outsourcing. I asked Murthy if he felt his company and industry’s huge success has indirectly made life harder for Indian-Americans. He turned the blame on xenophobes like Lou Dobbs and grandstanding politicians who use the wedge issue to get viewers and votes.

But it’s an issue he has to address a lot. He answers it by saying every morning he gets up and gets a Pepsi out of his GE Fridge and drives his American car to work where he sits down at his Dell computer. India used to have companies that made soft drinks, refrigerators, cars and computers. But the American ones were better. Allowing them in hurt Indian workers in the short term, but provided a far better quality of life for a much bigger swath of Indians long term. He argues outsourcing has done the same thing for US companies. Greater efficiencies and cost-savings enables these companies to stay competitive and there’s no reason they can’t—in theory—plow those savings into better local jobs or job training.

This argument isn’t going to pacify hate-mongers, because nothing will. Murthy knows that too and while he regrets it, he seems to accept it as reality.

Advice for Entrepreneurs. Murthy has started a $170 million venture fund, so although he spends most of his time still at Infosys, he clearly cares about encouraging the next generation of entrepreneurs. He had two big pieces of advice for them. One, be able to articulate what you do in one sentence. If you can’t, you don’t have a good idea. And two, make sure the market is ready. Businesses are killed, not congratulated, for being ahead of their time.

• Read the letter in full

A group of senior public figures have called on the government to abandon its plan to push through controversial digital economy bill before the election, amid claims that the move could "sidestep" the democratic process.

Earlier this week the government revealed that it wants to force the digital economy bill - which includes the controversial "three strikes" rule to cut off the internet connections of those accused of illegal file sharing - into the statute books in the next few weeks.

While it usually takes far longer to create an act of parliament, thanks to the public debates held by MPs, the secretary of state for business, Lord Mandelson, plans speed up the process by making use of a controversial parliamentary technique known as the "wash-up".

Under those rules, party whips bypass the usual debating process and make a series of horse trades in order to get proposals into law before parliament dissolves ahead of a general election.

That proposal has already caused concern, but today a coalition including a cross-party group of MPs and peers - as well as figures from the business world and entertainment industry - said that short circuiting the democratic process could have disastrous side effects.

In an open letter the group suggests that the controversial nature of the legislation - which it says "threatens to severely infringe fundamental human rights" and could introduce "website blocking" measure that impede free speech - must face the full scrutiny of parliament before it becomes law.

Among the signatories are musician Billy Bragg, human rights activist Peter Tatchell and writer Graham Linehan, who helped create comedy series including Father Ted and The IT Crowd. They are joined by a number of activists and campaigners, as well as politicians drawn from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party.

"Our worry today is that none of this will be properly debated by parliament," says the letter. "Last week Harriet Harman failed to give the Commons any reassurances that this important, complex and controversial bill will be properly scrutinised by our elected MPs."

"Democracy and accountability will be sidestepped if this bill is rushed through and amended without debate during the so-called 'wash-up' process. The thousands of people we know to be contacting their MPs with concerns will find their faith in politicians even further undermined."

The plans, which first became public last autumn, have caused controversy at almost every turn.

As well as the three strikes rule and measures to take down websites accused of infringing copyright - which could potentially result in the closure of major web destinations such as YouTube - Lord Mandelson has also sought the power to alter copyright law without the assent of parliament.

In addition, it has also been suggested that the bill's measures to prosecute the owners of internet connections used for illegal file sharing could hit anybody who provides web access - such as universities, libraries and cafes, as well as those individuals who leave their home Wi-Fi connections open.

While the made it through three readings in the House of Lords, it was not without serious objections. Lord Puttnam, the film producer, said he had faced "an extraordinary degree of lobbying" over the proposals, while others questioned the revelation that an amendment used language British music industry body the BPI.

Earlier this week BPI chief Geoff Taylor said that it was imperative that the legislation is passed before the election.

"It is vital for the future of the UK's creative sector that the digital economy bill becomes law before the dissolution of parliament," he said.

However, the open letter suggests that the bill's most controversial elements must receive proper debate or be removed from the bill entirely and left until after the forthcoming election.

• Digital Britain
• File sharing
• Wi-Fi
• Internet
• Piracy
• Law and technology

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Only 4,300km, accident free, still covered by warranty. Black 2-door Convertible hardtop, 3.0-liter twin-cam V6 engine, automatic with manual-shift capability, 16-inch alloy wheels, new dealer upgraded engin control unit sofware, new engin oil provided, Fuel economy.

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"Although the word "entitlement" fits, it's been used so frequently as to have become inadequate to capture the preening self-regard, the obliviousness to the damage that high-flying finance has inflicted on the real economy, the learned blindness to vital considerations in the pay equation. Getting an education, or even hard work, does not guarantee outcomes. One of the basic precepts of finance is that of a risk-return tradeoff: high potential payoff investments come with greater downside. But how did that evolve into the current belief system among the incumbents, that Wall Street was a sure ride, a guaranteed "heads I win, tails you lose" bet?" Yves Smith writes an essay on 'indefensible men.'

There's growing concern that China's overheating real estate market is setting the country's economy up for a big fall. What the evidence really shows, and what you should do with your portfolio as a result.

The UK Government continues to push forward the Digital Economy Bill (DEB) that aims to protect copyright holders from online pirates. On 15th March the House of Lords approved the bill and handed it over to the House of Commons.

To the absolute dismay of most outside the music and movie industries, some of the most controversial elements of the Bill are unlikely to receive any major scrutiny and will be dealt with quickly under the so-called “wash-up”, a short period between the announcement of an election and parliament being closed down.

“It’s a deeply unsatisfactory and very worrying development,” a senior executive from an ISP told The Guardian. “The fear is that no one will know what is being cooked-up before it becomes law. It’s legislation on the hoof.”

But this situation suits the BPI just fine. This week a leaked memo from the BPI fell into the hands of Cory Doctorow which showed that the “LibDem amendment” – a proposal under the DEB which would allow for websites to be blocked if, essentially, the BPI didn’t like their activities – was in fact written by the BPI. Very cosy.

But the controversies don’t end there. Doctorow also received an internal document prepared by the BPI’s Director of Public Affairs and prospective Labour parliamentary candidate, Richard Mollet. In the document he admitted that the only reason the DEB had a chance of passing is because MP’s are resigned to voting on it without debate.

“Translation: if MPs got to debate the Bill, they would tear it to unrecognizable pieces as they realized what terrible rubbish it really is,” wrote Doctorow. The scandals go on and on, but we have to stop somewhere.

Nevertheless, UK Music head Feargal Sharkey says that he is confident that the DEB will be passed before the general election, although others are not so sure.

“It will still be nip and tuck to get the Digital Economy Bill onto the statute book before the election so the battle is not won yet,” wrote Shadow Culture Minister, Jeremy Hunt, on his blog this week.

According to Jim Killock at the Open Rights Group, UK citizens aren’t leaving anything to chance with 10,000 of them having written to their MPs in the last three days to demand a debate on the Digital Economy Bill.

“It is outrageous for corporate lobbyists including the BPI, FAST and UK Music to demand that MPs curtail democracy and ram this Bill through Parliament without debate,” says Killock, adding: “The British people did not elect UK Music and the BPI to write our laws.”

Killock says that what is making the 10,000 so angry is the pushing through of the DEB without debate, an act he describes as “undemocratic and dangerous”.

If you’d like to add your dissenting voice, please email your MP, write to your local newspaper, and attend the planned demonstrations.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Plastic Jungle, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that runs a gift card exchange says it has raised $7.4 million in a round led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from previous investors, Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital and Bay Partners. The company raised $6 million in 2009.

Plastic Jungle is one of the many companies who are trying to solve the problems around the gift card economy, as I highlighted in my post about CardPool, a San Francisco-based very early stage start-up. According to some estimates, nearly $5 billion worth of cards go unclaimed every year. It allows consumers to get cash for unwanted gift cards for up to 92% of the unused balance and buy gift cards at up to a 30% discount.

In the 2009-2010 holiday season, Plastic Jungle saw 450% year over year revenue growth from 2009-to-2010. The company gets 118,000 monthly visitors to its website and is growing at about 60 percent per month.

Robert Andrews is puzzled. Why Are Russians Spending Like Mad To Save Journalism? | paidContent:UK

He writes:

The latest - after last year buying France-Soir, the country’s smallest daily, for €50 million, shipbuilder’s son Alexander Pugachyov is now spending a further €20 million on a marketing campaign to take it mainstream. He’s upping the print run by 20 times, has halved the cover price and has more than doubled newsroom staff from 40 to 100.

Jealous? There’s no part of this that makes immediate sense. In fact, contrasted with the cutbacks, climbdowns and contraction many parts of the industry are seeing, it looks like madness.

...

The Pugachyov scenario in France mirrors that of Alexander Lebedev in the UK ... The former KGB agent took the London Evening Standard, whose circulation was falling, off DMGT’s hands for just a nominal fee, forewent cover-price income in favour of free distribution on a higher print run, and pledged a £25 million investment over three years.

“£25 million investment??” That’s unheard of in today’s news publishing economy... Now Lebedev’s set to repeat the act by buying The Independent.

I think I can help Mr Andrews understand what's going on. It has nothing to do with "saving journalism."

These are prominent publications in their country. They are being bought not to make money but as vehicles to influence politics and society.

It's not the first time this has happened. Hearst used his newspapers for political influence, and many others have done the same.

Investing in propaganda...

The Russians, in particular, understand the power of media. At the heart of the Bolshevik party was its newspaper, Pravda.

The Bolshevik party wasn't investing in journalism when it funded and published Pravda -- it was investing in having its ideas discussed in society, and in the political realm.

These are ultra-rich individuals, they aren't buying the publications as investments in that business, but as an investment that will aid their other businesses.

Mr Andrews notes that Alexander Pugachyov is the son of a Russian shipbuilder and that the French government may place an order for four battleships. I think that's a pretty big clue that the investment isn't about "saving journalism."

Media businesses are often loss-leaders that help drive other businesses. You see this today a lot. Most online media sites, especially blogs, don't make money from online advertising but from selling other things, such as services, or research reports, hosting events, etc. You don't make money directly from the traffic.

- - -

I already have a loss leader, I just need to add services and products that I can sell to help support my journalism. That's why I've started to do some consulting for companies such as Intel, Pearltrees, SAP, and others.

Let me know if you need some help on media/business strategies - 415 336 7547.

In my latest Guardian column, "Is the music industry trying to write the digital economy bill?", I look at the last two weeks' events in the life of the UK Digital Economy Bill, a piece of legislation tailor-made for the record industry at the expense of the public interest, freedom and due process. The question I can't answer is, does the record industry put on these vastly over-reaching shows of power because they don't care about backlash, or are they just so arrogant that they don't imagine that there will be a backlash? [T]he next day, Bridget Fox, a LibDem prospective parliamentary candidate who had spoken out against her party's new pro-censorship stance, introduced an emergency motion to the LibDems' spring conference. This motion called for the LibDems to follow a policy that puts internet freedom front and centre, categorically rejecting web censorship and disconnection of infringers and their families, and embracing net neutrality and all the other freedoms that you'd expect from the "party of liberty". In other words, the LibDems had declared themselves to be not biddable by the entertainment industry, and indirectly but firmly rebuked the Lords who'd done the BPI's dirty work for them. By all accounts, the "debate" following Fox's proposal was a one-sided affair. No one came forward to oppose it. Instead, for half an hour, speaker after speaker stood up to declare the importance of a free and open net. When the vote came, it was near-unanimous (I hear that there was one vote against the proposal). If the BPI had hoped to have an ally for the years to come in the LibDems, they blew it by asking for too much - and getting it. Their greed in exploiting their influence over the LibDem Lords galvanised the LibDem rank and file into enshrining a rejection of the BPI's agenda into the party's official policy. Is the music industry trying to write the digital economy bill? Previously:Leaked UK record industry memo sets out plans for breaking ... Add your name to "Save the Net" FB page, help the LibDems do the ... Brits: tell the LibDem Peers not to bring web-censorship to ... LibDem rank-and-file make emergency motion for net freedom - Boing ... LibDem Lords seek to ban web-lockers (YouSendIt, etc) in the UK ... Brits: ask your MP to demand a debate on new copyright law before ......

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that American companies like Applied Materials are moving their research facilities and engineers to China as the country develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs in China after estimating that China would be producing two-thirds of the world's solar panels by the end of this year and their chief technology officer, Mark R. Pinto, is the first CTO of a major American tech company to move to China. 'We're obviously not giving up on the US,' says Pinto. 'China needs more electricity. It's as simple as that.' Western companies are also attracted to China's huge reservoirs of cheap, highly skilled engineers and the subsidies offered by many Chinese cities and regions, particularly for green energy companies. Applied Materials decided to build their new $250 million research facility in Xi'an after the city government sold them a 75-year land lease at a deep discount and is reimbursing the company for roughly a quarter of the lab complex's operating costs for five years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Digg this week unveiled plans to become a hub of web content, adding Twitter and Facebook shares to its Digg counts to present a more complete view of what’s popular on the web.

What’s more, Digg will soon let you log in with any of your social networking accounts — or even Digg stories without logging in at all.

Is Digg defining a new direction for the curation economy? And could the new site help us cope with information overload?

That’s the topic of my CNN column this week.

Check out the column at CNN.com >>

Tags: cashmore, cnn, digg

Reuters reports:

President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday announced that Russia would build a high-tech hub near Moscow to spur modernization of the economy and reduce its dependence on oil and gas.

The center, designed to develop five priority sectors -- energy, IT, telecommunications, bio-medical and atomic technologies -- will be built near Skolkovo, a new private-sector business school in the Moscow region.

(It would be tempting to call it "Silicon Steppes" if it were in Asiatic Russia...)

I had a very small part to play in this story. In late 2007 I met with a large Russian delegation that had come over to Silicon Valley to learn some of its lessons. Their goal was to use Russian oil money to establish several Silicon Valley-like regions.

They asked me lots of good questions. They made it clear that they did not want to replicate Silicon Valley, they wanted just the best bits.

I told them I would tell them the secret of Silicon Valley's success. They went silent, and leaned in closer to hear what I had to say. "Failure."

(This was before the EPIC Fail craze of recent times...)

Silicon Valley tolerates, and funds, massive amounts of failure. Only about one out of twenty startups succeed.

Probably no other culture allows people to fail as many times as Silicon Valley. Inside every successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur is a failed entrepreneur.

No other culture in the world, (except for maybe Las Vegas), tolerates and celebrates as much failure as Silicon Valley. This is the "best bit" of Silicon Valley, and its also the part that can't be exported.

They nodded. And they made some notes.

I asked them about how they would structure their VC funds, and about the Russian entrepreneurs that they hoped to attract.

One of them, the head of a quasi public/private VC fund, said that they had a problem finding and funding startups. It was an exasperating problem. The Russian entrepreneurs won't tell them about their business ideas.

They don't trust them. "I'm running a VC fund, I'm not going to run off with their business idea!"

- - -

By the way, did you know that Tim Draper, one of our most successful VCs, penned a song called "RiskMaster" to welcome the Russian delegation?

I have no idea what the tune is, obviously something stirring, I can imagine something between Red Army choir and Welsh choir:

Hey! You want to start a business?
Russia seems to show some promise
While weighing all your choices
"Go to Moscow!" you hear voices
Google founder came from Russia
Parametric? - Not from Prussia!
Genesis and PayPal too

SVOD and what is new?
With luck you'll become a
Master!

From Soviet biology
Comes really cool technology
Software immunology
From Nukes we get ecology
Ukraine's Orange Revolution
Good for all-freedom solution
And then political pollution
Now it's all in execution


Chorus:
With luck you'll become a
RiskMaster!

All you need is a faster chip
A million rubles
A couple of engineers
RiskMaster!

- - -

Please see: Turning Oil Into Innovation: Russian Delegation Seeks Silicon Valley's Lessons - SVW

Open source has made huge strides in enterprise adoption since the dot-com crash, said author, consultant and Java Champion, Jeff Genender. He said it seems like whenever the economy takes a nose dive and IT budgets stagnate, companies start thinking a...

International trademark filings plummeted in 2009 but trends should be reversed as the global economy regains strength with signs already showing in 2010, World Intellectual Property Organization’s Director General Francis Gurry said today.

The entertainment industry is known to commission reports and research that hugely benefit their lobbying practices. A new report, “Building a Digital Economy” was released yesterday. This report investigates the impact of piracy on Europe’s creative sector and was paid for by the same industry.

As expected, the reports paint a disastrous picture. In just 5 years from now the total number of lost jobs in Europe could grow to 1.2 million and the lost revenue for the industry may skyrocket to €240 billion in the same time frame. The report was quickly praised by anti-piracy outfits including the BPI and IFPI who will use it in their political lobbying efforts.

Of course, those who took the time to take a good look at the report will have seen that there are many assumptions and statistical tricks that led to these outrageous claims. We will discuss a few of them below and show that depending on what sources are used, one could come to entirely different conclusions.

- The report suggests that there’s a direct correlation between Internet traffic growth and lost jobs. That is, the more traffic that is generated on the Internet, the more money will be lost. This correlation is 1 according to the report, which assumes that all growth in Internet traffic will increase piracy at the same rate.

- The report makes another bogus assumption by stating that more traffic will mean more piracy and thus more lost revenue. It does not account for the fact that people might consume higher quality files which are greater in file-size. All projections are based on bandwidth and not the number of pirated goods.

- The report cites some academic literature which suggests that piracy leads to a decrease in sales. Studies that reported the opposite or a null-effect were carefully left out. This bias defines the entire outcome of the report. If they used studies that found a positive effect they would have found that piracy would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the years to come.

- The report uses fixed substitution rates. They assume that 10 downloaded albums results in one lost sale and this figure is not adjusted for the projected increase in piracy. One would think that the public’s budget for entertainment is limited and that the substitution rate would go down as piracy goes up.

- Related to the previous point, if the industry did indeed lose over €240 billion in revenue by 2015, consumers would have a lot of extra cash to spend. Depending on where this money was spent it might create more jobs than the entertainment industry claims it is losing. As a report commissioned by the Dutch Government showed last year, the overall effect of piracy on the economy might actually be positive.

- It gets even more ridiculous when we take a closer look at the claims. In the UK consumers spent €6.3 on audiovisual products. If the projected trends continued, the ‘lost’ revenue because of piracy would exceed the actual revenue, meaning that the music and movie industries would end up having to pay people for pirating their products.

- Lastly, the researchers seem to have trouble putting a decent report together as they messed up the legend of one of the critical figures. In this figure the bars for “file-sharing” and “global Internet traffic” are switched around. This makes us skeptical about the other statistics that are published in the report.

We can go on for a while listing the many implausibilities and research failures but we have to draw a line somewhere. Unfortunately, most news outlets won’t take the time to read through the report, meaning that these figures will be re-posted without questioning the source.

Both the UK Pirate Party and the Open Rights Group have responded to the report criticizing its one-sidedness and propagandistic nature.

“I am fed up of hearing corporate propaganda being deployed in order to justify intrusions on our rights to freedom of speech, privacy and to a fair trial,” Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group said in a comment on the report.

“The claimed losses of £1200 per household in the UK are clearly ludicrous. I certainly don’t know anyone who has an extra £1200 in their pockets thanks to piracy,” Pirate Party UK leader Andrew Robinson added.

The entertainment industry lobby, however, has already managed to get support from various politicians in the EU Parliament and will continue to use the report to justify their call for tougher measures against online piracy. We can only hope that the majority of them will see through the misleading setup and bogus numbers.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/online_education_and_blogging

Joshua Kim writes:

The best preparation I received for blogging was teaching online. One of the most important elements for running a successful online course involves presence. The instructor must be “present” in the course discussion boards and blogs. Teaching online gave me tons of practice in writing rapid, hopefully thought provoking, discussion and blog posts around the curriculum and the student’s work. Much has been written about how teaching online can improve on-ground teaching. I’d add comfort with blogging to the benefits online learning.

Is the ability to quickly produce prose that (at least sometimes) may interest a reader the sort of skill that we want to cultivate in our students? The importance of rapid, persuasive writing is growing as blogs and other social media displace other forms of communication. We all need to learn to make our case, to persuade, to make arguments based on evidence – and to do so in a limited attention economy. For all of us, both writes and readers, time is our scarcest commodity.

Perhaps participating in online courses provides students the same practice with rapid and persuasive writing as teaching an online course. The same behaviors that make for a good online instructor, namely the willingness to be active and engaged with the asynchronous communication tools, are also those behaviors of a successful online student. An online course is all about collaboration and interaction. The best students post persuasively, briefly, and often.

I would venture to say the best preparation I received for online teaching is blogging! Quick posts sharing links and commentary – something bibliobloggers have long been doing – translate perfectly to the way I interact with my online and hybrid classes. I also think the blogging activities have helped my students with their writing – just afeeling, no evidence yet, but it might be a good thing to study.