By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Internet, Apple, Uncategorized on February 7, 2010 at 3:32 pm
My mother in law got a new washing machine yesterday. Not normally the topic of a magazine devoted to IT professionals but stay with the thought.
Most men, let’s face it, are mere amateurs when using a washing machine. We take one look at the control panel and wouldn’t know the difference between mixed colours, fast wash, 40, 50, 60 degrees or easy iron. Our Hotpoint Ultima, for example, has 22 buttons to control all the options. When it was delivered our in-house sudsy Stig was driving it for a month before she realised that half the buttons didn’t work because the machine had been damaged in-transit.
Then a sock got stuck in the filter, the air became blue and not because colours had run. It needed an engineer to delve deep inside the guts of the machine. No easy-access front panel like just about every other washing machine. All because of a ridiculous decision made by the designer.
No such follies on mother-in-law’s new Siemens. For a start the filter is easy to get at and empty of all the loose change, curtain hooks, and buttons whose escape attempts came to a dead end. Even better is the drain pipe for those rare occasions when the machine stops with a full load and one needs to open its door without flooding the kitchen.
Best of all, it only has 5 buttons and one of those is on/off. Any man will understand how to work the machine and to select among all it’s options. All accomplished without reading the instructions – which are a single piece of paper in English only. It is almost as if Siemens has created a new paradigm in laundry interface design.
A new paradigm is exactly what the motion picture industry needs following the recent defeat in the Australian Federal Court. The case brought by 34 major entertainment companies who tried to make Internet Service Suppliers responsible for the data their customers download.
Justice Cowdroy recognised that ISP’s sell access to wires for electricity to run along and have no responsibility for what the electricity is used for, including peer to peer networks swapping the products of the entertainment industry. An analogy would be to make Texaco responsible for all traffic accidents involving vehicles using their petrol. Equally he recognised copyright infringement was taking place but couldn’t rule against ISPs just because something needed to be done.
Great Gulf
Back in the early days of datacomms, peer to peer sharing of files was small scale. We used to visit a file server located on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico to download an MP3 occasionally. It became a balance between our telephone bill reflecting the cost of obtaining the files over a 56k modem, compared with buying them on a CD. The latter was cheaper but usually the tracks weren’t available or out of print.
Napster changed it all. Its timing coincided with the growth of broadband and between 1999 and 2001 the on-line community swapped files with no thought for their copyright owners. Where originally the MP3s were rare tracks, digitised from vinyl or source material by the sharer, as Napster grew, newly released and yet to be released material was put up for sharing. This demolished owners’ copyrights completely and effectively raided their sources of income. It all came to a head and Napster closed.
Where Napster had been a central server, easy for authorities to influence, file sharing became distributed and uncontrollable. Apple and others looked at the problem and came up with the solution of making tracks available in huge on-line libraries, charging a small fee per download or a monthly licence. There was no need to pirate music any more because it was cheap to stay legal. Since then we have bought far more music as individual tracks than we ever did as complete CDs. The greedy music industry nearly imploded when they tried to force Apple, et al. to charge more for music downloads but have apparently come to terms with the current situation.
Buy, try, discard
The iTunes store has also revolutionised the availability of software, albeit currently only for the iPhone. Google is trying to do the same but has much catching up to do. Again, we buy more software and applications now than ever before because it is cheap enough to buy, try, then discard.
We have, from time to time, been given access to pirated films as digital files. They are not something we search for and have always been films we would never bother about seeing in the cinema or buy on DVDs. Usually they have been shown on TV soon afterwards when we could make our own copies using the many legal video capture devices. We don’t think we have defrauded anyone by watching the films we have been given because we would never have bought them. Most of the time we wonder why the films were even made, Transformers 2 being an obvious example which ought to have been left intact on the cutting room floor.
The entertainment industry should stop slashing about, aiming blows at its customers by suing them for pie-in-the-sky damages. Instead it should re-examine its entire product and supply chain and come up with a radical new solution which encourages people not to pirate but buy or rent instead. Faster broadband speeds will only make it more imperative for the change.
Rated: 100% (3 votes)
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[…] Grandma’s new Siemens - IT ProMy mother in law got a new washing machine yesterday. Not normally the topic of a magazine devoted to IT professionals but stay with the thought. Most men, let’s face it, are mere amateurs when using a washing machine. We take one look at the […]
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