Some movies are just so good that when the plot twists and turns, you may fail to notice that it also disappears up its own backside. Carried along with the moment, you may never see the incongruity amidst the events on screen. Here is my top five of film stories with holes that gaped just for a moment, but where you may have missed the holes when you blinked…

5. The Shawshank Redemption

Andy, played by Tim Robbins, is going to escape from Shawshank prison by using his little stone chisel to make a great big bloody hole in the wall. The guards never see the hole because it is covered over using a poster of a cinema sex symbol. Andy hides his chisel in a bible, and in one tense scene the warden is holding the bible whilst they search Andy’s cell. Fortunately, the warden never opens it up, although he talks about bible stories at length. But why hide your chisel in a bible, when there is a bloody great hole in the wall big enough to hide the chisel plus an elephant or two?

4. Star Wars

After a stirring escape from Death Star, and from the TIE fighters sent to chase after them, Han Solo and the crew of the Millennium Falcon at last feel like they can relax. Princess Leia, though, knows better. ‘Too easy’ she says, and announces the evil empire must have put a tracking device on their ship. If the heroes fly back to the secret rebel base, then they will lead the empire back there too. So what do they do? They fly straight back, in the hope that they will find a weakness in the Death Star which will allow the rebels to blow it up. Flying in the wrong direction and changing ships would have been a less risky plan.

3. The Prestige

Two warring Victorian magicians, played by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, scheme and counter-scheme to upstage and bamboozle each other. In a masterstroke, Bale allows Jackman to ’steal’ his secret diary. The secret diary leads Jackman halfway across the world, to meet with the inventor Nikola Tesla. The diary reveals that Tesla is the man who made a machine that can transport a man through space, making him reappear at a distance from where he first started. However, the diary is a cunning connivance by Bale - he actually performs his disappearing and reappearing trick with the help of a twin brother unknown to the rest of the world. The foolish Jackman believes the diary and tracks Tesla down in the US, finally persuading the reluctant but penniless inventor to meet with him. Desperately needing Jackman’s money, Tesla agrees to build Jackman a transporting machine, which works pretty darned well (apart for one unfortunate side-effect). How unlucky for Bale! He intended to send Jackman on a wild goose chase, but in the end he pointed him at the one man in the world who could build a machine that actually does magic. What were the odds on that?

2. Alien

In space, no one can hear you scream. You are being chased by an alien monster. It is strong. It is covered in armour. Its has a tail that can slice you in two. It has an extra set of jaws for biting you when the first set does not get the job done. It has acid for blood. To sum it up, killing this alien is going to be hard. But in space, no one can hear you scream because there is no atmosphere. So how do the hapless humans try to fight off this one-alien apocalypse? They use flamethrowers and other weakling weapons. Why not try switching off the atmosphere and allowing the otherworldly bugger to suffocate instead?

1. The Fast and The Furious

The starter for this high-octane car racing franchise starred Vin Diesel as the gang leader who boosts a lot of electronic equipment to pay for the modifications that boost his automobiles. However, in the craziest scene of the movie, Vinnie needs to escape the police following a street race. He hides his precious car in a garage, then high-tails it away on foot. A police car spots Vinnie and chases him. Remarkably, Vinnie manages to outrun the police car, and he makes his getaway. What were the moviemakers trying to say with this incongruous scene? Perhaps they were saying that feet are fleeter than the furious automobiles of this car-studded feature. Or perhaps they were saying that Diesel is faster than petrol…

Gutenberg and his Bible… The Little Red Book from Mao Zedong… The Guinness Book of Records setting the bestseller record for a copyrighted series of publications… discussing the future of printing using the (gulp) internet. Is the heyday of printing now a footnote of history?

Less paper can add up to more content, if we learn to print only what people want, when they want it. The danger with this argument is that it lends itself to the digital competitors, who might reasonably argue that even less paper equates to even more value. How can printing on paper compete with the instantly updated, interactive and seemingly endless resources of a digitally connected world? It can, in the same way that cinema has persisted despite the arrival of video, and radio has survived the arrival of television.

What is good about the printed word? It can be used without a power supply or technology. It can distributed universally. There is no up-front cost for a special device to read the material with, or to connect to a digital network to obtain it. Because there is no device, there are no costs or risks associated with having a device. Printed material is very transportable in limited amounts. The ‘interface’ for printed content is both well known and well liked by users. Printed material is harder to copy, which is good for the owner of the content, but not necessarily for the user. On the other hand, the printed word has its disadvantages as well. Once printed, there is no way to update the content, an impediment for either correcting errors, issuing new versions or presenting topical information. The communication is one-way only; you can read, but cannot respond. In large volumes, printed material is heavy and bulky. The marginal costs of raw materials and of distribution will be higher for printed material than for digital material. The options for formatting, structuring, and browsing through material are limited; there are no hyperlinks and no search functions.

The future for printing depends on finding compelling business propositions that maximises the advantages of the printed medium and are unaffected by its weaknesses. Reducing wastage will greatly reduce the costs for printing, but selling printed words and pictures has the same fundamental cost disadvantages as selling music on CDs or movies on DVDs. A pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap strategy may slow the decline of sales in printing, but cannot reverse the trend towards digital transmission of content. Using the analysis of generic strategies developed by business thinker Michael Porter, printing will be the loser in a competition based on cost. This leaves the printing business model two options: differentiation or focus on a few select markets.

Focusing on a few select and specialized markets may be viable for small print-oriented businesses, and there are many possible and imaginative uses for printing, but adding a lot of niche markets together is not the same as dominating one big market. There will be room for novelties, like printed albums that capture all the photos of a child as it grows up, personalized gifts, and souvenirs of historical events. However, we should assume that the total time and total expenditure on leisure, entertainment, education and information gathering is not going to change overall, just as people made time for increasing their internet use by reducing the time they spend watching television, which in turn has seen advertising budgets move from one medium to the other. New applications of print technology, devised to entertain and amuse small groups with one-off publications may garner some interest, but they are not likely to generate sizable business models. It is inevitable that much of the content that used to be supplied in printed form will be supplied digitally in future, because it has a cost advantage, and also has some differentiation advantages in terms of the ability to support two-way interaction and to provide rapid and frequent updates of content. For printed material to really thrive in an evolving economy, and to hold on to a significant share of the existing entertainment and knowledge markets, it will have to play to its strengths and support new products that are suitably differentiated and will generate consistent and large-volume demand.

One of the most obvious advantages of printed books is that they make good gifts. They are tangible. They look good on shelves. You can feel the quality of the paper with your fingers. People will keep giving books as gifts simply because it permits them to give something physical, in contrast to the gift of downloaded content. The hardcover, high quality and gift-oriented end of the book market will be relatively protected from the threat of digital incursion. The kind of personalization made possible by printing individual copies for individual customers is a natural complement to this kind of product. Whether offering children’s stories that feature the name of the child, anthologies of love poetry especially selected for the reader, a copy of a classic text with customized footnotes, or printed to suit the reader’s tastes in terms of page size, typeface and style, there are many possibilities. The same kind of bespoke changes could just as easily be delivered digitally, but will be much more attractive and meaningful when delivered within a beautifully bound and printed book. Though this sector of the market can embrace new opportunities presented by micro-publishing and tailoring of its content, its fundamental strategy is defensive in nature; it is about augmenting an established product and maintaining sales in the face of a new competitive entrant.

Digital material would seem to have the advantage when it comes to tailoring the content to suit the reader, because the reader can go online and be selective in what content they get. For example, HP’s Tabbloid allows readers to aggregate their preferred RSS feeds and format them into a printable magazine. The final stage, printing the content, is more of an option than a necessity. However, not all tailoring needs to be done by the reader. Sometimes it can be done for them. Tailoring may be even more important when trying to communicate common messages to a broad cross-section of people, not all of whom will be keen on technology or will chose to read digital content, but where the end same end result can be supported by different specifics to suit different individual tastes. A good example would be campaign materials from political candidates. Politicians are currently not that sophisticated at keeping a track of individual voters and why they vote the way they do, but the frontrunners are making rapid improvements. Instead of candidates tailoring their message to the reflect the issues that seem most important from a poll of people living in an area, what if they tailored the messages to the topics that each individual voter cared most about? A campaign mailshot could highlight the politician’s views on the policies that most interested the individual voter, and could list endorsements from people that the voter most admired. Where the campaign team lacks all the information specific to the individual, the next best guess can be inserted, based on polling and what is known about the voter’s age, job, and any political and social affiliations.

Because internet use is dominated by the model of users ‘pulling’ the content they like from a endless supply of resources, whether paid for or free, it is tempting to try to think of how printing can emulate this approach. However, printing has the disadvantage in terms of both cost and the natural mode for interaction with the recipient, who will tend to be using a digital and connected device of some description. There are many organizations that might want to push content to the user, and would prefer to supply it in a tangible format delivered direct to their home. Vanity publication may represent a growing proportion of print services, as demonstrated by the surge of interest in self-published books and in novelty items like this limited-run newspaper which was given as a gift to friends of its makers. However, the demand for vanity publications will ultimately be limited because the writer’s enthusiasm is unlikely to be matched by that from readers.

Of much greater advantage to printing is the possibility of ‘pushing’ content that might be of interest to the user but where the cost is paid for by the organization wanting to send them promotions and advertising. There are organizations that possess and will want to push content that may be of genuine interest to the recipient, even if the recipients would never think to ask for it. By joining forces, aggregating material, personalizing content and taking on some of the aspects of today’s traditional mass media, they could both cut their costs and offer differentiated content that would be hard to compete with. Consider three currently disparate models: (1) free local newspapers, which are paid for by local adverts, (2) supermarkets, credit card companies and other businesses which regularly gather data about customers, knows where they live, and which may want to push bespoke discount offers to them based on their purchasing habits, and (3) government agencies, transport bodies, and other public services that would like to give information relevant to the specific recipient, depending on such things as whether they hold a driving license, claim welfare benefits, are taxpayers or have children at a particular school. Personalized content could be pulled together to create a local weekly journal without any of the sponsor organizations needing to share any data. Costs would be covered by the commercial organization using the journal for their paid messages. These costs would be lowered because of the economies of scale that come from pooling their efforts with other organizations. Local and personalized content can be padded out by syndicating national and international news. The result would be a news bulletin that tells you about big events in the national news, tells about crime suffered in your neighborhood and investment in your children’s school, includes coupons relevant to the products you buy from the supermarket, and reminds you to submit your tax return. Consider also the benefits to advertisers. A classified advert to sell a used car would only go to those households where somebody has a driver’s license, and the local pizza delivery franchise can send a coupon enticing a known customer to order their favorite pizza. The complexities involved in managing multiple content providers can be ironed out, probably using a mixture of the techniques that local newspapers currently use to sell advertising space and that direct marketing businesses use to manage cost relative to the scale of a promotion. If they are, there is the potential for a genuinely new and attractive print product, made possible by the digital age but uniquely designed for the print medium.

Print will go into inevitable decline if it tries to be a paper-based version of the internet, and will be pushed back into defensible but small niches. A more aggressive approach to finding new products would yield better results. New products should utilize the data available to personalize content, whilst exploiting the advantages of a medium that is still universal in a way that digital media is not yet and may never be. These advantages will be most cheaply delivered to big organizations that want to connect to a very wide cross-section of people in a personal and tangible way. They may be promoting a commercial enterprise or trying to support a community. With intelligent use of print technology, they may find seamless, cost-effective and attractive ways of doing both.

In a swish apartment overlooking London’s Docklands, two scriptwriters, Whale and Purview, sit down to discuss ideas for a new James Bond script.

Whale: Okay, the studio wants four exotic locations for this film.

Purview: Only four? They must be cutting back.

Whale: Nah, they’re thinking about global warming. They want a more responsible Bond who thinks about the impact air travel has on the environment.

Purview: Okey Dokey. Let’s have an early scene where ‘M’ tells Bond that MI6 has adopted a carbon neutral policy.

Whale: Yup. Let’s make this some kind of sexy eco-thriller.

Purview: I’m not sure we can. We did the environment with Quantum of Solace and that plot about controlling water supplies and calling the antagonist ‘Greene’ and having him run an ecological business as a front for his criminal activities. Let’s make this film about terrorism instead. That’s topical.

Whale: We did international terrorism in Casino Royale.

Purview: Then what’s it going to be about? We’ve got to keep it topical and relevant.

Whale: How about making it a combo eco-terrorist story. With nukes. Iranian nukes.

Purview: That’s a good idea. Let’s hang on to that. Let’s start with the four locations.

Whale: One hot, one cold, one pricey, one wild.

Purview: St. Petersburg. We should use St. Petersburg as the wintry location.

Whale: The Winter Palace at Winter. Shots of crisp white snow contrasted with lots of lavish opulence with lots of gold and jewels everywhere.

Purview: We cut from a scene with a Bond girl skating on the ice of a frozen river to her putting on her diamonds in the evening.

Whale: Ice and diamonds - I love it. Okay, St. Petersburg works for me. We can have a Russian oligarch as the baddie. Yeah - good. Now what about the hot location?

Purview: I don’t we should actually set it in Iran. It would be too sensitive to have Bond going there undercover. How about doing a segment in Jamaica?

Whale: Bond’s been to the Caribbean so often that the audience will expect him to end up speaking like a West Indian.

Purview: Western Samoa?

Whale: Nobody knows where that is.

Purview: Nobody knows why you’d build a swanky hotel in the middle of the Bolivian desert but that’s what we wrote into the last script. What about Rio de Janeiro?

Whale: Puh-lease. Pictures of girls in skimpy bikinis and guys juggling footballs. So corny.

Purview: Somewhere in the Middle East then.

Whale: Not a bad idea. Bond can be involved in a chase through a shopping mall in Dubai. He pushes past a lot of Arabs all dressed in white. The baddie’s henchman is dressed in white too, so Bond momentarily loses sight of him in the crowd… I’m liking this idea. Lots of opportunity for product placement, as he throws the henchman through the window of a Louis Vuitton shop. Plus they’ll pay top dollar for the boost to tourism. We can have a scene with Bond flying off the top of that fancy ’sail’ hotel using a one-man helicopter pack on his back.

Purview: I like it. We’ve done rocket packs before, but not helicopter packs. As he helicopters down, Bond can set off some smoke flares, leaving a red, white and blue trail in the skies.

Whale: What about the glamour location?

Purview: New York. Perhaps we could stage a shootout in Grand Central Station. The crowd screaming, people leaping over ticket barriers and Bond having a fight on the roof of a subway train.

Whale: Nah. We’ve got to cut back. And Dubai can double as the pricey location as well as the hot one. We should do somewhere in the UK. You know, to fit with the ecologically responsible ’staycation’ theme.

Purview: How about Bond spends a weekend youth hosteling in the Lake District? He could encounter a hiking troupe of Swedish beauties, and bed them all during a wet afternoon under canvas.

Whale: I’m thinking more along the lines of Blackpool. Bond slides down a cable from Blackpool Tower whilst chasing an assassin.

Purview: Blackpool?

Whale: Blackpool. It can work. They’re making it more upmarket these days.

Purview: Perhaps. What if the assassin garrotes his victim from behind, just as they’re looping the loop on the rollercoaster at Blackpool Pleasure Beach?

Whale: That’s a great idea. I love it.

Purview: We just the need the fourth location now. We should think about somewhere really different, somewhere nowhere like Bond’s been before.

Whale: The moon.

Purview: Too far.

Whale: Slough.

Purview: Not far enough.

Whale: Outer Mongolia.

Purview: Too barren, just like Slough.

Whale: Australia.

Purview: Too Australian. Then again, perhaps the nuke can be hidden under Uluru.

Whale: Sorry?

Purview: Uluru - Ayers Rock. They hide the nukes under Ayers Rock so the satellites cannot detect the radioactive signature, or something like that.

Whale: Brilliant. So far we’ve got a plot where Bond’s having a staycation in Blackpool, his old Navy buddy is murdered on the rollercoaster whilst Bond is in the queue for candyfloss, the murderer escapes but resurfaces in St. Petersburg, employed by some super-rich oligarch. His old buddy was entwined in the oligarch’s business interests in Dubai. Bond investigates, realizing it’s a cover operation involved in smuggling nukes out of Tehran. The nukes get hidden under Ayers Rock, where they will be auctioned to the representatives of a variety of rebel nations. And Bond has casual sex with a woman he picks up in Blackpool, shags a Russian beauty in the Winter Palace and then bonks her again in Australia, but only after he does the identical twin PAs to the chief auctioneer.

Purview: That’s the basic plot resolved. We need some more gadgets to add to the heli-pack.

Whale: What about an invisible car?

Purview: Ridiculous. Imagine how many accidents you would have driving an invisible car on the road. People would keep hitting you in the tail.

Whale: And I remember we had one already - in Die Another Day. Maybe we should give the bad guy a gadget. Like an electro suit. And Bond can kill him by pressing a big red self-destruct button placed right in the middle of the suit’s chest plate.

Purview: That was in Die Another Day too.

Whale: The bad guy should have a gun which fires only one bullet, because he’s that good.

Purview: And what if he’s being attacked by two people? He waits until they’re lined up, one behind the other? Anyhow, The Man With the Golden Gun had only one bullet in his gun.

Whale: Okay. How about the bad guy has a fetish for Bond and keeps a mannequin of him in his lair? Then Bond can take the dummy’s place and catch the baddie by surprise.

Purview: That was in The Man With The Golden Gun too. Roger Moore was so wooden it was hard to tell which one was the mannequin. We should think about having some kind of space weapon. They’re very sexy, in a sci-fi style.

Whale: No. Definitely not. You Only Live Twice. Diamonds are Forever. Moonraker. Goldeneye and Die Another Day. Space weapons have been done to death.

Purview: Let’s leave the gadgets for now. Gadgets are passé anyway. We should talk about some set pieces.

Whale: Bond should invite himself to the nuke auction. He quickly drops the pretence as the baddies know who he is anyway. They’ll put him up for a couple of nights in the lavish guest facilities and the Bond’s oligarch antagonist allows him to sleep with his woman, before eventually deciding to kill him. Bond survives and blows the whole place up, leaving the Nukes safely buried underneath Ayers Rock.

Purview: Of course. That all goes without saying. We need Bond’s antagonist to have a sidekick with a special weapon or skill.

Whale: Killer hats.

Purview: Oddjob in Goldfinger.

Whale: Killer teeth.

Purview: Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Whale: Killer thighs.

Purview: Xenia Onatopp in Goldeneye.

Whale: Killer fishing rod.

Purview: Mayday in View to a Kill.

Whale: Killer moustache.

Purview: That would be new. How would it work?

Whale: A gay guy soaks his moustache in poison. It gives off fumes that would kill Bond if he kisses him.

Purview: I’m pretty sure that’s not been filmed before.

Whale: We need some good action scenes.

Purview: Bond is chasing the sidekick in Blackpool, but he escapes and makes a dramatic getaway.

Whale: By miniature jet plane.

Purview: Done before, in Octopussy.

Whale: By stealth boat.

Purview: That was in Tomorrow Never Dies.

Whale: By bobsled.

Purview: Check out On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Whale: By lunar rover.

Purview: See Diamonds are Forever.

Whale: Sliding downhill on a cello case.

Purview: That’s how Bond escapes in The Living Daylights.

Whale: Hot air balloon.

Purview: What kind of ridiculous getaway vehicle would a hot air balloon make? It slowly floats on the wind, there is no way to control its direction, is in plain view to everyone and can easily be followed by the cops who just need to wait until it comes back down to ground. It’s a silly idea. Plus it has been done already, in The World is Not Enough.

Whale: Phew. What’s left?

Purview: Bus. The sidekick jumps on the number 42 bus. Bond would give chase but his car is stuck in terrible congestion. That fits with the environmentally-conscious theme. M can then give her spiel about MI6 going carbon neutral when Bond returns to the office and debriefs.

Whale: After which, Q gives Bond a special folding bicycle to use on future missions.

Purview: Good idea, and its the extra gadget we were looking for.

Whale: Exactly.

Purview: I think we’re nearly there. We just need to write a few double entendres. Bond is as ‘hard’ as Ayers Rock. Bond is as ‘hard’ as Blackpool rock. That kind of thing.

Whale: Yeah, and we need a title. How about ‘Golden Day for the Kill’?

Purview: ‘Tomorrow’s the Day I Licence to Die’.

Whale: ‘Diamonds Never Die’.

Purview: ‘Dr. Thunderfinger’.

Whale: ‘A View to a Killing Licence, in Gold’.

Purview: ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Gold’.

Whale: ‘Her Majesty’s Secret Solace’.

Purview: ‘The Spy with a Love Licence from Russia’.

Whale: ‘Moonfingering the Octopussy’.

Purview: ‘Eye Spy Golden Die’.

Whale: ‘Die Today, Kill Tomorrow’.

Purview: ‘The Spy Who Kills in Gold Blood’.

Whale: ‘Live to Kill Another Day’.

Purview: ‘Licence to Live, Dying to Kill’.

Whale: ‘Never Say Die’.

Purview: That’s it. ‘Never Say Die’. That’s our title.

Whale: You know, sometimes I think we should try to be more original. But after twenty-two Bond films, what would be the point? ‘Never Say Die’ - we’ll make another killing at the box office…

If I told you what I did today, you probably would be left unimpressed. Rather obviously, I spent a part of today writing a blog. Let us avoid any metaphysical musings of over whether the blog-writing should be described in the past or present tense, and move on to some of the other things I did today.

• Waking up.
• Eating a Belgian chocolate biscuit purchased from Marks & Spencer.
• Suggesting ways to highlight public opposition to the extradition of Gary McKinnon
• Watching Aston Villa play Chelsea on the television.
• Flossing.
• Asking if the water supply had been turned off.
• Resending an email twice.
• Surprising someone whilst they cleaned the toilet.

This list is neither sequential, nor exhaustive. Apart from the tenuous connection to Gary McKinnon’s plight, none of it could be considered newsworthy. But who determines the worth in the newsworthy? Not me. Everything listed above is news, at least per the Merriam-Webster definition of ‘news’:

Main Entry: news
Pronunciation: \ˈnüz, ˈnyüz\
Function: noun plural but singular in construction
Usage: often attributive
Date: 15th century

1 a : a report of recent events b : previously unknown information [I've got news for you] c : something having a specified influence or effect [the rain was good news for lawns and gardens — Garrison Keillor] [the virus was bad news]
2 a : material reported in a newspaper or news periodical or on a newscast b : matter that is newsworthy

What I did is news. I mean, none of what I did was reported in a newspaper or news periodical or on a newscast. But it would be rather circular to assert that something cannot be news until it has been reported in a news outlet. That would mean news journalists could only find out what to report by checking what has been reported elsewhere. Which is probably how some of them work, but we can skip that topic for now. What I did was news because the events were recent and you did not know about them (assuming you are not party to the creeping surveillance society and that none of you were spying on me earlier today). News can be news even though you might not feel it newsworthy. If you had to tell a child that their dog had died, it would certainly constitute news, but there is no demand to extend newspaper obituary pages to cover pets.

The worthiness of the newsworthy is subjective. I defy anyone to watch a 24-hour news channel for a full 24 hours without questioning the inclusion of at least one story. The news supposedly relates the latest about the important and the interesting, but important and interesting to whom? Both the Financial Times and The Sun report news, but there are few stories in common. A lot of people are upset by the death of Stephen Gately. However, I feel no better informed because I now know the name of a Boyzone singer whose life I had largely been unaware of. I have no particular reason to know more about his funeral arrangements than those of the thirty-eight who died because of the Lahore attacks a few days later.

The significance of entertainment news stems from the fact people care about being entertained. But entertainment news is now a misnomer. Nowadays, almost all news is entertainment. Real news might consist of the announcement of the wedding of friends, the loss of a family member or a change in the law that changes the way you do your job. It is unlikely that the news will never tell you this news. The news only tells people what is relevant to them when talking about changes in taxes or the latest reform of education policy. Traffic congestion only gets reported when people are already stuck in traffic jams, and nobody finds out they have been hit by a power blackout by switching on the TV. Mass media news is dominated by stories that people find interesting despite, or perhaps because, of their irrelevance to the personal circumstances of the audience. Newspapers could be better described as stuffpapers because they tell the story of how stuff happens. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp might be better entitled Gossip Corp because of how much it spends on generating speculation. And if the US had proper laws to stop false advertising, then the Fox News network would now be called the ‘Why Anyone Who Voted for Obama is Wrong Network’.

There is another common observation that much of what fills news output is not news but commentary. But after a blog post commenting on how there is no news in the news, I cannot complain about that.

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George Orwell wrote about Salvador Dali:

“One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.”

In recent weeks, I have been struck by an analogy. Professional musicians are turning into new miners. I do not mean that they squeeze into dark holes and come out all sweaty and dirty, though I am sure plenty of them do. I mean that they are embarking on a great struggle, but one I think they have no hope of winning.

Twenty-five years ago, the coalminers of Britain’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) went on strike. They fought bitterly and they were desperate, but ultimately the strike ended in shattering defeat. They were not without popular support. Pictures of Police brutally clashing with pickets gained them favour, though this was balanced by stories of the harassment meted out to the strikebreakers who went back to work. In the public consciousness, the miners were defeated by an implacable opponent: Prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In the Ridley Plan, her colleagues had already outlined some of the essential steps to be successful when faced by a national strike by the coalminers. These included building up stocks of coal in advance and contingency planning for the import of coal at short notice. There was no doubt that the easiest way to envision the strike was as a battle of wills between Thatcher and the NUM’s leader, Arthur Scargill. The reality, though, is a little subtler.

Thatcher made vital decisions that allowed her to successfully confront the miners, instead of caving in to their demands for fear of power cuts, but she also had more powerful forces on her side: the tide of economic necessity. Put simply, British coal was more expensive than other fuels available for power generation. Cutting the cost of national subsidies would make it easier for Thatcher to cut taxes. Cutting the cost of electricity bills would reduce the cost of living and hence also buy her support. In a democracy, a major national strike needs to be seen in terms of overall imperatives. A politician that delivers power cuts is unlikely to maintain popular support, but a politician that delivers reduced taxes and reduced household bills is likely to gain support. It is a simple equation, but no less valid for its simplicity. Thatcher made a political calculation, and it paid off for her. In contrast, Scargill made the wrong calculation, and the cost of that error was the subsequently more vicious dismemberment of the British coal industry.

Recording artists are embarking on a similar crusade to that of the miners. Like miners, they have long depended on the state’s institutions. They do not work for a nationalized industry like the coalminers did, but they do rely upon an economic model that needs to be upheld by laws that are especially favourable to them. For most of the population, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that flattery is the only recompense available when the product of your mind is copied by someone else. Most ideas cannot be patented, or copyrighted, or trademarked, or protected in any other way. Though it is called intellectual property, the ‘intellectual’ element of such property is very narrowly defined, so that there can be a useful test and way to enforce laws that control who can exploit it for economic gain. If I copy an exact string of words I infringe copyright, but not if I relay the gist of a story. I break the law if I repeat a song note for note without giving the compensation due to the rights owner, but I do not break the law if I am inspired to write a similar song. This imbalance between the laws that govern exact copies and the absence of laws to govern similarity tends to favour people who already have wealth and power and can therefore have privileged access to distribution networks. The wealth and power of successful recording artists depends on a pillar maintained by the state, the institutions of law and order that govern what we may or may not do. Without copyright law, and the levers of the state necessary to enforce it, there would be no copyright infringement and no way to make money from owning copyright. But like the coalminers, there is an economic threat that musicians now face, and just like the miners, they are unwilling to do so. They have also slipped into the same trap as the miners, insisting that their fight is a moral one, when the truth is that the battleground is the economy.

The law only works if the great majority of people are willing to abide by it. The wonder of democracy is that we can replace governments without bloodletting, but even the worst tyrant can be overthrown. Authority for every law, every institution of the state, depends on the acceptance of the people. The horror of Orwell’s 1984 is that the state might penetrate not just into your home, but into your mind, in order to control you. We expect some things to be inviolable, including our own minds. That there are limits to law is a maxim. Where to draw those limits is a question of practicality as well as morality and economics. Like any other practicality, the answer to the question can change because of new circumstances. We find that through history, it is often morality that changes to suit practicality, and not the other way around. Nuclear stockpiles to kill every human are morally repugnant, but we can expect more and more nations to join the nuclear club for purely practical reasons, and the moral justification is always the same: “if them, why not us?” Cloning, slavery, education and child labour, pensions and the treatment of the elderly, democracy, feudalism, the role of women in the workplace - all have been the subject of moral debates and all of those debates are seen through the prism of what is practical at any given point in time. As practicalities change, so morality changes with it. Slavery for farming would be repugnant now, but is not so obviously repugnant in a time where there are no machines to bear the brunt of farming work. Expecting genteel ladies to work was also repugnant at one time, until the First World War made it essential to utilize every human resource at the nation’s disposal. The same is true of copyright, yet like the coalminers, the musicians are living in denial about the consequences for the economic model that rewards them for their work.

Just like nuclear proliferation, which we can abhor and try to delay but recognize as inevitable just because of the spread of technology, copyright abuse will inevitably increase. When copying involved taking a book and writing it out again in longhand, then there was no need for copyright law. Now that copying has been completely divorced from physicality, and that we live in a world with a globally connected network to share digital content, and there are people in the world with the nous to write software and implement solutions to solve problems they want to solve, copyright abuse is inevitable. Its abuse is inevitable thanks to the glorious hypocrisy in the heart of every human being: the belief that laws are there to protect them from other people, not there to stop them doing things they want to do. Everybody thinks like that, and no end of ‘education’ will stop people ’stealing’ music so long as they feel the cost of music on the free market is too high, and the damage done to the creative artist is little or none. Any very many people do feel like that. So whilst the economic imperatives are different to those that savaged the British coal industry - we are talking about ease of access for a limitless and free ‘black market’ in music, not the relative cost of extraction and the kilojoule content of coal versus gas - the economic imperatives exist and cannot be ignored.

The musicians, like the miners before them, are living in denial about economic change. One can sympathize. Nobody wants to believe that their chosen path has been invalidated by forces outside of their control. If you make a career decision in your teens, it will be painful to recognize that it was based on outdated economic assumptions by the time you reach your late twenties. A retreat to an argument for morality is as misguided as the miners believing they could successfully demand subsidies from the rest of society. In a way, they can, because they can try to make it so difficult to change that people put up with long-run inequity rather than a shorter period of more severe turbulence and trouble. The price of doing so is inequity; musicians are demanding to be raised up and protected by society that does not offer similar protections to everyone else. Plenty of ideas receive no legal protection. Copyright does. This inequity most of us would agree is tolerable. But that this inequity needs to be backed by surveillance is a demand too far. A law that cannot be enforced without spying on people in their homes is a law that belongs in Orwell’s Airstrip One, not a law that belongs in our Britain. And we know that copyright can no longer be effectively enforced without surveillance. That makes it a law that should not be enforced, because the morality of protecting the right of musicians to enjoy the economic benefits of their labour is outweighed by the morality of protecting all citizens from surveillance by authoritarian forces. If anything, the musician has become far more morally reprehensible than the miner ever was. The miner just expected to get paid more than the true value of the coal they produced, and if they do not get it, they would cut everybody’s electricity until the government backed down. Unfortunately for the miner, there were no power cuts and the strike went on far longer than the average miner could afford to live without pay. In contrast the musician expects not just the state, but unrelated businesses to pay the price for the surveillance they demand. And they do expect surveillance of everybody in the UK. Electronically monitoring who does what on a network is surveillance of everyone who uses it, no matter how much ignorance and subterfuge is offered by musicians in order to make it sound more reasonable.

One of the reasons to dislike Arthur Scargill, the leader of the NUM who lead their ill-fated strike, was his authoritarian tendencies. There is little doubt he was loved by many of his union’s members. He was seen as a man who worked hard for the cause of miners, was honest and faithful. But when he called for a national strike by coalminers, the NUM lacked the facility, or interest, to ballot its own members on whether they wanted to strike. Now I see Lily Allen in much the same light as Scargill. She has the same ability to inspire love and devotion in some, but suffers the same deficits when it comes to an excess of pride and a lack of humility. Allen is a would-be leader for the musicians, and for much of the rest of us. In recent weeks, she has been the most outspoken of the increasingly politicized fight to protect the economic interests of recording artists. What Allen lacks is an interest in listening to points of view that are different to her own. I have never met the woman, but I draw inferences from her behaviour. She started a blog to persuade people to her point of view, but tore it down after she received ‘abuse’, by which she means she did not like being pointed out as a hypocrite. Allen then went on a media rampage, threatening to quit music and appearing in The Sun to immodestly explain how she ‘understands the internet’, with the implication presumably being that anyone who disagrees with her must not really understand the internet, although there are many learned individuals from all walks - lawyers, academics and even musicians - who sincerely believe copyright is in desperate need of reform. This media blitz was cleverly and pointedly designed to distract attention from the revelation, made prominent on Michael Masnick’s Techdirt blog only hours earlier, that Allen had infringed the copyright of other musicians herself. When she was unknown and trying to get attention, she made ‘mixtapes’, digital music files that spliced her music with that of other artists, in the hope that they would be downloaded and help her to gain popularity. Embarrassingly for Allen, the mixtapes were still available for download on LilyAllenMusic.com, even whilst Ms. Allen was denouncing the evil of ’stealing’ from recording artists by abusing their copyright. When the hypocrisy was about to get mainstream press attention, the mixtapes were finally pulled from her website and she went into overdrive - talking about anything and everything except her own infringement of copyright laws that she now rather pompously considers to be sacrosanct.

If you want the proof of Lily Allen’s copyright infringement, I downloaded the files from LilyAllenMusic.com to ensure the evidence was never lost to the public domain. If you want, you can listen to Lily Allen’s mixtape1 and mixtape2. I know that by offering these files I am guilty of copyright infringement myself. The funny thing about morality is that sometimes the morally right thing is to break a law in order to highlight a greater moral wrong. I am not deaf to the pleas from celebrities to protect the interests of hard-up old session musicians, but I am cynical about them. And I am not persuaded that heralding an era of unprecedented spying on the private individual is a price worth paying to ensure the poorest musicians earn a little more money. A better solution to the poverty of some who work in the music industry would involve the richest musicians earning a whole lot less, but the music industry has been incapable of finding solutions like that. That makes them as selfish as much of the rest of humanity, including the people who want to download music for free.

To borrow from Orwell, one ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Lily Allen is an attractive artist with a talent for catchy songs, and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a musician is that he or she makes music. If it makes us want to whistle or dance, it is good music, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. Yet even the best celebrity in the world deserves to be pulled down if they use their celebrity to turn the internet into a prison camp. Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

And Lily Allen is wrong about music dying. Music lived before copyright. It will live after copyright. People make music with no profit motive, even in these crazy materialistic times. Take a listen to this sensational song by Dan Bull, which rather amusingly analyses Lily Allen and her arguments…