Time was that if you wanted a manual for manners, you simply turned to a guide from Debrett’s. With the rise of interweb and netiquette, life is no longer so simple, though Debrett’s still try to give advice on civility in the age of cybersurfing. Take this suggestion they make about email:

Emails will often be printed and filed, and therefore close attention must be paid to layout. Again, treating the construction of an email just as you would a ‘real’ letter is the most effective approach.

Okay. The subtext seems to be not to bother backing up your hard drive. Instead, just devote a wing of your mansion to a library of print-outs of all those one line emails containing links to YouTube videos of cats falling off TVs. But the real question is, when filing your printed emails, should the leather binder be green or red?

So, forget Debrett’s. They are stuck in a timewarp when people needed to know if they should hit their manservant with the back of their hand or with their walking cane. Where else can we turn? There is one obvious answer: the internet. Stop! They let anyone on the internet. And the internet hosts elitists that make the people who write Debrett’s books look like hippy-hugging commies, except the internet elitists think good protocol means knowing your TCP from your IP. Take a look at some of the advice someone at the Internet Engineering Task Force came up with on a wet Wednesday afternoon whilst their modem was busy downloading the latest data on matter-antimatter asymmetry from CERN:

In the past, the population of people using the Internet had “grown up” with the Internet, were technically minded, and understood the nature of the transport and the protocols. Today, the community of Internet users includes people who are new to the environment. These “Newbies” are unfamiliar with the culture and don’t need to know about transport and protocols.

Hmmm… so there was a point in time when there was nobody new on the internet, was there? That must have been one heck of a change freeze. “Please sir, I’d like to use the internet” “No son, you can’t. It’s full and there won’t be room for anyone new to use it until Spring 1993 at earliest.”

Perhaps the newbies could have told the old fogies of the internet one or two things about other kinds of protocol. For example there is the language convention that says a “newbie” is not a proper name and should not start with a capital letter, or the one that says written language should not contain contractions like “don’t”.

But it is an understatement to say the self-appointed sages of the IETF were poor at predicting the future of propriety. Here are some examples…

Respect the copyright on material that you reproduce. Almost every country has copyright laws.

And every country has millions of people who think those laws are a joke and break them every day.

Never send chain letters via electronic mail. Chain letters are forbidden on the Internet. Your network privileges will be revoked.

Another rule that was completely missed by its intended audience.

Remember that people with whom you communicate are located across the globe. If you send a message to which you want an immediate response, the person receiving it might be at home asleep when it arrives. Give them a chance to wake up, come to work, and login before assuming the mail didn’t arrive or that they don’t care.

And some of those people may not even be Americans and they may not even speak English, which rather dents the usefulness of this Californian clot’s list of internet conventions.

Verify all addresses before initiating long or personal discourse. It’s also a good practice to include the word “Long” in the subject header so the recipient knows the message will take time to read and respond to. Over 100 lines is considered “long”.

Another stipulation that did not catch on. And 100 lines is not considered long by me. For me, 100 lines is considered “brief”. That is because I have more to tell people than my thoughts on what is polite use of the internet. Except for right now, obviously.

It is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material.

Hah. This could only be written by someone who never had to reply to one of my 10,000 line blockbusters.

Since the Internet spans the globe, remember that Information Services might reflect culture and life-style markedly different from your own community. Materials you find offensive may originate in a geography which finds them acceptable. Keep an open mind.

Like how I should keep an open mind when some American tries to dictate what is good manners on the internet.

If a user is using a nickname alias or pseudonym, respect that user’s desire for anonymity.

Tell that to the Chinese government - a good example of a culture unwilling to toe the American line.

Don’t point to other sites without asking first.

Darn! I pointed to this IETF guide before I read it.

Any time you engage in One-to-Many communications, all the rules for mail should also apply. After all, communicating with many people via one mail message or post is quite analogous to communicating with one person with the exception of possibly offending a great many more people than in one-to-one communication. Therefore, it’s quite important to know as much as you can about the audience of your message.

I should get to know the whole world. Nice idea. Difficult in practice.

Don’t badger other users for personal information such as sex, age, or location. After you have built an acquaintance with another user, these questions may be more appropriate, but many people hesitate to give this information to people with whom they are not familiar.

True, but not everyone…

Author’s Address

Sally Hambridge
Intel Corporation
2880 Northwestern Parkway
SC3-15
Santa Clara, CA 95052

Phone: 408-765-2931
Fax: 408-765-3679
EMail: sallyh@ludwig.sc.intel.com

Those were the days… nobody would send you spam because you could rely on everyone to follow the rule that said

Don’t send large amounts of unsolicited information to people.

But enough of pulling apart poor Sally’s guidelines for the Newbies of the ‘Net. Here are five top 21st Century etiquette questions not addressed by Debrett’s, Hambridge, or anyone else that I know of (except they probably have, but who put them in charge?)

1. How To Sign Off an Instant Message Chat With Someone Who Does Not Know When to Stop

You know the scenario. You have chatted away for thirty minutes but your RSI is flaring up and you really really need a pee. So you want to stop but the other person keeps on going…

X: Thanks for the chat, bye.

Y: We need to catch up about that thing. When is good for you?

X: Anytime. Laters.

Y: Cool. Wasn’t Derek impressive giving that presentation?

X: Sure. Got to go.

Y: Yup, see you later. Do you have a copy of Derek’s presentation you can send me?

X: Don’t think so. Sorry. Adios.

Y: It’s been so cool catching up. We should do drinks sometime soon.

X: Yeah, totally. Ciao.

Y: How about tomorrow night?

So by now you have wet your pants and there is no end in sight. What should you do? Is the answer:

(A) Just stop typing. You can always pretend your PC crashed if challenged about it.

(B) Write something shockingly offensive. With luck that will mean one less bozo to annoy you in future.

(C) Call your interlocutor. Chances are he or she is scared of talking on the telephone and they will hang up as soon as possible.

2. What to Do When Your Mobile Phone Battery Dies During a Call

Your loved one is fed up with you because you were once again working late. You are stuck at the platform trying to work out which train is least delayed so you can answer when you will be home for dinner… but before you do, the phone goes dead. That means your better half is bound to assume you just hung up and they will be in a really foul mood when you do eventually make it back. Do you…

(A) Keep pressing your mobile phone’s ‘on’ button in the hope you will have enough juice to text the word “sorry”.

(B) Rummage through your small change and hope there is a payphone within five miles of where you are.

(C) Decide to go down the pub. You might as well take advantage of the fact that the evening will not be interrupted by calls asking where you are.

3. The Blog Comment as Personal Message

Your blog is really popular and gets comments from all sorts of people you do not know. To keep the spam under control, you monitor all comments before they are published. A new comment comes in from someone new. It is not really a comment, but is more of a personal message where the person tells you about themselves and why you should get in touch. How do you respond?

(A) Approve the comment and then post your own comment slagging off anyone who is too stupid or lazy to use the email form in the ‘contact me’ page you went to all that trouble to make.

(B) Reject the comment and do not reply. Whoever it is, he or she must be an idiot.

(C) You have another fan!! Write them a personal email and give them your home phone number too.

4. Dealing With RSS Scoundrels

Your really popular blog is really really popular. It is so popular that some rascal is syndicating your RSS feed and milking your clever content for his own profit. How do you deal with him?

(A) Let him be. It means more people get to enjoy reading your inspiring words.

(B) Switch off the RSS feed. It is yours and nobody can use it without your permission.

(C) Write a script that floods your RSS feed with unfettered and incessant swearing. That will really burn the guy who tried to take advantage of your brilliant material. Sure, it might offend some regular readers, but then again, it will teach them a lesson for not visiting the site properly so they can hit all those click-through ads for matchmaking sites and spread betting.

5. Internet Forum Multi-Answers

You sign up for this great new discussion forum where everyone thinks like you and shares your passions. Then, as always, you realize the forum is full of imbeciles who think the opposite of you and have the world upside-down and back-to-front. You need to straighten them out by showing them the error of their ways. But there are so many different forum users who you need to educate. Should you…

(A) Write a string of posts that individually deal with each and every goof, gaffe and piece of garbage, thus instantly propelling yourself to being the forum’s top poster.

(B) Pick a fight with just the one real idiot so all the other idiots will see how wise you are and start to worship your wisdom.

(C) Post one enormous reply, citing every mistake made by everyone else… and not forgetting to put the word “Long” in the subject heading.

When an accident occurred during an F1 Grand Prix, Murray Walker, the motor racing commentator would sometimes tell the audience “we can’t see what’s happened from where we’re sat.” The reason Walker could not tell who came off at turn 11 of the Hungaroring is that he was in a BBC studio in England, watching the same television pictures as everyone else. Therein lies the irony of sports commentary. The purpose is to tell you what is happening. Apart from when listening on the radio, the same goal can be realized by using your own eyes. But watching television sport without commentary is like watching a modern-day movie made in black and white. Some people will never overcome that gnawing feeling that something is missing.

For the most popular sports, commentary has expanded exponentially. The commentator, once the lynchpin of television sports presentation, is now a bit part player. Time was that you used to only hear commentary, talk about events as they happen. Now every major sport is immersed in talk about what will happen before it does, and talk about why it happened after. Commentary is submerged in punditry. When once a retired footballer would buy a pub and serve stale beer to his hangers-on, he now learns to wear a tie with an enormous knot, gets media training, and reinvents himself as a television personality.

As a consequence of the shift from talking about events as they happen, to just talking, the entrance qualifications for talking about sport have changed. It used to be necessary to be good at talking, specifically at continuously something interesting and coherent in response to changing events. Now, the major qualification is to have once been a sportsperson. The idea is that having been a sportsperson, you have some special insight on the events. That may be true to a point, but most sports people are individuals with exceptional gifts of strength, stamina, speed, balance and agility. That does not mean they have two brain cells to rub together, had the foggiest idea what they were doing, why they were good at it, or the least bit of ability to explain it to others. Thanks to this trend, it is not unusual to hear halftime conversations that go something like the following…

Steve: Gary, do you think the blues will be happy coming in one-nil up?

Gary: Yes, Steve. But they’d have been happier to be two-nil up, no doubt about it.

Steve: It’s been one of those halves where the team on top is the one that takes its chances.

Gary: You’ve got to take your chances when you’re playing at this level. Albion didn’t take their chances. The blues did take their chance. The funny thing was that the lad took what was the hardest of the chances he had, after missing three or four easy ones.

Steve: Once again, it all comes down to taking your chances…

Gary: It does, Steve. And not just chances but half-chances. Sometimes you don’t even get a chance, so you’ve got to take your half-chances too.

Steve: And Albion didn’t make many chances.

Gary: No. To make chances you’ve got to take a chance or two. They’re sending in balls from deep and the defenders will gobble them up all day and night. The blues are working hard and they’re making it hard for Albion and that’s what we saw right from the kick-off, right up to when the ref blew his whistle and they came in for halftime. To be fair to Albion, the blues have played with two solid lines of four in defence and midfield, and they’ve not let Albion have a chance in this game.

Steve: Albion have shown they can make chances in their other games.

Gary: They have, and I’m sure that’s what the gaffer is telling the boys right now. The final ball’s let them down, but with the chances they’ve made in other games, you’ve got to back them to score sooner or later. But at this rate, it might not be today. Saying that, we’ve seen games like this turn in an instant and like the great Brian Clough used to say: it only takes a second to score a goal. Another goal, from either side, will definitely change the game.

Steve: What else do you think the manager’s telling Albion in their halftime talk?

Gary: I think he’s probably saying that there’s no need to panic. They’ve got forty-five minutes to come back. They need to be patient and find a way to inject some more urgency in their passing and overall play. They’ve not been the top team so far, but even the bottom team can be the top team on any given day in this league. We’ve seen it many times before, but I’d be surprised if we see it today. The main thing is they need to score first to get back into the game.

Steve: If they go two down, it’ll be a mountain to climb back.

Gary: That’s right Steve. They’ve done well for a newly-promoted team, but they really need to score first to stand a chance in the second half. If they go two down then you’ve got to think they’re out of it. But with the goalscorers they’ve got, they can never be ruled out completely.

Steve: Is it too soon to make a change?

Gary: I don’t think they need to make a change. The young lad on the wing is causing them problems when he runs at his opposite number. He just needs better delivery into the box. The strikers aren’t getting fed and if you don’t feed them they become invisible. There was a ten minute spell when the guys upfront looked bright and seemed to be getting on the front foot but the rest of the time they’ve not got their foot on the ball and that’s why they can’t get a foothold in this game.

Steve: That’s the game of football for you. Now what about the referee - is he having a good game?

Gary: There’s been some tackles flying in which makes it hard but he’s keeping the game flowing which the fans like to see.

Steve: And the penalty shout?

Gary: Definitely not a penalty. He won the ball cleanly and the lad went over too easy for my liking. If you’re going to criticize the ref you have to question why he didn’t give a yellow card for simulation. This ref never tends to hand out many cards unlike other refs, which I like to see, but makes the players very confused. The players are crying out for more consistency. That’s all that anyone can ask from the men in black. If a player falls that dramatically in the box, and it’s not a penalty, you’ve got to card him. We’ve seen them given in other games and it’s the lack of consistency that makes it hard for players to tell what are the rules on pretending to be fouled in the box. They just want to know what the rules are and if they’re allowed to pretend to be fouled in order to win a penalty decision. The refs really need to sit down together and decide what the rule’s supposed to be so players know where they stand when falling over in the penalty area.

Steve: Do you think they might throw on Hobson, who’s not played for six weeks but is fit enough to sit on the bench?

Gary: Hobson gives them something different. The question is his sharpness. Without playing he won’t be sharp but you don’t get sharp unless you’re playing. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t come on until the last ten minutes, especially if they’re still down.

Steve: And what do you think of the blues’ new signing, the lad Kinzamann from Kaiserslautern?

Gary: He came here with a big reputation but I’m disappointed, to be honest. It looks like he’s struggling to keep up with the pace of an English derby game. This isn’t a derby game but it’s as good as a derby game.

Steve: I think the teams are about thirty-five miles apart. It’s not technically a derby game, but I know what you mean. It’s just like a derby game with everyone running around at a hundred miles an hour. And Albion would only have spent a half hour on the team coach, coming down the motorway this morning.

Gary: There’s a lot of huff and puff. There’s a lot of commitment on show. Typical English game with everyone diving in, hard tackles and no time on the ball. It’s what makes our football so entertaining to watch. Some of these new foreign players struggle to adjust to the pace when they first arrive. But the lad Kinzamann had that moment early on when he showed he’s got some silky skills, so I’m hoping he’ll be better in the second half.

Steve: Would either team be satisfied with a draw?

Gary: I don’t think so. This game’s a six-pointer. If it’s a draw, then the teams only get two points between them and that means they’ve both lost a potential four points. Even at this stage of the season, you can’t afford to drop four points in a single game.

Steve: Every game counts.

Gary: It does. There’s thirty-eight games in a season, not ten games or six games or twelve games but thirty-eight games in a season. And that’s not counting cup competitions. I think they’ll both be glad that they’re not in Europe which would mean even more games.

Steve: This league’s a marathon.

Gary: Exactly. These days, football is literally a marathon. That’s what makes the result in every single game so much more important. That’s why they’re playing this league game like it’s a cup game. In the league what matters is how many games you win and how many you draw. You can’t afford too many loses so you’ve got to aim to win every game, especially these games because you can’t expect to win against the top four. But with the blues at home, they know they’ve got to beat a side like Albion to stay up, and so far they are beating them which is all the fans can ask for.

Steve: The game might be unlocked by that little bit of skill or a mistake in the last ten minutes.

Gary: If the game is still one-nil going into the final ten minutes, then what happens in those ten minutes could definitely change the result in a big way. And then there’s stoppage time too.

Steve: So they’ll both be trying to win.

Gary: I’d bet my shirt on it.

Steve: And it looks like an expensive shirt too.

Gary: [Laughs] Thanks Steve.

It is tempting to denigrate the low end of punditry, but the high end of pre and post match analysis is now supported by an extraordinary array of technology. Pundits like Andy Gray of Sky’s Football coverage, and John Madden when talking about American Football, are now supported by gizmos that make even Bill Gates drool with envy. They have chalkboards, replays, hawkeyes, highlighters, snickometers, speed measurers and even computer simulations to help explain such basic things as how one team managed to score despite the best efforts of the other team to stop them. The investment in technology is so impressive, you have to assume there has been a knock-on stimulus to other sectors, in the same way that the space race resulted in teflon pans and pens that write upside down. Right now you imagine there is an American general somewhere in Afghanistan, marking on a touch sensitive screen the plans for how his team of troopers will make a touchdown run into Al Qaeda’s endzone.

Whilst some pundits have masterful analytical skills of a kind that were sorely lacking at Lehmann Brothers, the average pundit has descended to the level of former sports stars who can be trusted to dress smartly, speak coherently and avoid getting drunk until the show has finished. But then, they did let Gazza have a go at it, so even those expectations are not universal. More and more televised football games has created such a vacuum for former footballers that even Stan Collymore gets to share his insights with the rest of us. If even can talk sense about football, perhaps he should have told himself to score more goals during those long years of underachievement out on the pitch.

Journalists have been frozen out and their skills are no longer needed in front of camera, thanks to the seemingly endless rise of the professional sportsperson and amateur personality. The idea that being good at a sport is correlated to being knowledgeable or understanding a sport is laughable, as demonstrated by the modest playing careers of coaches Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho. That makes no difference to the television producers, who want stars with name recognition. Knowing what you are talking about is a secondary consideration. The problem for the stars is that they must eventually wane, and make room for the more recently retired. Only an organization like the BBC has the charity to keep Garth Crooks in work, and former footballer and pundit Gavin Peacock saw the writing on the wall and decided to pursue a higher calling, studying divinity and training for his new vocation with the church. As they get older, the bigger stars realize that anecdotes about their old sport and old chums tend to age as well as George Best’s liver. Lineker had the sense to diversify the range of sports shows he hosted, and Ian Wright diversified into mainstream light entertainment. Amidst all the hard-headed business nous, there is less of the engaging whimsy and eccentricity that makes Peter Alliss the Wogan of golf or made Murray Walker the Norman Wisdom of motorsports.

Occasionally, though, sheer numbers will deliver an unusual new flavour amidst the rotten apples that dominate punditry. When Mark Lawrenson reformed his double act with Alan Hansen, migrated from the centreback pairing of Anfield to the sofa pairing of Match of the Day, he seemed like Hansen-lite in every respect. Most of the time he made crappy self-indulgent chit chat about historical episodes in his life and those of the fellow players around him. Entertaining this may be, but relevant to presenting sporting highlights, it is not. Lawro’s witticisms were reminiscent of Richard Whiteley on a bad day. But as the anecdotes have run out, a new Lawrenson has emerged so seamlessly that it is impossible to identify where the transition began.

I first noticed the new Lawrenson when he was moved from the comfort of the studio settee to being the live commentary sidekick of John Motson. Normally sidekicks are there to pick up the slack with some knowing insights when the principal commenter needs a respite or someone to bounce off, or when the action lulls. They barely need to watch the game, and only need to come out with all those staple clichés that can only be excused because the former player has been there and done that. Lawrenson’s approach was radically different. He watched the game and talked about it. And he really did watch it. Whilst the normal viewer is befuddled why Motson is clueless about the events on the pitch (’the ref’s blown the whistle, I’m not sure what for…’) Lawrenson would know perfectly what was going on (’the ball flicked up off the midfielder’s heel and it struck the right back on the hand’). On top that, after all the lazy self-indulgent matey chat in the studio, putting Lawrenson next to Motson, and making Lawro talk about real events in a crisp manner as they unfold, has revealed a command of language at least the equal of the Scouse defender’s command of the offside trap. Lawro not only knows what the word ‘perfunctory’ means, something that cannot be said of many professional and university-educated people, but he is unafraid to use it. On returning to the sofa, Lawrenson has now cut the smalltalk, let the vocabulary off the leash, and found the way to weld information to entertainment. At one time, Lawrenson made even Ian Wright seem profound. Lawrenson is now the Hemmingway of pundits, except with added quips. Which goes to show that sports punditry, like so many other things, can sometimes be a game of two halves.

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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…

When the US was a young nation, it was greedy to learn and to grow. A good example is Benjamin Franklin a famous polymath who experimented with electricity amongst other things. Benjamin Franklin was an innovator, but he also engaged in piracy. Franklin, like others, republished the works of 18th century British authors without giving them any reward in exchange for copying their words. As early as 1808, the poet William Wordsworth complained about exploitation and argued for copyright to be extended. The most popular novelist of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens, lobbied Congress during his North American speaking tours, protesting that the copyright of British authors should be recognized in the US. His pleas fell on deaf ears. America needed the wealth of new ideas and lacked libraries. For Americans to benefit from education and entertainment, so the argument went, necessitated cutting costs, and that meant not rewarding the British authors who should be satisfied with the rewards received elsewhere. And was not the success of Dickens’ tours a real demonstration that piracy helped authors, rather than hindering them? The argument went on to assert that Dickens benefited most from the enhancement of his reputation gained by the wide circulation of his work. Whether Dickens thought so or not, the Americans had decided this was worth more than profiting from the sale of fewer books bearing his name. Does that sound familiar? It should, because we hear the same debate today. The difference is that the tables have turned and now the US, like the other countries that have hoarded intellectual wealth, is concerned that its valuable copyrights are exploited by the greedy, growing, countries of the developing world.

Whilst the struggle for copyright is sometimes seen as a battle between nations, it is also a battle of will within national borders. The emergence of a political movement in European countries, the Pirate Party movement, tells us something about the strength of feeling across an increasingly polarized debate. Businesses pursue stringent fines for P2P filesharers. Governments enforce stricter laws to protect copyright. Citizens respond by forming new political parties and canvassing for votes. There is a Pirate Party in the US too, though the nature of American democracy makes it very unlikely they will break through and raise the profile of copyright reform. The frontline of the US copyright debate is the courtroom, not the ballot box. In contrast, the very existence of electoral alternatives has enabled European parties to secure valuable attention in mainstream media. In only the first month since being launched, the Pirate Party UK has secured room for the debate about copyright reform in every quality British newspaper, on television and radio, and of course all over the internet. All of this is encouraging for a party that wants people to freely exchange their thoughts, and is a signal that even in rich countries, many see the appeal of less stringent copyright.

The counterargument to copyright reform is that there will be losers. The losers are supposed to be those who create, or the losers will be all of us. The conclusion is that either the creators receive lesser rewards for their work, and so they will be poorer, or the creators will simply create less and will do other jobs instead, leaving us all poorer. But Dickens did not stop writing because of American exploitation of his words. If anything, he was inspired by it - inspired to respond via Martin Chuzzlewit. The same internet that enables instantaneous and mass duplication of copyright works has transformed many other markets. The internet enables middlemen to be stripped out of supply and distribution, and the benefits are passed on to the consumer through lower costs. Take this to its logical limit and you do end up with an extreme - the same extreme as Benjamin Franklin not sharing the profits from the works he pirated. But far from ending creation, piracy simply changes the market dynamics. One source of revenue is closed, not all sources. Dickens made money by speaking. Musicians can make money from live performances or merchandise. The copyrighted content stops being a marketable product and instead becomes the fulcrum for a kind of marketing. This marketing is all the more powerful because it is spread from individual to individual, and cannot be manipulated by business interests. In other words, people promote the content they like, not the content they are told to like, and all studies show that we trust the recommendations of friends and ordinary folks far more than we trust celebrity endorsements and slick corporate promotion. The evidence is that this peer-to-peer advertising is effective in creating new revenues. This is a threat to the jobs of some middlemen, who are paid to influence the market, but is a boon to consumers and puts market power and intelligence back into the hands of the people who should be dictating what is popular and what is not. The significance of the advertising effect of free content is demonstrated by the observed correlation that the most prolific downloaders of pirated content also spend the most to legitimately buy content.

With a marketplace in rapid transition, it can be hard to identify all the factors that cause it to happen. The digital marketplace for copyrighted content does more than increase the potential to freely copy works that were originally created with profit in mind. It also reduces barriers to entry. It reduces them so far, that, at the extreme, the marketplace collapses. People just give and take freely. This has been observed already with open source software. We see it with the rise in so-called ‘user-generated content’ on sites like YouTube. ‘User-generated’ is a euphemism for ‘not to be taken seriously because it does not have a big budget’. Thanks to the democratizing effect of other technological improvements, married to the free distribution mechanism of the internet, then all it takes to create a popular song is to possess a guitar and a microphone, without the need for a marketing budget. Beneath the veil of piracy, the real factor that drives down prices is the proliferation of competition, from small business, from micro business, from hobbyists and people who create for the pleasure of friends.

Resetting the marketplace so that many can produce for many will diminish some business models. It also creates new ones. If you cannot profit by controlling a much-sought copy of one work, perhaps you can profit by using the work to attract people to other goods and services, or by embedding the work within another product. The music industry has recognized this, and now seeks to make more from new activities like selling t-shirts with lyrics written on them. This is innovation in the true sense - instead of just creating variations on an established theme, the goal is to develop genuinely new kinds of products.

Supply and demand suggests that the money saved on certain kinds of products just gets spent on others. This is the basis of the real value proposition for any economy. Either it remains stagnant, and tries to protect existing business models, or it is open to change and incubates new business models. Copyright was created for an old business model, and not a very good one at that. Technology has moved on from the time when printing presses were expensive and distribution of content was physical. Many of us may love Mickey Mouse, but perpetually extending Disney’s copyright stifles creation instead of encouraging it. Nobody wants to see some poor session musician struggling to fight poverty in his old age, but that is no reason to rewrite the contract he agreed when he first did some work. We would not go back to a plumber, fifty years after he does a job, and agree to pay him more than was originally stipulated for the original job, just because we feel sorry for him. Let charity be charity and business be business, without confusing the two. If we do confuse the two, we are likely to forget that expenditure on entertainment is discretionary, meaning that if more goes to Disney’s millionaire execs, or to some poor old session musician, less will go to anyone new who wants to break into the market.

Governments that try to preserve existing business models by defending copyright are missing the point. Creative people now have few barriers of entry to a huge potential market. Artists will simply short-circuit big businesses, by selling direct to the consumer in the same way that insurance brokers were frozen out by the rise in direct sales of insurance policies. Some will give work away just to get the foothold of recognition. Unhappy that your publisher does not promote your work? Then give it away and bet that the audience will see talent where the publisher does not. Giving his work away made Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho successful. At the same time, discretionary spend on entertainment and education will still be spent on education and entertainment. That means new markets open up as others close. If people can get recorded music for free, then they have more money to spend on live performances. Or if they want something to enjoy at home, consumers will shift their spending from music to other content like video games, and this research suggests that is just what people have been doing. Seen in that context, it makes perfect sense for music businesses to change tack; if they cannot sell direct to the consumer, sell to the people who make games instead. This is innovation, and it is good for customers, even if painful for those businesses that lack the imagination or agility to keep pace with change.

Nations that have been great innovators face a risk. They have built up intangible wealth that will tempt some to simply sit back and exploit, instead of creating anew. To do so would be the worst mistake possible for the economy of not only rich nations, but of the world. Innovation, experimentation, change - these are the ways to keep on creating world-beating formulas. Monopolies of ideas are profitable only for those that control them. That means monopolies should not be allowed to live on longer than fairly required to recoup the initial investment that was needed to turn the idea into a reality. Money spent on enforcing and maintaining those monopolies for longer than needed is money not spent on developing alternative products. New capabilities inevitably give rise to new markets and these are the real and pervasive threat to old monopolies. The iPod allowed people to listen to as much music as they like, wherever they like, but it also gave birth to podcasting and a new world of creative opportunity. Listening to a free podcast means less time to listen to an album of music that you pay for. Sales of volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica collapsed in the face of rivals sold on CD-ROMs, and Wikipedia begs the question of why anyone should pay for reference texts. News services are happy to reuse the amateur’s view of major events, in the form of bystander photographs and videos, tweets and commentary from blogs. Such amateur content squeezes the market for professionals, but that does not mean amateur content should be prohibited or limited, or that the reader or viewer would be better informed by content that only came from professional sources.

Rich countries, like the US, got ahead by creating new ideas, not by just by exploiting them. And every nation has been greedy enough to exploit the ideas of others - when it suited them. Now, more than ever, piracy and the dissolution of barriers to entry mean new ideas have to be imagined and delivered at ever greater speed. You can try to slow the progress of competitors, but if that is all you do, they will still overtake you soon enough. Nations rich in intellectual capital should avoid the temptation to pour more and more resources into protecting its current intellectual assets. Intellectual assets only retain value if rivals lack the imagination to make something better. In a world where ideas are spread ever more easily, the dominance of a good idea will be shorter and shorter. The cleverest nations should stick to what they do best - investing in creating the future. If that means encouraging the next generation of Benjamin Franklins, that can only be a good thing.

Technology is an amazing thing. It makes you think. I do not mean it makes you think about how things work, though it does that too. It makes you think about things you take for granted. It challenges your assumptions about what is in the world, how the world works, and what makes for a good life. Take abortion and care for babies born prematurely. Better technology to sustain young life begs the question of when life begins. Take cloning and human rights. Manufacturing life will challenge our perceptions as to the rights of the individual. Take fertility treatment and increasingly older mothers, or the potential for families where one or other biological parent was never intended to be part of the family unit. This erodes our assumptions about what the family is for. The example I want to talk about today, but is not being looked at clearly, even though it is perhaps the most common example of how technology has outstripped our intellectual and ethical worldviews. Millions of people, all over the world, share digital files that contain copyrighted content. Yet there is no grown-up debate about the fundamental questions about the extent to which this is a good thing, or a bad thing. I will avoid promising to give a definitive answer, but I will outline what the problem is.

Here is the nub of the philosophical problem that underpins filesharing. If I lend a book to a friend, I may be depriving the copyright holder of the potential to make money from selling that book. If I invite a friend to my house, so he can watch a football match on satellite TV, a match he could not watch at home, I may be depriving the owner of the content some potential to make money from selling the broadcast. Every day, for hundreds of years, people have done things that may, potentially, reduce the revenues earned by the owners of content rights. However, we have long considered these actions to be moral and virtuous. When the owners of great houses allowed the local community to use their private libraries, this was considered a civilized act of charity, not an attempt to deprive publishers of income.

We know that technology has changed the potential to share, most importantly because the content is now divorced from any physical medium. The analogy of stealing is false. Thieves do not break into your house and copy your jewellery, leaving the originals behind. They take something from you. Filesharers, on the other hand, do not take. They make a copy. The truth is that now people are prepared to share far more widely, with complete strangers, because it costs them nothing to do so. However, the act of sharing would be identical if it was sharing an entire music library with a complete stranger on the other side of the planet, or sharing a single e-book with a next-door neighbour. The technological and legal aspects are the same. All that differs is the range and scale of the impact. We can understand that we live in a society that thinks it is wrong to share a music library with a complete stranger on the other side of the planet, but believes it is good that we share a book with a neighbour. The polarized debate about right versus wrong simply ignores the fundamental issue: that legislators have proven incapable and unwilling to creative a framework that reconciles and accommodates both extremes. No government anywhere has been able to coherently adjust laws to allow for the act we generally consider virtuous whilst prohibiting those thought to be harmful. The result is a terrible fudge. All sharing is a violation of civil law, including sharing an ebook with a neighbour. However, some actions are ‘decriminalized’ not because of a choice of the state, but by a reliance on the copyright holder’s goodwill and lack of interest in pursuing damages. This leads to a new and intolerable conflict within our legal and ethical outlooks.

This is as a problem for all political parties around the world, because no party has been able to form and articulate a coherent position that explains why denying a copyright holder the potential to earn revenue is considered to be virtuous in some cases, evil in others. Technology has moved the debate forward, but our understanding of how to live in a civil society has not. With an issue like this, there is a natural tendency towards petty party political squabbling and points-scoring. There is a fear of dealing with this issue head-on with the hope of resolving it. Burying the topic in overly simplistic maxims about right versus wrong is much easier than risking the unpopularity that comes with thoughtful attempts to find workable compromises. I believe the popularity of the Pirate Party movement around the world stems from the failure to address the fundamental paradox that we consider sharing to be virtuous whilst denying others an income is wrong. The problem has been there for a long time, and articulating the problem has kindled the interest of many people who were already aware of it in one guise or other. There may never be a perfect solution, but a mature political party that tries to explore workable compromises will be doing everyone a favour, and earning themselves credit in the process.