More on A Quick Heads Up

I've been simmering over this one for a while now - unfortunately my hands are tied. TFL inform me 95% of all people entering the congestion charge zone have their vehicle registration numbers recognised by the cameras. This means that either:

a. They are a terribly efficient organisation making the best use of modern technology.

b. They are lying scumbags who don’t give a monkeys about the Freedom of Information Act

And unfortunately that’s all I can say unless somebody who knows better and has access to the data is prepared to stick his or her neck out.

More on Free Beer

I've been canvassing my MEPs:

Dear MEPs,
I’m sure you are inundated by emails, so I will keep this as brief as possible. I’m writing because you represent me as Londoner, and as a businessman.
The European Commission has proposed to extend the term of copyright in sound recordings. While this move claims to be of benefit to performers, the truth is that these properties are more often owned by corporations, and the trend is that in the future these rights will be treated increasingly as traded commodities.
The value of these commodities means that there are strongly vested interests in this extension for very good commercial reasons, and these interests are lobbying hard to attain this extension for the same commercial reasons.
The counter view is of course coming from individuals like myself who believe our arguments are not being heard, as well as organisations such as ORG in the UK and the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property Law in Munich. The arguments are many, but I would like to focus on the commercial value of the residual copyright. The 45 year extension period has a quantifiable value. At present that ‘value’ is owned by us, the public. Why should this asset be given away to a small special interest group at the expense of the general public?
If Sony BMG asked you very nicely as MEPs to sign over my personal car to them, and you legislated to make this possible I would not vote for you. I might even drop by in person to explain just what I thought of you. Why then, should my right to listen to royalty free music be any different? It’s ours. Please keep it that way.

Best regards,

--------------

Anyhoo - a couple of interesting responses - Gerard Batten (UKIP) is supporting our cause, but Syed Kamall (Cons) replied with a copy of one of David Cameron’s speeches which left me wondering just how large a bung the conservatives have received from the lobby groups. I thought democracy was about upholding the rights of the people not selling them out – if this position was widely know pretty much anybody who owns an MP3 player would refuse to vote conservative. I replied:

Syed,

Thank you for getting back to me, and the speech was certainly interesting to read. Unfortunately these arguments bear all the hallmarks of coming strength from a BPI briefing document – they certainly ignore the wider arguments as well as almost all studies bar one done in this field in the last five years (and that one was commissioned by the BPI).

The argument that this is a move will counter the effects of music piracy is particularly interesting – this is a matter that has been much discussed in the music rights arena and the consensus is that any copyright extension will erode the respect of the public for intellectual property rights generally.

I hope you don’t mind if I attach a short briefing document setting out the arguments, as well as providing a more comprehensive set of references than David Cameron is likely to have received from the BPI.

Best regards,

----------------------

We (that is the ORG staffers) are going to be following this up with meetings in Brussels in the hope that we can somehow overturn this juggernaut before it all goes tits-up.

A Quick Heads Up

Here's somthing I fired off a while ago. We'll come back to this later...

From: Me
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 2:59 PM
To: 'enquire@tfl.gov.uk'; 'londonstreets@tfl.gov.uk'
Subject: Request under the Freedom of information act

Congestion Charge Number Plate Recognition

I would like to know what percentage of vehicles entering the congestion charge zone have their vehicle registration numbers recognised by the cameras.

Please advise me if you are able to provide this information in response to an email request, or else advise me of the address to which I should direct a written enquiry.

Free Beer

Free beer was one of those great campaigning platforms when I was a student. We loved it, but we also knew that it wasn’t real. There is no free beer because free beer is against the fundamental physics of both business and economics. Until now.

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2008/07/22/copyright-extension-what-you-can-do/

In a nutshell, music copyright which used to expire after 50 years is to be extended to 95 years by the European Parliament.

There are few issues that presently get my hackles up in the way that copyright extension does. Once again a special interest group seems to have lobbied its way into a ridiculous windfall at our expense. Don’t for a moment imagine that this is anything that benefits the artist. Most of them have long since sold their rights to that obscene body of companies that represent the recording industry. Here are my personal favourite counter arguments.

1. The period up to the end of the current 50 year limit has what in licensing terms is called a residual value. Note that word. Value. It therefore follows that there is a value in the 50-95 year period as well. And since the record companies didn’t pay for that period, the copyright, and its value as a property, should revert to the original creator.

2. As it stands the Value I talked about above is ours, the public. If the record companies want it they should pay for it. I don’t expect my elected representatives to give my rights away (though I’m rarely surprised when they do)

Here’s a simple question. If copyright was reduced from 50 years to 45 years would the stakeholders expect compensation for those 5 year? Of course they would. So why do they expect to get 45 years for free?

TV Licensing Office Given Powers of Search at UK Airports

The G8 governments are considering allowing the BBC to go up your bottom with a torch to check for unlicensed television equipment. No Really.

OK – maybe not, but I can’t see why they shouldn’t, given that they are discussing granting another far more commercial group of multinationals the benefits of similar powers of search

If I were paranoid I would assume this was just a plot to raise my blood pressure to intolerable levels (and just because you're paranoid doesn’t mean they AREN’T out to get you).

I do not pay taxes so that my government can pay for staff and equipment to pander to the whims of special interest group, especially one with a standpoint that I find particularly offensive. How in the hell did the RIAA get one step ahead of Homeland Security when it comes to depriving people of their civil liberties (or diginity for that matter) .

All together now:

I DO NOT REMEMBER VOTING FOR A RECORD COMPANY .

If anybody actually reads this please do something useful with this link

Who Says Crime Doesn't Pay?

A work experience sixth-former who stole thousands from one of the world's top international law firms has been jailed for five months.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2270314/Work-experience-girl-jailed-for-stealing-thousands.html

So let’s do the arithmetic. Five months, out in three. That’s the annualised equivalent of £54,000, which is the equivalent of a gross salary of just under £80,000. That’s about what a Chief Superintendent in the Metropolitan Police gets.

Personally I think she ought to be strapped to a thorn bush and whipped until she tells them where the money is, but then that’s probably just the liberal in me speaking out.

Viacom want what?

Now I'm really angry:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/07/court-ruling-will-expose-viewing-habits-youtube-us

and

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/07/viacoms-statement-youtube-user-data-controversy

Just what do they think they are doing? This is a clear case of a pathetic special interest group pissing all over our right to privacy regardless of any evidence of a crime having been committed.

Standing up to Big Business is hard because they have a lot of money to piss away, so in the Zen book of war the first step is to turn the Big Company into a small company. Boycott away....

http://www.mcvuk.com/interviews/229/Whats-Viacoms-game

Viacom own:

Film: Viacom International, Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks, Republic Pictures, MTV Films, Nickelodeon Movies, Go Fish Pictures

Television: Comedy Central, Logo, BET, Spike, TV Land, Nick at Nite, Nickelodeon, Noggin, The N, Nick Jr TEENick, MTV, VH1, MTV2, CMT, MHD

Video Games: Xfire, Harmonix, GameTrailers, Neopets, Shockwave

I've removed Xfire already, and I'm buggered if I'm watching any of their channels or film releases any time soon.

Viacom - screw you.

Democrat donkey with a capital M

This Japanese advert is attracting a lot of attention as some people assume it's targeting Obama:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si-lSLv9b4E

Surely the racist ones are the people who:

a. Infer that any monkey is automatically representative of Africa Americans, and;

b. Are completely ignorant of the cultures and social mores of nation from which the ad comes.

The Japanese Macaque is hugely popular in Japan (though maybe not with the local farmers) and is a generally very nice primate to be around. If the odd American thinks that this (brown haired, pink faced) primate looks like a black man then maybe it’s another case of the US templating its own set of values on another very different culture. Perhaps they should invade.

Not his fault, apparently

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2152671/Grieving-father-attacks-canoe-hire-business.html

We can all feel for this poor guy, but that’s no excuse for his idiotic remarks being given a national platform.

He was the one who decided to hire the canoes, he was the one who knew how much experience he and his children had. But now it’s the people who hired him the equipment who are responsible fro this tradegy. However much he’s grieving, in the long term surely it would be better for him to accept responsibility for his own poor judgment now, rather than live in denial of his guilt forever

Scum of The Earth

When I was an IT contractor we regarded recruitment agents as slightly below pond life on the evolutionary scale. They were totally without encumbrances that hold the rest of us back. I'm talking about things like honesty, morality, and the like. I’m sure there were some nice ones about, but I never met them.

Now I’m recruiting for a new techie, and despite my best efforts I am getting spam from the scum, so I’ve drafted a standard reply as follows:

THIS IS A STANDARD REPLY.

You have sent an unsolicited email in response to a gumtree posting clearly marked with the following :

“Anti spam: Do NOT contact me offering services or anything of a commercial nature.”

As you have chosen to ignore this instruction your email domain has now been flagged as a spamming domain, and may be added to a number of blacklists. Once a domain is listed on a blacklist you may find that email is not being received across a wide range of organisations.

To resolve this your mail administrator will be required to contact any list administrators to request that the domain be removed from any blacklists, and will be required to give assurances that unsolicited email is no longer being sent from this domain.

PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL AS FURTHER EMAILS FROM YOUR EMAIL DOMAIN WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED

The wording is careful - I’m not actually going to the trouble of blacklisting domains, and this won’t stop other agencies from wasting my time, but it sure feels good when I hit the REPLY button.

Here's One I Prepared Earlier

Please excuse the length - I dictated this Using Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 so it’s more verbose that normal – but my is it soooo much easier to rant verbally….

I’m posting this now because I didn’t before – mostly lethargy, but also an urge to wait and see what happened. And the answer is… Nothing. FSB never replied to two emails, British Gas have lost my account it would seem, and have never event sent me a reminder. And so due to glorious inefficiency all round, I emerge victorious. Will the last person competent enough to do so please turn of the lights….

---------------------------------------------------

When I took on the lease of our new shop in the beginning of June I initially tried, admittedly not very hard, to find out who our utility providers were. These days this is a less than simple task, and it was only a month or so later when I had a little more time to dedicate to this task that I was able to find that British Gas were supplying both gas and electricity to the property. When I phoned up to get the bill transferred into my company's name we began to discuss rates. It works slightly differently when you’re a business, and you seem to have a little more negotiating power about the rates and standing charges that you're going to pay, however until you have agreed a contract with your gas supplier you are put on a ‘special’ rate, for which you may read punitive rate.

British Gas, when I pointed this out to them, said they would quite happily backdate the tariffs they were offering to the date of my taking over the property, but I had two objections to this. Firstly it is an overt form of blackmail. I do not like having my decisions affected in this way, and given that British Gas were not the most competitive suppliers, I would have had good reason not to choose them anyway. I refuse to be subjected to what I considered to be a shoddy practice, and contacted NPower who were offering a more competitive tariff are both gas and electricity supplies.

For those who don't know how these things work, the process of changing supplier takes some six to eight weeks, during which time you have to pay whatever special tariff the old supplier chooses to apply to your account. It was about nine weeks later that British Gas sent me a bill based upon this punitive tariff which firstly quoted a wholly unrealistic estimated electricity reading, and also made no reference to the fact that they were no longer providing the supply to my property (specifically they were charging for dates after NPower had taken over the supply). This was very much a case of showing a red rag to a bull, and in very short order I had made my feelings on the matter cleared to British Gas, and had also spoken to NPower who confirmed that they had informed British Gas of the date of their taking over the supply, including the meter reading.

British Gas had not acted on this information, and clearly made no note of the reading (hence their ludicrous estimate) and more importantly when I told them to sort out their own mess, they told me to contact NPower and get it sorted out from their side (though after a few short words they did agree to change their records without placing any more obstacles in my away)

Let's look at specific numbers to get a little bit of an idea about why I'm getting upset with British Gas...

Firstly will deal with the estimate of 3485 units used between the 8th June and 1st October. The actual reading, which is about half of this, reflects the fact that we are running two servers and half a dozen computers at any one time as well as lighting our office for about 10 hours a day. The previous occupants used practically no electronic equipment and therefore used a fraction of what we are using, so this is clearly a cavalier attempt on the part of British Gas to frontload their cash flow. Then come the tariffs British Gas 13p per kilowatt; NPower 8.26p. Standing charge: British Gas £133 per quarter approximately; NPower £16.24 per quarter. In other words the unit charge is twice as much and the standing charge about eight times as much with British Gas.

This is simply not fair, and I don't like things that aren't fair. The important point to note is that whatever my statutory obligations, I do not have a contract with British Gas, or at least not one I have signed or agreed to. Were it a case of 10 or 20% extra to pay then I might stomach this, but given that I'm being screwed I'm going to put up a fight. At the moment I’ve raised the matter with the Federation of Small Businesses, of which we are a member, and through them will raise the matter with Energy Watch, the ombudsman.

By An Amazing Coincidence....

...I get a call from TV licensing. Thinking they've received my letter (see last blog entry, which was still waiting to go out with this evening's post) we begin at cross purposes. Then in one of those all-too-rare moments I have a lucid conversation with somebody helpful.

I can, it turns out, send in my refund application which is now downloadable from http://tvlicensing.metafaq.com/resources/tvlicensing/licensingInfo/Refund and the kind lady even gives me the license number and expiry date which I need as I no longer have the original.

So now I’ll post that off with a final bill from my old address and see what happens….

Difficult by Design

The Refund Centre
P.O Box 410
Bristol
BS99 5HP

30 May 2008

<snip>

28 Jan 2008

Dear Sirs,

Request for refund of license.

I am applying for a license fee refund as I have moved into my Girlfriend’s house (address above), and she already has a license. I surrendered my lease on my previous home on 19 October 2007, but was unable to locate my license certificate until last weekend when it surprised me by falling out of a book.

I enclose my final gas bill to prove the date of termination, and confirm that the information I have given is correct and that the licence will not be required between 19 October 2007 and the date the licence expires.

Yours faithfully,

<-snip>


Well, that’s how it started out – a simple request by letter as erroneously directed by your department, scuppered only by the need for an obscure form that had to be sent to me, rather than downloaded as that would have made it just too accessible.

So said form was duly sent out, arriving eventually at the address which I had of course left months previously. Now that it’s finally reached me four months later I have mislaid the original TV license and according to the form you will not entertain my claim without it, despite the fact that it will be recorded in full on your database.

May I take this opportunity to congratulate you on a superlatively bureaucratic and obstructive system which has in this case worked to your financial advantage, though I can’t give you the exact figure as you have all the information, as well as my money. I will not now be arguing in favour of TV licensing in future.

Yours faithfully





Peter