The Eastern Horizon

The decision of the RIAA/MPAA to collude with ISPs to monitor their own customers for alleged incidences of piracy, apparently without legal entitlement, merely serves to confirm what some of us had suspected all along – that they are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and don't know how to handle it.

My attention was drawn to this by Thom Holwerda at his news blog, http://www.osnews.com/ this week – it seems that certain parties in the US feel that they have to go outside the law and essentially invade the privacy of their own customers (or, let's also bear in mind, potential customers), as detailed at http://www.osnews.com/story/25647/US_ISPs_to_launch_massive_copyright_spying_scheme_July_12, and the link therein to http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/03/15/american-isps-to-launch-massive-copyright-spying-scheme-on-july-12/.

Now recently I have been thinking about something that is weird. And it relates to my downloading activities. When I first came to Korea, I had no cable Internet and spiffing, modern 64-bit free OSes like I have now. I was spending at least ten per cent. of my salary each month just on nights spent in unhealthy, smoky PC-bangs in Bonggok-dong in Changwon, full of online gamblers and irritating little schoolboys playing the likes of "StarCraft".

This situation continued until – close to the end of that year – my Boss, Mr. Lee, asked me what my plans were and whether I would like to stay. After I answered in the affirmative, we made arrangements for signing a new year's contract. Later, I suddenly realised that it was time to get back online, and as I had previously been commuting daily, by bus, between my meagre apartment and the original hagwon in Sodab-dong (where I started working after departing from my ill-fated attempt to start a new career in Taiwan), I knew where the local Hanafos offices were and simply walked in and signed up for their (at the time) most expensive, highest-speed service. In fact, I had known about all of this before even leaving the UK, because Korea had been a major and likely option after the Shibuya contract fell through; I was very thorough in my research, of course.

This was after I had a confab with the owner of my regular PC-bang and (with the assistance of an online translator I had discovered previously) ordered the parts to build a new PC from a wholesaler in Seoul, and they arrived three days later. I went to the PC-room and he helped me get it all home in his car; you couldn't fault the guy for his service! I put the thing together in a couple of hours before leaving for work on a Wednesday afternoon and it was working fine up to POST (I actually did an ICS course in PC Repair and Maintenance about the time I went to work for the MoD in Wales in 1998, and it turned out to be a great investment), and left it at that, as I was waiting for a copy of XP Pro that I had ordered from a local high street electronics outlet (they never actually kept any in stock . . . how outlets are fallen these days!!!).

As it happened, it was not until that Friday that the XP disk arrived, and so I had to install the OS and all the other software (this was prior to SP3) in something of a hurry after work that day, because the installation engineer from Hanafos was due that Saturday morning.

Anyway . . . it is now 2012, and back in July 2004, when I first got online, I wanted to download anything I possibly could – audio, video, you name it – and stored stuff on CDs, which actually limited the size of files I could save. But here's the thing: after a few years, I started to notice that I was disinclined to download very much; my interests were limited to a few certain films or old TV shows, or certain works by composers or modern musicians rather than others. As an analogy, think of all the unwanted tracks you have even on your most loved album – why pay for filler when you only want the nuggets?

Or I could just go out and buy the DVD! The kind of thing I would like to buy – for example, the twin-DVD "Enter the Dragon" set – I was eventually to buy because it was found by me in a local E-Mart for sale at a reduction (about £4.50 in real money), and purchased it with a copy of "City Heat", which I still haven't seen! And by this time I had downloaded (and lost) the main file several times due to inexperience with Linux . . . but my basic point is that given all the vast choice of stuff available for download on the Internet, I never obtained very much using this method. This is because I tended to focus on a relatively narrow range of media, and music purchased on CDs, for example, I would rip to my hard drive anyway for transfer to whatever media player I was carrying around with me . . . can you believe that my first mp3 player had only half a gigabyte of memory? And it still works, all these years later . . .

The central problem is that Hollywood in particular is in conspicuous decline. It cannot be taken seriously any more, simply because it cannot come up with any new ideas, either for story lines, plotting or even characters. In the last few years it has instead focused on sequels, prequels and re-hashes, for example "Starsky and Hutch" (and I never really found the original all that interesting), and the more recent CGI version of "Tintin". CGI is an absolute curse, but then, most Hollywood actors are like gate posts warmed up, they are legendary in their inability to "emote", and Hollywood is also no less afflicted with "political correctness" than any other American institution, so that both stories and possible themes are increasingly vapid and unreal.

Then there is the question of distribution and payment. Anyone with a modicum of common sense would think that the ability to have customers download, mainly at their own expense, media which they want and receive a substantial income stream for it, would be seen as a goldmine by the so-called "content creators". Alas, no: still wedded to a business model stuck somewhere in the early twentieth century, they have tried to extract too much wealth from their customers, not understanding that the transition from an actual film – or even a video tape or DVD – to purely electronic form, an *.avi file for example, means that production costs per unit are virtually zero, and the customers know this. People aren't stoopid, dude! So the originators are onto a loser. It's not a question of "competing with free"; your product no longer has any real value which can result in justified expenditure.

Payment, of course, is also remote and electronic, and this is another "Achilles Heel" for the originators. After all, how can they take payment for a product from customers who do not have, say, a credit card or debit card which allows them to do so internationally? The whole idea falls apart here, and perhaps what we are really seeing is the practical limit of Western-style commerce.

Finally, their preferred platform, Windows, has also been in decline for some time. I myself made the transition first to Mandrake/Mandriva Linux, and now I am using its recent fork, Mageia, and I have never been happier. And the main difference between the Windows/Apple ecosystem and that of Linux is that in the main, every distribution comes with media players and CODECs already in place; commercial products are not actually unwelcome, but there are plenty of very good apps which are part of the base installation. Other platforms do not suffer from repeated and terminal infections from spyware, malware, Trojans, worms and viruses; and the "content creators" cannot control something with DRM like they do on Windows because they are prevented from doing so by the GPL.

The prevalence of Windows as a preferred platform, for a variety of reasons, also effectively freezes out potential customers who . . . hate Windows. I have used it since the 3.0 days, and it has always been a pig. The transition to 32-bit architecture really led to no real improvement, and as for commercial wares, apart from firewall/AV solutions like Trend Micro, plus other utilities like Acronis Disk Director, most of what I wanted could be done using free software – even emerging office suites, way before Open Office became a force to be reckoned with. Especially nowadays, who on Earth would want to spend money on an operating system, something which should really be running in the background, when free alternatives are available? My own experience here provides the answer – either there is something perceived as a very good combination of hardware and software, like the rise of Apple after the return of the late Steve Jobs, or it is there because of legacies – the business's fear of moving away from MS Office, for example, or old software that can only be run in a "certain" environment. It is illustrative that I only have copies of XP here for what is really "legacy" software and things which cannot be run under Mageia/Mandriva, for example my old webcam for Skype and other chat engines, or Windows only software such as the free Formtec Design Pro, used for designing things like business cards. In other words . . . apps with purely minor usage and limited usefulness.

I run both my humongous Epson Stylus Photo 1390 and my new CanoScan LIDE 110 flat-bed scanner directly and without problems on both of my machines using free software on Mageia – indeed, it was this latter which pushed me towards the new OS, as the existing Mandriva installation did not have the latest drivers for this device and the newer version, which I had installed on the laptop, had caused me some dismay, especially with the mandatory ROSA interface, which I quickly removed. I do purchase proprietary software as and when I need it – for example, SoftMaker Office from Germany, which is perfect for handling MS Office files under Mageia – but many of the tasks I need to do I can in fact satisfy using virtually only some app under the KDE desktop system. So Windows is also now irrelevant.

This seems to be a recurring theme – former giants now on their back heels because of changing times and technologies, trying to maintain monopolies using old-fashioned business models, who can pay for new Draconian laws to apply to their own customers, but whose days are now seriously numbered – undesirable, dull and overpriced products, conspicuous and egregious corporate greed, as well as dissatisfied and indeed increasingly disenfranchised customers, mean basically that the end is near, but personally, they fail to get my dollars out of my pocket simply because (a) their products are not interesting, (b) my tastes are limited and (c) in terms of product quality – you can't fault the good old days, when they had real actors and real drama. You can't get that using plasticky CGI.

So I voted with my wallet. :yes: