There are a number of defenses used for downloading pirated music.  Music prices are too high. Artists don’t see the money anyway. I hate the music industry. But here’s one I didn’t think of – “I didn’t know there were legal alternatives”.

Consumer Focus, the UK government-backed watchdog, sees legal online music as the best way to tackle online copyright infringement. Okay – so far so good. It then goes on to criticise the music industry for failing to promote the many legal alternatives. 

Eh?

It said four out of ten people in their survey couldn’t name a single online music service at all – despite their being 20 of them. I’m going to go out on a limb and say those 40% aren’t the ones downloading music. They’re the 40% who struggle to operate a computer beyond the things their kids have shown them how to do – for the 5th time – this week.

They found that 90% of the 60% who did know about legal online music could only name iTunes and Amazon. How many legal alternatives do you need before you use them?  3? 4? 10? Surely you need only one decent option?

In New Zealand, the music industry has been trying to promote legit music purchases through its Love Music website so that would please Consumer Focus. I wonder what difference it has made? Do we have lower rates of music piracy in New Zealand than elsewhere? I doubt it.

People download free music because its free. Its cheap on itunes (I’ve certainly got my $2.39 worth from Lada Gaga’s Bad Romance).  But free is cheaper. Free is the best value (from the purchaser’s perspective).

So I could have got Bad Romance for free. Why then, did I purchase it?

Two reasons. Its easy to use itunes to find, download, and manage music. I’m paying for the whole integrated convenient experience, not just the music. And secondly, I feel better about paying than not paying. I worry that LadaGaga might not be rewarded appropriately for her musical skills in the event that I don’t pay.

Its definitely a combination of those two things. Individually they might not be enough. But my point is, there is a good user experience available – and surely every reasonable computer user has at least heard of iTunes. A lack of awareness around legal alternatives is not driving music piracy.

 I recently read this report from “The Youth Voice Project”. The cover says its a “…large scale research project that solicits students’ perceptions about strategy effectiveness to reduce peer mistreatment in schools.” I’m always sceptical of research that perports to be representing youth voices. They are often better described as “what adults think young people are trying to say” or ”what [...]

It’s so annoying when this happens – you’ve been using your neighbour’s wi-fi free for a year or so and then they move and you’re left with no internet.

I’m constantly amused by people who tell you what the Internet “is” – as if there are some irrefutable laws of science that define it. An apple falls from the tree to earth because of gravity.  The Internet provides a free and uncaptured environment for information because that’s how it was built. Everything good and [...]

I was asked to make a comment recently for Victoria University’s student news publication Salient about a service called Pleaserobme.com.
Pleaserobme is a self proclaimed “Hack” from Social Media consultants Forthehack based in Rijswijk, The Netherlands, which scans and parses geographical information posted by users of the FourSquare.com service on the four square site and across [...]

You may have noticed that around the cybersafety scene the language is changing. The old terms like e-safety and digital safety are out – the new buzz phrase is ”digital citizenship”. Now – I’ve been around marketing for a while, and I can spot a re-branding exercise if ever I saw one.
Lets face it – lots of Cybersafety organisations [...]

A belief that the web uncovers the truth (and that we can use this to improve society) underpins a desire to protect the open and uncapturable nature of the internet. The web will out the truth. Why fight it. If we don’t like what we see – its not the web that needs fixing.

February 9 was Safer Internet Day (SID). An annual event run by InSafewhich was apparently celebrated through 500 events in 50 countries around the world.  It is certainly a busy day for the European cybersafety organisations who release new resources, run events, and generally try to constructively raise the profile of cybersafety.
New Zealand is probably considered one of those countries [...]

There’s almost no chance you missed it. Apple launched the iPad. It looks like a big iPod touch – which is basically what it is. A few minutes after the launch, Mac haters said it was a big iPhone without the phone. They said it was just another tablet device. A typical Apple product – [...]

Is txt speak bad for our kids? Lolz OMG no! And that’s what recent academic research confirms