'The Economist' And 'Financial Times' Already Writing Off ACTA As Dead

In the last few days, we've seen an extraordinary wave of announcements by governments in Europe, particularly its eastern part, that they would not be ratifying ACTA immediately. That sequence of events, culminating in today's news that Germany, too, would be holding off, has suddenly made lots of people sit up and take notice.


But even against that tumultuous background, few of us would have expected that two of the most serious business publications in Europe, The Economist and Financial Times, would both go much further than simply noting the problems the treaty now faces, and declare that ACTA is pretty much dead. 

On Techdirt.

There's No FUD Like an Old FUD

The Economist has been writing poorly-informed articles about open source for years - I dissected a particularly egregious example back in 2006. So it's hard to tell whether the flaws in this new book review are down to that antipathy, or whether they are inherent in the title it discusses, “The Comingled Code”. As far as the latter is concerned, the following information does not inspire confidence:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Misinformed about Malware

I was moaning recently about the appalling sloppiness when it comes to viruses et al.: they are practically all for Windows, and yet nobody mentions this fact. Here are two more egregious examples.

First:

Researchers at BitDefender have discovered a new type of malicious software that collects passwords for banking sites but targets only Firefox users.

The malware, which BitDefender dubbed "Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.A" sits in Firefox's add-ons folder, said Viorel Canja, the head of BitDefender's lab. The malware runs when Firefox is started.

The malware uses JavaScript to identify more than 100 financial and money transfer Web sites, including Barclays, Wachovia, Bank of America, and PayPal along with two dozen or so Italian and Spanish banks. When it recognizes a Web site, it will collect logins and passwords, forwarding that information to a server in Russia.

Firefox has been continually gaining market share against main competitor Internet Explorer since its debut four years ago, which may be one reason why malware authors are looking for new avenues to infect computers, Canja said.

Bad, wicked Firefox, bad wicked open source...except that this trojan *only* works on Windows...which means it's bad wicked Windows, yet again. But the article never mentions this, of course.

Or take this:

BATTLEFIELD bandwidth is low at best, making networks sticky and e-mails tricky. American soldiers often rely on memory sticks to cart vital data between computers. Off-duty, they use the same devices to move around music and photos. The dangers of that have just become apparent with the news that the Pentagon has banned the use of all portable memory devices because of the spread of a bit of malicious software called agent.btz.

...


The most remarkable feature of the episode may not be the breach of security, but the cost of dealing with it. In the civilian world, at least one bank has dealt with agent.btz by blocking all its computers’ USB ports with glue. Every bit of portable memory in the sprawling American military establishment now needs to be scrubbed clean before it can be used again. In the meantime, soldiers will find it hard or outright impossible to share, say, vital digital maps, let alone synch their iPods or exchange pictures with their families.

And yes, you guessed it, it only works on Windows. So that bit about "[t]he most remarkable feature of the episode may not be the breach of security, but the cost of dealing with it" is really about the cost of using Windows - well, it's The Economist, what do you expect, accuracy? When will they ever learn?

The Economist's New Commons Sense

Baby steps:

The economics of the new commons is still in its infancy. It is too soon to be confident about its hypotheses. But it may yet prove a useful way of thinking about problems, such as managing the internet, intellectual property or international pollution, on which policymakers need all the help they can get.

The Egregious Economist

I continue to be gobsmacked by the egregious stupidity of The Economist:

Commercial piracy may not be as horrific as the seaborne version off the Horn of Africa.... But stealing other people’s R&D, artistic endeavour or even journalism is still theft.

Not only is it not as horrific as what occurs off the Horn of Africa, it is a total insult to parrot such a stupid, loaded metaphor, which consciously tries to equate the two. And for the six billionth time, it's *not* theft, no matter how many times you repeat it: it's infringement.

Nothing is stolen: you still have your R&D, your artistic endeavour or even your journalism. What has happened is that others may be making use of those, possibly against some laws in certain jurisdictions. Quite how terrible that might be depends on many factors, not least the scale and intent.

Maybe it would be better if The Economist put the paywall back to protect innocent minds from its idiocies.

Why The Economist is Clueless, Part 2353

A new business model: give away the game and charge avid players for extras

Well, "new" aside from the fact that free software has been using it in various forms for over 20 years....

Chinese Whispers

One of my hobbies is to try to spot the emergence of unintended consequences of major events. The classic, perhaps, is the fall of the Communism, and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which was supposed to be a victory that showed the West's strength, but turned out instead to make our lives hugely less safe. Here's another - and a profound one at that:

Just as damaging for China in the long run, however, may be the effect on ordinary citizens. One place the Tibetan flag no longer flies is in the window of a bed shop in the English city of Sheffield. Its owner is a Tibetan sympathiser, who displayed the flag last month. Two young Chinese, apparently students, visited and made threats. That night his windows were smashed. A celebration supposed to mark China's emergence as a friendly global power has made some people think for the first time that its rise is something to fear.

Only a whisper at the moment, but I predict it will become a fearsome - and fearful - roar before long.

Opening the Mirror

Der Spiegel is the greatest news magazine in the world, bar none. It makes The Economist look superficial, and yet constantly surprises with the range of its coverage.

A little while back, writing about Focus, its main rival - although that's really too strong a word, good though Focus is - and the fact that the latter was providing free access to its archive, I made the wish that Der Spiegel would follow suit.

Apparently, it has. It's called Spiegel Wissen, and I may be some time....

Time to Face the Music

I've been rabbiting on about this for some time; now The Economist is saying it too, so it must be true:

Seven years ago musicians derived two-thirds of their income, via record labels, from pre-recorded music, with the other one-third coming from concert tours, merchandise and endorsements, according to the Music Managers Forum, a trade group in London. But today those proportions have been reversed—cutting the labels off from the industry's biggest and fastest-growing sources of revenue. Concert-ticket sales in North America alone increased from $1.7 billion in 2000 to over $3.1 billion last year, according to Pollstar, a trade magazine.

...

The logical conclusion is for artists to give away their music as a promotional tool. Some are doing just that. This week Prince announced that his new album, “Planet Earth”, will be given away in Britain for free with the Mail on Sunday, a national newspaper, on July 15th. (For years Prince has made far more money from live performances than from album sales; he was the industry's top earner in 2004.) Outraged British music retailers were quick to condemn the idea. As far as the record industry is concerned, it is madness. But for the music industry, it could well be the shape of things to come.

I Fear the Geeks Bearing "Lughenjo"

If you've been holding your breath while waiting to discover what The Economist's super-duper, top-secret, Web 2.0-y, skunkworks Project Red Stripe turned out to be, you may now exhale:

We are developing a web service that harnesses the collective intelligence of The Economist Group’s community, enabling them to contribute their skills and knowledge to international and local development organisations. These business minds will help find solutions to the world’s most important development problems.

It will be a global platform that helps to offset the brain drain, by making expertise flow back into the developing world.

Oh, right.

Well, at least those geeky Economist types have come up with an interesting code-name:

We’ve codenamed the service “Lughenjo”, an Tuvetan word meaning gift.

Amazingly, neither Wikipedia nor Ethnologue, the definitive source of information about languages, knows anything about Tuvetan, but Webster's does. Anyone with more info?

Economistical with the Truth

The Economist is a strange beast. It has a unique writing style, born of the motto "simplify, then exaggerate"; and it has an unusual editorial structure, whereby senior editors read every word written by those reporting to them - which means the editor reads every word in the magazine (at least, that's the way it used to work). Partly for this reason, nearly all the articles are anonymous: the idea is that they are in some sense a group effort.

One consequence of this anonymity is that I can't actually prove I've written for title (which I have, although it was a long time ago). But on the basis of a recent showing, I don't think I want to write for it anymore.

The article in question, which is entitled "Open, but not as usual", is about open source, and about some of the other "opens" that are radiating out from it. Superficially, it is well written - as a feature that has had multiple layers of editing should be. But on closer examination, it is full of rather tired criticisms of the open world.

One of these in particular gets my goat:

...open source might already have reached a self-limiting state, says Steven Weber, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of “The Success of Open Source” (Harvard University Press, 2004). “Linux is good at doing what other things already have done, but more cheaply—but can it do anything new? Wikipedia is an assembly of already-known knowledge,” he says.

Well, hardly. After all, the same GNU/Linux can run globe-spanning grids and supercomputers; it can power back office servers (a market where it bids fair to overtake Microsoft soon); it can run on desktops without a single file being installed on your system; and it is increasingly appearing in embedded devices - mp3 players, mobile phones etc. No other operating system has ever achieved this portability or scalability. And then there's the more technical aspects: GNU/Linux is simply the most stable, most versatile and most powerful operating system out there. If that isn't innovative, I don't know what is.

But let's leave GNU/Linux aside, and consider what open source has achieved elsewhere. Well, how about the Web for a start, whose protocols and underlying software have been developed in a classic open source fashion? Or what about programs like BIND (which runs the Internet's name system), or Sendmail, the most popular email server software, or maybe Apache, which is used by two-thirds of the Internet's public Web sites?

And then there's Wikimedia, which powers Wikipedia (and a few other wikis): even if Wikipedia were merely "an assembly of already-known knowledge", Wikimedia (based on the open source applications PHP and MySQL) is an unprecedentedly large assembly, unmatched by any proprietary system. Enough innovation for you, Mr Weber?

But the saddest thing about this article is not so much these manifest inaccuracies as the reason why they are there. Groklaw's Pamela Jones (PJ) has a typically thorough commentary on the Economist piece. From corresponding with its author, she says "I noticed that he was laboring under some wrong ideas, and looking at the finished article, I notice that he never wavered from his theory, so I don't know why I even bothered to do the interview." In other words, the feature is not just wrong, but wilfully wrong, since others, like PJ, had carefully pointed out the truth. (There's an old saying among journalists that you should never let the facts get in the way of a good story, and it seems that The Economist has decided to adopt this as its latest motto.)

But there is a deeper irony in this sad tale, one carefully picked out by PJ:

There is a shocking lack of accuracy in the media. I'm not at all kidding. Wikipedia has its issues too, I've no doubt. But that is the point. It has no greater issues than mainstream articles, in my experience. And you don't have to write articles like this one either, to try to straighten out the facts. Just go to Wikipedia and input accurate information, with proof of its accuracy.

If you would like to learn about Open Source, here's Wikipedia's article. Read it and then compare it to the Economist article. I think then you'll have to agree that Wikipedia's is far more accurate. And it isn't pushing someone's quirky point of view, held despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Wikipedia gets something wrong, you can correct it by pointing to the facts; The Economist gets it wrong - as in the piece under discussion - and you are stuck with an article that is, at best, Economistical with the truth.