PARADISE LOST

Dick Pountain/Idealog 82/13 May 2001

It's not been my habit to refer to mail received in this column but two recent columns have attracted so much of it that I can't resist replying here. The first was my column in issue 79, in which I mentioned the DIY trend in personal computing, comparing it to the hod-rod car scene of the 1950s and 60s. I rashly said that - so far as I knew - no-one actually painted burning skeletons on their PC case, but it appears from my mailbag that an alarming number of you do, and are proud enough of it to write in. I hereby publicly withdraw that comment and replace it with this one: so far as I know, no-one paints three-kittens-wearing-blue-satin-bows-in-a-basket on their PC cases...

The second was my column in issue 80 on the aborted fibering-up of Britain in which I was uncharitable about a female ex-prime minister. I received lots of mail about that one, substantially more pro than con, which was unexpected but nice. What was not so unexpected was the unpleasant tone of some of the cons, who tended to declare themselves 'Thatcher's Children' and proceeded to prove it by their shaky grasp of basic grammar: with few exceptions they missed my point by railing against the sorry thing that is BT now, when I was arguing that given a different decision BT might have become a different sort of beast altogether.

One of the most pro mails struck a particular chord with me. It was from an ex-researcher at IBM Hursley Park and Sun Palo Alto who once worked on advanced object-oriented systems. He approved of my rant, and wondered whether it really was too late to fiber up Britain, and also to get a proper object-oriented operating system that manages complexity instead of magnifying it. This last thought was prompted by his recent discovery that he has 3409 executable files on his hard disk, but has only actually installed five applications plus Microsoft Office. I'm afraid my answer on both counts has to be, yes, it probably is too late, for reasons that have only emerged quite recently. The reason we are unlikely to get affordable fiber links (or even a sensible DSL service) is discussed by Steve Cassidy in this very issue, namely that the precarious financial state of BT seems to have strengthened the hand of its conservative faction - which sees mass-market broadband as a threat to its lucrative leased-line business - and has all but snuffed out any serious populist tendency.

The fundamental reason we will never see a truly object-oriented operating system from Microsoft stems from something that Jon Honeyball discussed last month, namely that Microsoft has finally found itself a workable technology for exerting total control over the distribution of software, and so whatever watered-down commitment to object-orientation it ever had will soon become an embarassment. I'm referring of course to the new registration system that has been introduced with Windows XP, which allows you to try a piece of software on as many computers as you like for a short period, after which it stops working until you register it for just a single CPU. By using strong encryption Microsoft now has the technical means to force you to buy a separate copy of its software products for each computer you want to use them on - and in future this system will be pushed further to create a business model wholly new in the PC marketplace, namely renting software for a fixed period (which is physically enforcable).

If you are expecting a rant about how iniquitous and totalitarian this scheme is you will be disappointed, because fortunately or not, Microsoft has the both the law and morality - as it stands in our market-oriented civilisation - on its side. For the last five years I've been saying ad nauseam in this column that the interaction of digital technologies with intellectual property rights is going to become the critical issue of our epoch: now the technical means are in place for this assertion to be tested. The relative difficulty of printing and copying books and newspapers restrained their widespread forgery, but didn't prevent people lending them to one another. On the strongest view, when you lend a book to a friend you breach the rights of its author and deprive them of income, but because such a draconian right has never been practically enforceable, we've all come to accept a somewhat laxer interpretation of intellectual property rights. However were they to become fully enforceable only the most altruistic and uncommercial of publishers and authors are going to turn down the chance to enforce them.

The Open Source and Free Software movements, to differing degrees, want to reduce the protection afforded to authors' and publishers' property, a perfectly reasonable demand in a free society but one that has to be argued for politically because granting it requires the reform or removal of property laws on which all capitalist societies are based. (Object-oriented software is not quite so ideologically loaded, but it still depends on a lax view of IP rights because it involves the sharing of components between different author's systems). If you think I'm being melodramatic, just consider the inexorable march of pay-per-view TV, and the legal firepower brought to bear on Napster. Remember that scorpion in the old fable who stung the frog that was carrying him across the river 'because it is my nature' - well it's in the nature of those who can charge to charge, so don't be too surprised if you find one day that you have to rent your own surname from Somerset House.