The best of OUT-LAW Radio
OUT-LAW Radio, 23/08/2007
We present the highlights of the first year of OUT-LAW Radio,
from wireless security in a paint can to the plight of Gary
McKinnon to protests from Billy Bragg.
A text transcription follows.
This transcript is for anyone with a hearing impairment or who
for any other reason cannot listen to the MP3 audio file.
The following is the text spoken by OUT-LAW journalist Matthew
Magee.
Hello and welcome to the birthday edition of OUT-LAW Radio. Hard
to believe, but we have been bringing you the very latest in
developments in technology law for a full year.
This week we're going to look back through 12 months of
OUT-LAW Radio. We've heard from the mad, the sad, the desperate,
the triumphant and the terminally laid back, from people who've
missed out on deals of the century to the people shaping the
technology of the future.
We have met a man with a paint can that can stop the wireless
internet in its tracks, and delved into the devious world of
corporate espionage; we have gazed at crystal balls and pulled
apart the latest agenda-setting judgments.
But we start with a maverick. Singer, songwriter and political
activist Billy Bragg took on Rupert Murdoch over the terms and
conditions of social networking site MySpace – you might not
remember it, think of it as the Facebook of mid 2006.
He got the site to change its Ts&Cs not for him – he was
protected by his contract – but for all the young musicians
starting out who might have woken up one day to find out that
MySpace proprietor Rupert Murdoch owned their tunes.
Bragg told us that a vital point was made, that the digital
future could still belong to those kids, not to big business.
Billy Bragg: One of the really interesting
things about the music industry, is it's in an incredible state of
flux and where the power is going to lie at the end of this process
is still open to debate. If the big multi-national record companies
have their way, they will retain control. But the real power in the
new market place lies with those people who are able to create
interest in new music. I don't want new kids coming into the
industry to be signing contracts that were written up during the
time when they were physically producing and physically
distributing cds and records, I don't want kids coming in and
signing those kind of deals."
Another man who is engaged in a battle over digital culture from
quite a different political viewpoint is Jack Thompson. A lawyer
and an anti-games campaigner, Thompson has long argued that
computer games make children violent. He did so again in the
aftermath of yet another US school shooting. He insisted that
children shoot other children not because of the easy availability
of guns, but because they play computer games.
Jack Thompson: We've got more guns than people
over here and in a perfect country which america is not, I would
prefer nobody have any guns, but now that the guns are out there,
the gene is sort of out of the bottle, and we have got 3,000 gun
laws on the books in this country nobody has come up with a way to
get the guns from the bad guys as well as the good guys, so that if
you pass a law that said everybody has to turn in their guns and
we'll melt them down and make a statue of Charlton Heston out of it
or something, the bad guys, the criminals would still hold on to
their guns and us good guys who are law abiding would be giving
them up. I live in Miami, I'm not giving up my gun because if
somebody comes in my house I want to be able to kill him.
Unfortunately when you have a country that is awash in guns, you
have got to do something about the stimuli to use those guns.
Thompson can debate the rights and wrongs of technology law with
an academic distance familiar to most of us. Few of us, though,
have as much riding on tech law as Gary Mckinnon. The man accused
of causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage when he hacked
into the poorly protected NASA and Pentagon computer systems,
Mckinnon faces extradition to a potentially hostile hearing from a
US justice system that he feels is out to use his case as an
example to others. He told us about the threats made to him. He was
even told he could be jailed for 70 years or sent for a secret
military trial at prison camp Guantanemo Bay.
Gary Mckinnon: At first I laughed, when this
was first raised I thought no, come on, don't be ridiculous. And
then as someone pointed out most of the people in Guantanamo have
never been proven to even have been terrorists and they have been
languishing there for years, whereas I have allegedly attacked
American military networks, so that kind of put it in perspective
for me. It has been so psychologically damaging for me and it has
brought my life falling down round my ears sort of thing.
Ever since Google bought YouTube in what seemed to be a
staggering $1.6 billion takeover last October there has emerged
lawsuit after lawsuit alleging copyright infringement against the
now-deep pocketed video site. When the deal was announced, we asked
stock market analyst Jordan Rohan to tell us the likely effects of
the deal. Let's just say you heard it here first.
Jordan Rohan: You are going to see some spike
in lawsuits, I don't know; the US is a pretty litigious place to
begin with, figuring out what a spike is, I think you will
certainly see some lawsuits, that makes sense, that's how
the US economy works.
Not everybody was so lucky with YouTube. When we asked Kevin
Hartz to guide us through the social networking boom the
experienced investor made a surprising confession: he had turned
down the holy grail, a chance to invest in YouTube right at the
start.
Kevin Hartz: I don't know if I should admit
this but I was very busy with my start-ups and actually passed on
investing as a private individual in youtube last year.
Unfortunately it was a great return and in that case from the
perspective of the investors they had one of the fastest irrs or
highest ROIs in the history of I would say all venture investing to
return such a high amount of money in such a short period of time.
Well it was invitation by another angel investor and I was very
busy with my own start-up and honestly didn't think too much of it
and didn't take a close look at it. You know maybe in hindsight,
obviously in hindsight that was a big mistake, but you know I'm
focussing my attention on my own start-ups at this point.
Now it's not all midnight crackberry mainlining over
valley-strength frappacinos while slave-driving a team of lawyers
in a dusty library here at OUT-LAW Towers. Sometimes we get to
relax and investigate the hell that is other people's working
lives, like we did last Christmas. In a hard-hitting investigation
into the terrors of incessant taped carols for shop workers we
discovered Austrian shop worker union chief Gottfried Rieser, who
told us how he ran a successful 'no carols in the sausage
department' campaign in the past.
Gottfried Rieser: The purpose of the problem, I
cannot explain it very good in English but I think it is a
psychological problem. It's going to the brain and to the heart. Do
you know the company Spar? I had a meeting with Mr Preksel he's the
top of Spar in Austria, he told me of course I am right the
campaign was very, very successful and this time he promised to me
he won't play the music any more than three weeks before
christmas.
Just when you think you have a handle on something, like
a new dotcom boom, it slips and shudders out of your grasp.
Take Craigslist: rare survivor from boom 1.0, massively successful
listings site, threatening the very future of newspapers, six
billion page impressions a month. And what does chief executive Jim
Buckmaster go and do? Tells us that they don't care about making
money.
Jim Buckmaster: You know the way we run the
business is a little bit opposite than the way most businesses, at
least in the US, are run which is mainly the primary objective is
to maximise revenues and profits and everything else is secondary
to that whereas in our view our goal is to kind of maximise
utilities for users so we concentrate on doing what users ask us to
do and little else. We do run a healthy business and do have a
healthy business because, you know, we don't want to borrow money
and we don’t want to solicit outside capital so we do want to stay
in the black but beyond that maximising profit and revenues has
never been a primary goal. It is unfathomable to the financial
community in the US Wall Street because it is anti-ethical to
their kind of holy grail. It just doesn't make sense in their
worldview, it is sacriligious if you will.
Now we have uncovered some pretty unusual things on OUT-LAW
Radio. The software that lets you spy on someone's mobile phone,
the man being evicted over his website comments, and a mobile phone
paparazzi agent who keeps a major royal family secret. But perhaps
oddest of all was Wayne Legrande, who says he has paint which can
keep a wireless network safe.
Wayne Legrande: The wall shielding material
along with if you have windows that gets a film put on the window
then you have the ability to make whoever is trying to acquire your
information have to come up very very very very close to your
facility.
MM: how close?
Legrande: you’re talking sometimes within the
building. We have had all of that validated and checked by some
pretty high-powered information security people. Most of the
locations we can’t disclose.
We also talked to some of the people in the world of policy and
government who shape the environment in which businesses operate.
No figure this year was bigger than Andrew Gowers, the former
Financial Times editor who examined all of Britain's copyright laws
and whose recommendations are, one by one, being implemented by the
Treasury. He told a music industry used to getting its own way that
they couldn't extend the copyright term on sound recordings past 50
years. He told OUT-LAW Radio that he nearly went much farther.
Andrew Gowers: I could have made a case for
reducing it based on the economic arguments. As it is we left it in
place. We certainly considered it and if you look at the report
that came from the academics that we commissioned to examine the
arguments and examine the evidence they also argued very robustly
that, you know, 50 years could be arguably more than enough
but you know in the end we took the politically prudent course. To
be honest reducing it in any case would be a very big international
debate. It would stand very little chance of making headway in
Europe but I think there is a pretty strong chance that
50 years – the line can be held at 50 years as the EU
considers the issues.
Well, that was the first year of OUT-LAW Radio. We truly hope
you enjoyed it, and we always love to hear from you, so do get in
touch at radio@out-law.com.
Tune in next week for more news and interviews, for now,
goodbye.
OUT-LAW Radio was produced and presented by Matthew
Magee for international law firm Pinsent Masons
