Shane Richmond

The European Union last week confirmed that Maria Martin-Prat would be taking over its intellectual property unit. Among other things, that will give her responsibility for negotiating the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta) and the revision of the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (Ipred1), both of which could substantially change the copyright landscape in Europe.

An advert for hifi company Brennan was censured for 'encouraging copying'.

Martin-Prat has worked for the European Commission before and will be returning from a stint in charge of the legal department of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Yes, Europe has put a record industry lobbyist in charge of the department that will oversee the future of copyright in Europe.

Now Martin-Prat is a lawyer and like many lawyers she's been paid to put forward the views of her client, in this case the… Read More

Amazon announced Cloud Drive yesterday, a music storage service that will give you access to the music you own on a range of computers and mobile devices. The service, which is US-only for now, is an obvious next step for music collections and clearly better than carrying a hard drive around all the time.

Amazon weren’t the first to launch such a ‘music locker’ service but they are one of the most high profile companies to do so. In the process they’ve beaten Google and Apple, who are widely expected to launch similar services soon.

The record labels have so far said little publicly but privately are thought to be unimpressed, complaining that Amazon has not secured the necessary licenses. A Sony Music spokesman said: “We’re keeping all of our legal options open.”

In other words, they want Amazon to pay for new licenses so… Read More

Now that the iPad 2 launch is out of the way we can move on to more pressing matters: speculating about the iPhone 5.

Apple's pattern since the first iPhone was released in 2007 has been to update the iPhone every summer, with the new device being announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers conference (WWDC) and released soon afterwards.

However, according to rumours, there will be no new iPhone this summer. Instead, it's thought that the new handset will not be released until the autumn or perhaps early 2012.

Announcing the 2011 WWDC yesterday, Apple's senior vice president Philip Schiller said: "At this year's conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS."

The focus on software, rather than hardware, was not lost on observers. Jim Dalrymple, writing on his blog The Loop, said the "announcement backs up what my own source… Read More

It's common to read about the damaging effects of video games, quite often without any supporting evidence whatsoever (hello Baroness Greenfield!). It was refreshing therefore to hear Dr Jane McGonigal at SXSW yesterday talking about the positive effects of gaming.

McGonigal is a game designer, researcher and author and her talk at SXSW was based on her book, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. For me it was the highlight of the conference so far; McGonigal is an inspiring and engaging speaker and what she had to say was fascinating.

The central thrust of her talk was that play is essential to our psychological wellbeing. Humans love to play games and McGonigal quoted philosopher Bernard Suits, who describes games as "unnecessary obstacles we volunteer to tackle".

Before you become enraged at the prospect… Read More

Tim O’Reilly, the technology book publisher who popularised the phrase “Web 2.0”, said that Foursquare and similar geo-location services owed their existence to Ronald Reagan.

He said it was Reagan’s idea to open the government-built GPS network to the private sector, making possible an enormous range of services as a result. O’Reilly said: “The government built this hard infrastructure and opened it up to the market.”

O’Reilly, speaking at the SXSW technology conference in Austin, Texas, said that governments have a role to play in building the infrastructure that could be used for innovation. He cited highways and broadband roll-out as other examples of how the government has played this role.

O’Reilly added: “I didn’t agree with Reagan’s politics but I loved that he had values.” He said that the major technology companies are driven by people with values. Google’s Larry Page and… Read More

A week after Apple announced its subscription plan for iOS apps, debate is continuing about whether the policy is fair, sensible and workable.

The two points of Apple's subscription policy that have provoked criticism are, first, the 30 per cent cut for Apple from any content publishers sell within their app and, second, the insistence that if a publisher offers a subscription or purchase option outside their app then that option must also exist within the app, at the same price or less.

The case for the defence, as usual with Apple, comes from John Gruber. Greeting the arrival of the subscription plan on his Daring Fireball blog, Gruber wrote: "You’ll seldom go wrong betting on Apple doing something that’s good for Apple and good for its users — no matter what the ramifications for everyone else."

I agree that is usually the case but… Read More

Apple announced its subscriptions programme for iOS apps this afternoon. For Apple, it's a very simple service that allows users to subscribe to a publication with just one click. They're pitching this as being about the user experience – something that Apple prizes highly.

Apple's press release says:

"Customers can review and manage all of their subscriptions from their personal account page, including cancelling the automatic renewal of a subscription. Apple processes all payments, keeping the same 30 percent share that it does today for other In-App Purchases."

That last part is going to annoy some publishers, indeed it already is annoying them. They're particularly angry about this bit:

"In addition, publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app."

That has led to speculation about what this will mean for an app such a… Read More

Trending topics on Twitter are largely driven by retweets of mainstream media accounts, according to research by HP. The computer firm examined Twitter's trending topics – the list that shows what Twitter's users are talking about – to discover where the tweets were coming from.

After analysing more than 16 million tweets, HP found that just 22 Twitter accounts were "the source of most retweets when a topic was 'trending'". Furthermore, 72 per cent of those 22 were mainstream media outlets.

Instead of Twitter celebs, such as Stephen Fry, or your friends and colleagues, HP says that tweets from the likes of the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and, yes, The Telegraph, are driving Twitter's trending topics.

Bernardo Huberman, HP senior fellow and director of HP Labs Social Computing Research Group, said: "We found that mainstream media play a role… Read More

Apple is working on a smaller, less expensive iPhone to be sold alongside the main iPhone, according to reports.

MobileMe, Apple’s online storage service, will also be overhauled, the Wall Street Journal has reported, and turned into a free service that would store photos, music and videos. This would reduce the need for large amounts of memory on the device itself and also reduce the need to constantly sync

The WSJ report matches rumours last week that Apple was preparing an ‘iPhone Nano’, which would cost around £125. The Wall Street Journal says:

“The person who saw the prototype of the new iPhone said the device was significantly lighter than the iPhone 4 and had an edge-to-edge screen that could be manipulated by touch, as well as a virtual keyboard and voice-based navigation.”

The rumours come as the mobile industry gathers in Barcelona for Mobile… Read More

The short version of this review: it's the BBC iPlayer in app form and it's free. You really should get it.

The first question about the BBC iPlayer app is why build one at all when the iPad has long been able to access the iPlayer on the web. The answer is that the app can provide a better user interface and a more stable experience than a browser. Apps can use APIs that the browser can't and an app can manage memory use better than the browser.

It's hard to judge the iPlayer app's memory performance; I haven't been able to use it for long enough. The user interface, however, is far better than the web version. Browsing through the featured programmes is a pleasure and the TV guide is very smooth too.

The TV pictures are crisp and… Read More