just out of interest, what is the legal position on the photographing of the magazines in Japan? Presumably the magazines themselves are not super-distressed so long as people photographed the advertising as well, and the resulting news coverage of the dispute drove more people to look at the magazines, so I imagine that the dispute would be with the store. Unless the magazine has a permitted usage clause inside it that once it is adjusted for legal fair use still forbids the taking of photographs. One would assume that the taking of photographs of the outside of the magazine without touching or opening it is similar to the discussions that you get when you try and take back a bit of software when you disagree with the EULA (the software companies and distributors *hate* it but they generally have to comply).

oh and I wasn’t implying that you said it was legal - I’m fully aware that you were merely quoted the original article and preserving the quotes around ‘legally’

as for the bookshops metaphor, there was a bit of a kerfuffle a couple of years back in Japan, about people just ‘photo-shopping’ magazines from stores by taking pictures of the pages with hi-rez phone cameras then walking out without buying the actual magazines… so *that* at least is more than a thought experiment (to the extent that it isn’t of course just a nice urban myth)…thought we’d posted on BST about this, but it seems not…

thanks for the namecheck - we’re now thinking of changing our positioning to ‘oh-so-paranoid-oh-so-activist’ x

“users to ‘legally’ copy and redistribute copyright books from amazon.com” obviously uses some for of the word ‘legally’ that I was previously unaware of.

5. Licence for website access states “Amazon.co.uk grants you a limited licence to access and make personal use of this website, but not to download (other than page caching) or modify it, or any portion of it, except with express written consent of Amazon.co.uk.”

So what they *really* mean by ‘legally’ is “it is easier to break the law and we don’t care”. It would be just as legal as if bookshops utilised customer driven scan and pay stations like Tesco and had no security on the door. Yes you could steal the books, but it still wouldn’t be “legal”.

However the key difference is that in this case he doesn’t want what the surveillance is giving, and his surveillance is not funding it. ie the FBI get funded regardless of whether or not they watch him whereas facebook will only exist if they have a business model. So, if you do succeed in rendering facebook’s business model null and void by giving away everything they are trying to sell, then the ultimate conclusion is no more facebook. Whether or not this is a good idea is up for discussion.

When it comes to google, I personally think that it is the best search engine that I’ve ever used. I like having this resource and I like having it as a free resource. Or rather let me rephrase that - the impact on my personal privacy that may or may not occur due to google selling the only asset that they have to fund their business model is vastly outweighed by having google as a search engine. I wonder how much it would actually cost if google had no income other than the money paid to it by its users? I suspect that it wouldn’t be very cheap and I suspect that it would get more expensive as more people stopped using it.

My personal feeling is that there is never any such thing as a sustainable free lunch. If you want one, and you think you are getting one then you are probably mistaken and you should look very carefully as to what information you are actually providing because that will almost always be the currency by which you are “paying” for your lunch. If you don’t want to pay this cost then you should take your custom elsewhere…

(but then I’m just a grumpy old java programmer and no-one ever listens to me)