UKHamlet's Blog

Your rights are under attack. Apple have filed a twenty seven page statement to the U.S. Copyright office arguing that the modification of an iPhone’s software is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The ruling as to this issue is expected this autumn. If they are successful it will mean that when you buy an iPhone, not only can they dictate which service provider you use, but also what you can do with the phone.  It will erode the basic concept of ownership still further.

Things used to be simple – you bought something, it became your property and you could do what you wanted with it. Isn’t this simple? Isn’t it a good thing? Well, that depends on your view of property, but in essence, in a capitalist society, where ownership is a lynchpin of the economic method, you’d expect the simple elegance of this proposition to hold sway.

You buy it, you own it, you do what you want with it.

This is no longer the case. Microsoft et al saw to that with software, which they licensed it to you without ceding ownership. Then it became: You buy, we still own, you do what you want within certain limitations detailed in this twenty page document. Now Apple are seeking to take it still further – it’s about to become:

You buy, we own it, we tell you what you can do with it.

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Tony Blackburn

The Digital Switchover for TV appears to be in full swing and generally it appears to the consensus that this is a good thing. That’s another debate, but more concerning to me is the momentum being gained by the Radio Switchover proposed for 2015. It seems a long way off, but it is only five and half years away. If government has its way then at some point in 2015 all car radios, analogue hifi radios, the radio you have in your kitchen, your clock radio and so on, will become scrap.

Let’s just take the car radios. There are more than 35 million cars in the UK, with slightly smaller numbers in most European countries and slightly more in Germany. There’s about 200 million in the USA. In 99.9% of these cars there are analogue radios and for the foreseeable future car manufacturers will continue to pump out cars, vans and trucks with analogue radios.

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