here seems to be a great number of cases of crazy behavior in and around the computer business. Mark Gibbs provides a few examples.
I wrote last week about New Zealand’s insane copyright legislation that would make people accused of content piracy guilty until proven innocent. Over the last few days I’ve been marveling at how that seems to be consistent with the general level of insanity that surrounds the digital world at present. Here are a few examples of that craziness:
First, how about Apple turning down the “South Park” iPhone application? Apple makes episodes of “South Park” available through the iTunes Store but in the company’s quest to, presumably, keep the cell phone world clear of corrupting influences, it has refused to include the application, deeming it to be “potentially offensive.” This, from the company that makes Wu-Tang Clan albums available for download to iPhones? This is commercial insanity.
Next we have Michael Torchia, billed as “America’s Lifestyle Coach” (he not only coaches humans but also pet fitness — honest), who got a ridiculous amount of press for his lawsuit against Nintendo and its Wii game console (he has retained a hotshot Beverly Hills law firm).
Torchia claims that the Wii Fit and Wii Balance Board are physically dangerous (which is debatable) and that people are getting hurt (which is true, but only because they are klutzes who could equally well hurt themselves getting out of bed). Torchia also claims that Nintendo is misrepresenting the products as replacements for exercise and wants the company to pull the games until it makes “important changes in their products.”
As crazy and self-serving as this might be there’s no way to ignore Torchia until he goes away or gets some kind of settlement out of Nintendo. This is litigation insanity.
How about Facebook’s management recently trying to change their Terms of Service so anything you post on Facebook becomes theirs to do with as they please forever?
Now, it was always the case that while you were a Facebook member they could make merry with your content, but if you removed your content or closed your account under the old TOS their rights vanished.
The new terms were, not surprisingly, universally loathed and a huge wave of user complaints forced Facebook management to do an about face and return to the previous TOS “while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”
You have to wonder what Facebook management was thinking. It should have been obvious that revising the TOS so it no longer represented the interest of the users would result in a firestorm. That was public relations insanity.
Want more? How about the U.K. government? Yes, the county with the highest level of video surveillance in the world (as long ago as 2006 it was estimated that there was one video surveillance camera for every 14 people) has passed legislation that becomes law in March requiring ISPs to keep the headers (not the content) of all e-mail that passes through their networks for up to one year.
Something like 3 trillion e-mail messages are sent in the United Kingdom every day and at the very least both the sending and receiving SMTP servers will have to keep copies of the headers. This means that U.K. ISPs will be responsible for what I estimate to be at least an extra 1.42 exabytes (that’s 1,642,500,000,000,000,000 bytes) of storage (that volume will grow every year as e-mail use continues to soar).
Assuming a cost of, say, $5 per gigabyte per year, the U.K. ISP industry will be forced to spend an extra US$7.5 billion per year on this exercise. Worse still, that figure doesn’t include the costs of e-discovery processes, database and management overheads, and so on. This is economic insanity.
Then there are the privacy issues the U.K. law creates, which are similar and as dangerous as the ones that were raised with the U.S. warrantless wire tapping under the Bush administration. This is bureaucratic and political insanity.
We live in strange, turbulent times. I wonder if the insanity is a product of the times or vice versa?
