Losing a link
The UK government wants to retain details of our electronic activities. At the same time, bypassing copy protection to view something you own is illegal. Perhaps people should have paid more attention to the likes of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Europe, which has been campaigning on the issue of loss of freedom. The next big issue is software patents. If we go the same way as the USA, then for the first time companies will be able to patent an idea. So, once I have an idea for a product, no one else will be able to produce software that does the same sort of thing. Goodbye to choice, low cost and reliability. The big boys in the US are patenting everything they can, and that includes BT's claim to patent web links, which could result in us having to pay more for internet use since every page that uses links would owe money to BT. The more who join the EFF Europe fight, at least by writing to their MP, the more chance we can stop it now. Tony Burrows
CMSABUR1@livjm.ac.uk
Pirate clones
The record companies seem to forget that we've heard their spurious complaints about "piracy" before (May the fraud be with you, June 6). Anyone remember the slogan: "Home taping is killing music"? It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now. Anyone who wants to clone Celine Dion can do so by running a line out of their amplifier or CD player into their computer; the process may be slightly more time-consuming than ripping a CD via software but the end result would be the same. Sony and co. are evidently unaware of those time-worn aphorisms concerning bolting horses and barn doors. John Coulthart
discordia@mail.com
Cracking code
Record sales have been decreasing year on year for the past five years, mainly because most people have rebought their old vinyl collection. The record companies can't stop the piracy, because even if Sony employs 1,000 programmers to find a secure form of encryption, there will be 10,000 kids trying to crack the code. Neil Butler
renus@maths.tcd.ie
Rippable
Tony Smith states that the Sony Attack of the Clones soundtrack CD is "not capable of being ripped to the net". This is not true. Anybody who is determined to rip a CD and make it available over the internet will do so with a normal CD player and the line-in socket on their PC soundcard. The protection just makes it impossible for the listener who does not have any other CD-playing equipment. Geoffrey Swindale
geoff.swindale@chesterton.co.uk
Copying Sony
Could the Sony that restricts our ability to play music on our PCs be related to the Sony that makes computer drives that copy DVDs and CDs? Prof Adam Tickell
a.tickell@bristol.ac.uk
Real problem
Although Warren Newman is correct to say that RealPlayer is not yet available for Mac OS X (Feedback, June 6), it is possible for users to access BBC and other Real content, as RealPlayer for OS 9 works under OS X's Classic environment. This is not an elegant solution: I haven't been able to get RealPlayer to launch automatically when clicking on a link to a Real file, so have to download the file then double-click it, but it works around what is (hopefully!) only a temporary problem. Pete Clark (email address supplied)
Stream free
Warren Newman writes of problems listening to RealPlayer content from Mac OS X. Operating systems such as Linux also have problems with such proprietary systems. Thankfully, however, the BBC is trialling an alternative - Ogg Vorbis - a Free Software alternative that can be easily implemented on just about any operating system. To encourage the BBC to adopt this open technology, as explained on http://support.bbc.co.uk/ogg , email oggfeedback@bbc.co.uk. Recently I listened to an Ogg stream of a talk by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation from the University of Aberystwyth, from the stability of my Linux box, which has at least three audio players I could have used. Chris Howells
howells@kde.org
Camera crime
Jack Schofield's review of the Nokia 7650 camera-phone (June 6) mentions a surge of possible offences to the sensibilities of Daily Mail readers from multimedia messaging (MMS) dating games. I'm more concerned about its potential role in child sexual abuse. MMS will enable the person-to-person distribution of images of abuse without any apparent obligation on the part of the carrier to police content on the network. Phone companies cannot be liable for the nature of conversations conducted on their networks, but MMS and such camera-phones facilitate actual crimes, rather than mere discussions of them. Network operators should be obliged to monitor and analyse images transacted on their networks and make them available to law enforcement agencies. This would greatly increase the cost of MMS services. But the alternative is to sanction an efficient, hidden, near-real-time, abuser-to-abuser technology. Paul May
paul.may@verista.com
