Digital blow

On March 1, Online reported on the problem of copyright violation through appropriation of the source code for web pages.

This issue strikes at the heart of digital society. There are huge social benefits from the free reuse of source code, because otherwise everybody has to recreate the same basic techniques.

But the original author should be rewarded for their work - if they give it away free, they can't earn a living.

How can the web survive in these circumstances? The same question applies to "open source" systems such as Linux, and to the battles over Napster technology for bypassing copyright ownership. The lives of technologists, artists, and ordinary people depend on the answers.

The Arts Council of England and the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory have recognised the need for debate that crosses the arts/technology divide, including opinion-formers, legal experts and policy makers. The resulting conference in Cambridge next month has a few places open to the public - details are at: www.cl.cam.ac.uk/CODE/

Alan Blackwell
alan.blackwell@cl.cam.ac.uk

Taxi please

Re ordering a taxi via SMS (Online, March 1): What a ludicrous idea. Anyone who has ever used SMS or paging knows that messages cannot be guaranteed to arrive to a time like that. Your taxi may well turn up if your initial SMS arrives with the cab company within a reasonable time, but the confirmation messages are pointless and could arrive days late, if at all. As SMS facilities in European cities become more clogged with kids txtng 3ch thr, something ostensibly useful such as a way to book a taxi will become rapidly pointless, if it isn't pointless already.

Sam Nelson
sam@cs.stir.ac.uk

Suspicion

SA Mathieson (Insight of the Law, Online March 1) quotes the idea that "there should be reasonable suspicion of [benefit] fraud before a [bank] customer's information is surrendered". Given the pressure claimants are under to have benefits paid directly into bank accounts (very convenient), the mere fact of claiming benefit seems to be sufficient excuse.

D. Cameron
Stoke-on-Trent

Bemused

Two letters on March 1 regarding Freeserve make me wonder. I have signed up for Freeserve Anytime but am beginning to wish I hadn't. It barely works at all. Connecting to the service is a pain. The dialup number has two components, namely a six-digit prefix and an 0845 call number. The first six digits are supposed to access the special free terminal arranged with BT, which then enables contact with the 0845 number. Almost invariably when my dialer has got as far as the prefix digits there is a click, then the charming computerised BT lady voice announces: "The network is busy, please try later," or words to that effect. The following digits achieve nothing, although if you dial them separately, contact is established at once, but at a cost.

On two occasions in the past week I have achieved access at the first dialing. Every other time I get the BT lady, and dial again and again, sometimes as many as 20 times before getting the proper connection noises.

Three emails, a phone call to customer services and two expensive calls to the Freeserve "help" line only apologised and referred me to BT, who referred me back to Freeserve, saying there were not enough slots in the free connector for the number of customers, kindly explaining to me how the system works, which was interesting but didn't achieve anything.

When eventually I do get through, I tend to do all my jobs at one go, which is not kind to other "users". As a senior nerd aged 83 how much time have I left?

As your correspondent Jane Leaper remarked, anyone contemplating Anytime should think very carefully, and perhaps invest in a calendar rather than a stopwatch.

Henry Hudson
henry@henhud.freeserve.co.uk

In regard to David Ross's complaint on the tardiness of their email service, I have used the service for the past two years and have never encountered delays in receiving messages that could be attributed to FreeServe. The only delays have been when mail has been sent via a third party - where special interest group mail is sent through a moderator - who delays forwarding. I have come across friends who have thought that merely opening the Outlook Express inbox would automatically download mail from their ISP, not realising that they need to log on to their mail server.

Thus they only got mail when they wrote a message and actively clicked the Send/Receive button.

Des Geere
des@dgeere.freeserve.co.uk

My ISP is BTinternet, I use their £9.99 per month service. I also use a telephone line from a cable company. But from March 31, to use my current service or similar service I will have to have a BT phone, which would be much more expensive. The only service open to those without BT phone lines is BT Internet Pay-as-you-go which I do not want. I have used BTinternet for several years and I had no wish to move website or change my email address but I will now be forced to as I will not be bullied into paying for one of BT's overly expensive lines.

Andrew Aitken
andrew.aitken@btinternet.com

I don't want to seem to be joining a witch-hunt, but has anybody noticed how appaling their off-peak service has become? Since Sunday (February 25) I have been unable to log on, getting the busy signal for hours at a time. An email (from work) brought an anodyne soother referring to their installation of more hardware. Surely this should have been done before they launched a new marketing drive?

Tim Bloomfield
(email address withheld)

Corrections

On page 9, in our piece on booking cabs via SMS, the URL for the service, available in April, should have been www.obvious.co.uk.

And on page 14, in our feature on web help for farmers, the address for Farming Online should have been www.farming.co.uk.

Apologies for these errors.