shadowspar

So Julian Assange has turned himself into the police and been arrested.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, a spokesman for WikiLeaks, said Assange's arrest is an attack on media freedom...

Uh, no it's not. It's an attempt to bring an individual to trial for criminal acts he's alleged to have committed -- rape and sexual assault, in this case. The charges predate Wikileaks' release of US diplomatic cables, FWIW.

I don't understand all the hand-wringing over this, like the media is trying to make out whether to drape Assange in a hero's cape or a villain's one. People do good things; those same people do bad things, and they should be praised for the former and held to account for the latter. The cells of Torquemada's prisons were apparently "large, airy, clean and with good windows admitting the sun....far superior to the civil prisons of that day", but you don't see anyone holding him up as a wholesome personage to emulate, and rightly so.

We can give Assange credit for his work with Wikileaks without letting him off the hook for his other behaviour. It's that simple.

I wanted to post a big ranty screed about this, but this post on DVDs and this one on DRM-ed audiobooks just about sum it up.

The big media companies make much of the fact that the pirate sites are giving away music and movies for free. They tend not to mention the fact that the usability of their own offerings is freakin' horrible -- these companies actively try to prevent customers from making legitimate use of the material they just shilled out their hard-earned money for.

We'll take music as an example. Let's look at a few of the many things that file-sharing networks allow you to do and the media companies' offerings don't.

• You can preview any part of any song you want.
• You can listen to music from any artist in the entire world, without geographic restriction. If you're interested in a Japanese band, you can access and download their music from anywhere; it doesn't matter whether you're in Tokyo, Toronto, or Tajikistan.
• The downloaded files will work with any software, operating system, or media player you want to use them with.
• You can listen to the music on every computer and media player that you own; there are no restrictions on how many devices you can copy it to.
• Oh yeah, you don't get treated to commercials or warnings about how people who copy music are reprehensible wretched commie thieves.

Even if downloading tracks from bittorrent were to cost the same as iTunes, bittorrent would still be the better offering. In short, the pirates are offering a better music service than the music industry, even though they're not making any real money from it.