Today's Robin Hood

That bandwagon leaving town has Kim Dotcom on it, probably in manacles, leg irons and, for all we know, nipple clamps depending on the proclivities of the people who arrested him.

Millions of people who have never heard of him before are scrambling to don the Lincoln green and enlist themselves as his merry men. As far as casting goes, he would probably make a better Friar Tuck, yet the ability of multi-lateral policing to create heroes seemingly knows no bounds.

Like Julian Assange, Kim Schmitz has been largely complicit in his own fall. He is a self-professed (nay, self-acclaimed) hacker and has had several brushes with the law. Unfortunately, though, people who demand due legal process cannot always draw their clients from a cast of orphans, waifs and choirboys. The fact is that the legal assault on Schmitz has treated someone whose alleged crime is copyright infringement as though he were, at the very least, a drug kingpin.

This was an arrest targeted mainly at the press: if you can treat someone publicly enough as a criminal, you might be able to convince the world that he is a criminal: something which (by the way) may be very difficult indeed to prove at law.

The indictment rather cheeringly refers to the alleged criminals as the 'Mega Conspiracy', which sounds like something that falls beyond the remit of the U.S. Justice Department but for which Batman or his ilk would be the ideal investigators. The indictment then goes on to describe many felonious features of the Mega Conspiracy, many of which sound uncannily like the business habits of any other internet business: the use of advertising, the desire to push users onto premium accounts; reliance upon third-person links for dissemination and advertising etc. etc.

Often the claims in the indictment are largely unsupported: "the popularity of the infringing content on the Mega Sites has generated more than $25 million of advertising revenue for the Conspiracy". (Well, perhaps, but it remains to be demonstrated that it was the infringing content that brought to the site the traffic that generated those advertising revenues.)

Some of the Mega Conspiracy's practices may, however, look more questionable. Having struck a deal with copyright holders to provide an "Abuse Tool" (satirists, start your engines!), Megaupload agreed to suspend any links that accessed infringing material: in fact, however, most links terminated in common files that were not actually being deleted. Nor did the Mega Conspiracy kill other links that accessed the common file. The Mega Conspiracy (I'm going to keep typing that until it gets dull) thus created the illusion of complying with copyright holders while actually continuing to make the material available through alternative links. This may well prove to be (and here Sordel shall employ a metaphor wholly improper to the crimes under consideration) the smoking gun.

More interesting, though, are the endless emails cited in the indictment in which one thing becomes quite clear: however much the principals of the Mega Conspiracy were involved in a criminal activity, they certainly do not seem to have been conscious of being so. Certainly they were aware that there was a problem with hosting copyright material, and their habit seems to have been to comply with copyright holders to what they judged to be the minimal standard to establish cooperation for legal purposes.

The test of their strategy will certainly be the court case when they will advance the safe haven defence and the prosecutors will attempt to show that such a defence has been rendered null by their elevated awareness of the copyright infringement facilitated by their site.

Many onlookers will nonetheless share Sordel's concern at what amounts to commercial rough-housing being turned (not metaphorically but literally) into a federal case. I know that the "slippery slope" argument has been overused in an internet context but malicious prosecution should not be allowed to displace normal commercial litigation. Wouldn't the Justice Department's time and resources be better spent on turning criminals into convicts than in turning businessmen into criminals?

An Inactivist Writes ...

As though Sordel needed an excuse to down tools and interrupt the all-too terminable process of binding in nutshells: tomorrow will see a pointed not-working to rule as I join the masses doing precisely nothing to prevent the passage of a U.S. law.

Wednesday 18th January sees a web-wide protest against two pieces of legislation: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These laws, if passed, will give copyright holders wide powers to close or block online sites holding copyright material. Moreover, they will make sites such as YouTube and (for that matter) Blogger responsible for hosting material that infringes copyright. They will also extend the U.S. legal position on copyright throughout the world by forcing U.S. companies (such as PayPal) not to trade with sites subject to allegations of copyright infringement.

The provisions of SOPA are wide-ranging, and cannot be reduced to the most obvious infractions, such as a website set up to stream pre-release copies of the latest Hollywood blockbuster. To take one example, if one assumes that the material published by Wikileaks was the intellectual property of the U.S. government, then it would be the case that Google could be placed under an injunction preventing it from linking to Wikileaks as part of a web search.

Moreover, the holder of the intellectual property does not need to prove an infringement; it merely needs to notify third parties of the infringement. A hosting service would have to withdraw all services from Wikileaks immediately once notified by the complainant and - if it resumed those services on the basis of a satisfactory counter-notice from Wikileaks - it would itself be vulnerable to legal action on the part of the complainant.

Moreover, if Google (for example) decided that it were safer to comply with the complaint and remove the Wikileaks site from its engine, it would be immune from action by Wikileaks even if the complaint were never upheld by any court. Voluntary suspension of services is specifically defended by the law, but there is no protection for a company that continues to extend services to a site, even if that site has provided reasonable evidence that it is not infringing copyright.

Moreover, what if the site, rather than being Wikileaks, were to be, say, a British newspaper reporting a U.S. government leak?

Effectively, then, SOPA enables limitless penalties to be levied upon any site whatsoever without the complaining party ever winning a legal action. Most of the legal liability falls not upon the complainant or even on the alleged copyright violator: it falls instead upon the companies that provide points of access to internet content.

(It would, by the way, become a civil crime knowingly to make a claim of intellectual property against a site where no such claim existed, but then the site owner would require the means and the evidence to sue the complainant, and the complainant would have to be wealthy enough to make such a suit viable.)

Sordel's opposition to SOPA is staunch but, in the interests of full disclosure, I do source a large number of my factoids from Wikipedia, which is leading the protest and will be closed tomorrow. Anyone seeking to conclude that the drawing down of Nutbinding shutters makes a virtue of a necessity would, of course, be quite quite wrong.

Goodbye To All That

Osama bin Laden ... Muammar Gaddafi ... Kim Jong-il ... George Papandreou ... Rebekah Brooks: 2011 was a bad year for people with difficult-to-spell names.

Of course, recent years have in general been bad for people with difficult-to-spell names, although the majority of them would seem superficially to have had a better year than usual, thanks in no small part to the Arab Spring which brought peace, love and understanding to Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Libya.

The troubled history of Iraq culminated in the triumphant withdrawal of U. S. Forces and would certainly have been marked by mass public celebration had the crowds not been forced to disperse to make way for ambulances. Even now, as Sordel scowls in a corner typing out his inexcusably jaundiced nut-binding of 2011, the power-sharing government in Baghdad is celebrating several minutes of successful cooperation as President Nuri-Kamal al-Maliki's Shiite faction seeks Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi on charges of running a death squad.

One way or another, 2012 looks to be another memorable year for people with difficult-to-spell names.

Elsewhere, people with difficult-to-spell names agreed to merge them in an effort to dodge the jinx hanging over their heads. Hence 'Merkozy': a different making-of-the-beast-with-two-backs than Shakespeare can have anticipated, yet one equally likely to result in someone being smothered under a bolster before morning. Still, no one said that France and Germany have actually to be at war with one another to be mutually ruinous; it just helped.

Comedy Moment of the Year (for those who can see past the oddly pedestrian circumstance of a bride being upstaged by her sister's bottom at the Wedding of the Century) was the U.S. playing "Mister, can we have our ball back?" with their RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone and Iran. What's next? Asking for their bullets back from Pakistan?

Anyway, Sordel looks forward to 2012 with one lingering concern. If education continues on the path it is currently following, all names will become generally more difficult to spell. As trends go, it's not exactly encouraging.

Bishop's Move

For those amused by the discomfiture of the clergy, there has been undoubtedly an entertainment in watching the officials of St. Paul's Cathedral tying themselves into more knots than you would find in a Franciscan's cincture. Unfortunately all jokes eventually wear thin (a fact of which Jonathan Ross should have been apprised in about 1993) and it's becoming more difficult to see the funny side. Not least on account of a report today that Dr. Richard Chartres (surely that isn't his real name?) is advancing the argument that the protestors camp should be evicted on the grounds that it might be infiltrated by violent activists.

Chartres, described by The Times as "the third most senior cleric in the Church of England" apparently voiced the following concerns: "we do not know what is going to happen. The camp could be taken over by people who are very different from the ones who are in charge at the moment."

Well, much as it pains Sordel to slip into the vernacular, duh. I don't know who will be running Dixons next week: it could be taken over by people who are very different from the ones who are in charge at the moment. Just in case, maybe it should be closed down.

The counterargument to this is obvious: Dixons is operated by a bunch of professional retail experts (bolstered, it should be admitted, by a load of spotty teenagers who always seem keen to chat in a back room rather than show their acne-ridden faces on the shop floor) whereas the Occupy London protestors are a bunch of naive and erstwhile-tree-hugging hippies ripe for exploitation by would-be criminals. Violent infiltrators usually gain entrance to Dixons through the front windows via the energetic application of waste-bins, not by applying for jobs and working their way up. In this (and perhaps nothing else) Dixons would seem to have a robustness and resilience totally absent from a protestors' campsite.

Yet while Dixons does not seem to warrant the mistrust that Dr. Chartres lavishes on Occupy London, I can think of at least one institution that does.

The Church of England.

Isn't the Anglican clergy full of precisely the same variety of wide-eyed idealist who is currently camping out in front of St. Paul's Cathedral? Aren't they all the same feckless bunch of warts on the behind of society who have demonstrated by their lifestyle choice their complete incapacity to make a conventional contribution to society, yet who make a profession of asserting their high moral standards? Aren't they a proven target of criminals (in this case, child molesters) who would like nothing better than to infiltrate their organization and use it for other purposes?

When we start evicting people on the basis of what might happen in the future, it is my modest proposal that we don't stop at the doors of St. Paul's but proceed directly into the body of the cathedral.

In the meantime, perhaps Dr. Chartres consult a book with which he is supposedly familiar and take "no thought of tomorrow, for tomorrow shall take thought of the things for itself". Or he could, you know, pray.

50/50 Hindsight

Sordel is feeling somewhat soiled today, having been forced to visit the Daily Mirror website so that you, Dear Reader, do not need to.

The poor old Mirror (broadly speaking a distorting mirror, given that the people therein reflected are always wickeder, more repulsive or otherwise just more than they would be in real life) is up in arms because of the injustice of a largely random competition having a largely random result.

Nathan Hageman (separated from the hangman by one small letter) is evidently a "thug" and a "brute", as well as being £1 million pounds the richer as a consequence of a roulette spin on the new Ant & Dec vehicle, Red or Black?. Contrary to all reasonable expectation, the roulette ball seems to have paid no attention whatsoever when bouncing around the wheel to the fact that Hageman was sentenced to five years for beating up his ex-girlfriend.

In this, as usual, God has had his little joke at the expense of those who care. Some might say it was affliction enough on His part to have permitted Red or Black? be green-lighted in the first place, but now He compounds the misery by allowing the sun to shine on the unjust man while the rest of us get the thorough drenching that only ITV on a Saturday night can bestow.

Simon Cowell is reportedly livid that someone of such low moral character should get rich from reality television which (apart from setting up an obvious but quite unwarranted joke) merely suggests that Cowell did not understand the rules of the competition that he himself had scratched on the back of a beer-mat.

Before we castigate the creator (and the Creator) too energetically, however, it is worth noting that there evidently was another and more immediate failure: on the part of the show's producers when they were "vetting" contestants. Evidently, Hageman admitted to having a criminal conviction for ABH and aggravated burglary, but claimed that the victim was a man and not his ex-girlfriend.

It reveals the mentality of the producers to a nicety, then, that their consciences (which would have been untroubled by a violent criminal winning the prize had his victim been a man) pinch somewhat when the victim is revealed to be a woman.

Sordel, meanwhile, is willing to admit to having watched roughly five minutes of Red & Black? last Saturday and would like several series of The X Factor to be taken into consideration. I consider myself to be the principal victim and can assure you that no women were harmed.

Can I haz my million still?

Looters to the Court of St. James

Doubtless you shared Sordel's shock. An ambassador was among those recently rioting in London! Some Ruritanian minor nobility, one might presume, tired of cowering behind the windows of his embassy in silk sash and monocle while the people of England marched for civil rights and HDMI cables.

But, hang on.

It was an Olympics ambassador.

One of the things that the media are very good at is inventing grandiloquently entitled professions when it suits them. Robert Sebbage, murdered while on holiday in Greece, was evidently an England mascot which, with all deference to his better qualities, seemed to be a stretch of terminology.

A 17-year-old who turned herself into the police for looting Richer Sounds, "had been learning ballet since the age of seven and fears that she will now lose her place at dance school". Sordel tends to think the age of seven as a rather late start for ballet, but she is described by The Times as a ballerina which, on the evidence of the article, is both unlikely and something of an insult to proper ballerinas, who are typically the principal dancers in ballet companies.

Our "Olympic ambassador" is Chelsea Ives, an athlete whose competition results are readily available online. Her main disciplines would appear to involve running, throwing things and jumping (skills for which she may have found a practical use) but being a reasonably promising sportswoman and one of eight thousand doing voluntary work to promote the Olympics does not make her an Olympic "ambassador", except in the fevered brains of news editors and the British Olympic committee: neither of whom are strangers to overstatement.

Gushing lists of these glorious occupations were trotted out in newspapers, wall posts and tweets. Graphic designers evidently bathe in champagne and have white truffles for loofahs. Social workers have uniforms of spun gold with diamond inlay. Semi-professional footballers (ah, how it must have hurt the news editors to add that semi-) use bankers for their footstools and millionaires for their spitoons.

The problem with this "title inflation" is that the impression has been given that - far from those suffering from social deprivation - the rioters were all members of the urban nobility, living it large, them with their degrees and flashy careers.

One problem with rioting? It leads to a lot of heat, and not so much light.

The Hours Crawl By

The essence of "water cooler television" used to be that a programme was so memorable that everyone at work would be talking about it the next day. These days it's a branding thing: watch this thing tonight or tomorrow you might have nothing to talk about.

Case in point: The Hour, the BBC's one-size-fits-all drama. It's part history, part social history, part breathless romance, part spy story, part detective story. The general idea seems to be to mix up all the genres so thoroughly that the audience won't even know which way is up, and it seems to be working, since Sordel is still resentfully watching it several weeks beyond its logical expiration date.

Until the most recent episode, none of the actors in The Hour seemed quite to have hit upon the perfect acting strategy for the drama. Romola Garai (only happy when a strand of hair is falling fetchingly over one eye) is one half blushing schoolgirl and one half strident feminist. Ben Whishaw (playing a journalist who would evidently be brilliant if the writers were able to supply evidence in the form of slick dialogue) is half pouting public school intellectual and half working class hero. A line of motley runs up the centre of each of them.

The most creditable work in the main cast is being done by Dominic West, who has relied thus far on a sweetly avuncular smile and arched eyebrow to suggest that he is keeping his best acting chops in reserve for some other programme, any other programme. Channelling Roger Moore is a skill that every great actor should have in his toolbag.

The latest episode, however, opened up the field to an actress who had the thing to a nicety. Jessica Hynes (previously known as Jessica Stevenson and best known for her roles in Spaced and The Royle Family) might be said to have played the entire thing for laughs, deploying a range of cod-period tics that have never hitherto been rolled into the same character.

There is such a thing as "mannered acting", but this crossed into some territory beyond High Camp, not even pausing to draw breath at the staging post of "a right Royal piss-take".

As water-cooler television goes, The Hour is deplorably tepid, but one senses that once it is done and dusted it will be the comic actors who add it to their c.v.s with the greatest pride, and the principals who claim to have been "resting" in 2011.