When industry bodies like FAST, RIAA, MPAA et al describe the illegal downloading of software, music, movies, etc. as “theft” they hugely simplify a complex problem. Theft involves taking something from a party and depriving them of the item. But obtaining software (or whatever) without paying is not so simple.

Here’s an example, in which you could replace software and FAST with a different industry and body. Let’s say Company A sells a piece of software, the industry standard in its field, for £1,372 (no, really). I would like this software but there’s no way I can afford the cost. So I’m considering a similar, but simpler, product from Company B which sells for £38. In the end, instead of spending any money, I download Company A’s software for free, illegaly. I now still have the £38 I was going to spend and I end up buying an unrelated item from Company C (I might spend it on something other than software, but the point is that I still have the money to spend).

In FAST’s simplistic model of theft I have “stolen” £1,372 from Company A and deprived the country’s economy of the same amount. The story ends there, shocking press releases are issued, and newspapers blindly print the industry statistics.

In reality the only company to lose out in any way is Company B, to the tune of £38. This is a shame for Company B. Company A, the victim in FAST’s scenario, has in fact lost nothing — I was never intending to buy their software, but if I’m going to download something it might as well be the most expensive and “best”. You could even say Company A has benefited: they haven’t lost a sale but they have gained another user. A user who will become familiar with their product and, one day, might buy a legal copy. Company C, entirely ignored by FAST, has gained a sale of £38 they would otherwise not have had. The country’s economy has not gained or lost a thing — I have still spent the £38 I was planning to spend in the first place.

This is not to say that obtaining software (or music, movies, etc.) without paying is a good thing and legally or morally right. While there will always be some software that is produced to be given away for free, in practice there is always going to be software that requires money to produce and so should be paid for. But calling the sharing of these products “theft”, and mechanically adding up the imagined “cost” to companies and economies, only distracts us from ever finding a better solution.

(I’ve just noticed the Guardian has printed someone else’s response to the letter that got me worked up in the first place. Good.)

To be honest I’ve been surprised how much I’ve enjoyed his tweets. On Twitter I follow very few people or things that aren’t my friends and I planned to follow Pepys purely as a means to make sure my worryingly simple script for automatically updating his account was still working.

And yet, despite the fact I’ve already read the diary entries from which the tweets are extracted, and despite the fact I’ve already spent a while editing his lengthy prose down to 140 characters, I still look forward to his next tweets.

I must confess that I don’t read his diary on the website very often — having already prepared each diary entry in advance, and having limited time, there’s not much appeal in reading it again. But I thoroughly enjoy the more real time nature of these diary fragments popping up among my friends’ updates. It’s easy to picture @samuelpepys conducting his business and pleasure, travelling around London — from his home near the Tower of London to Deptford to Westminster — when he’s updating you on his progress during the day.

Right “now” (early June in 1666) the English and Dutch are half-way through the Four Days Battle at sea and so we get to read updates in “real time” as Pepys hears them. The first day he didn’t even mention what was going on. Yesterday he was busy helping the war effort:

Newes is brought of a letter from the Duke of Albemarle, as they were sailing to the Gunfleete, that they were in sight of the Dutch fleete. #

To the Victualling office, and thence upon the River among several vessels, to consider of the sending a recruite of 200 soliders away. #

I went on shore with Captain Erwin at Greenwich, and into the Parke, and there we could hear the guns from the fleete most plainly. #

Seeing the King and Duke come down in their barge to Greenwich-house, I to them, and did give them an account of what I was doing. #

All our hopes now are that Prince Rupert with his fleete is coming back and will be with the fleete this even. #

Away and down to Blackewall, and saw the soldiers shipped off. But, Lord! to see how the poor fellows kissed their wives and sweethearts. #

You can, of course, read all this in 2nd June’s lengthy diary entry which includes much more detail, several other events, and links to oodles of background information, not to mention discussion from the regular followers of the diary. But I realise plenty of people don’t have time for that or simply aren’t interested enough in Pepys, while a few snippets of his life is manageable and entertaining and interesting enough.

It’s not a way to fully understand his life, just as your tweets or my tweets aren’t a good way to find out everything about our lives. But, like everyone else, it’s a way to keep in touch with some of the things he’s up to. And, given the more private nature of the source material, there’s plenty of stuff — gossip, frustrations, marital problems, sex — that you or I would never commit to 140 characters.

Coming up we’ll be hearing the changing news of the Battle as it arrives in London, more work and womanising and, later in the year, the event which is synonymous with London and 1666.

So if you think this might be interesting do Samuel a favour, help him feel as important as he’d like to be, and be his Twitter friend.

The Pretend Office mailing list is run using Mailman and I wasn’t sure how to make the archives public for all to read while also maintaining anonymity for its participants. I didn’t want our full names, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. to be Googleable.

So I wrote a script which scrapes the private Mailman archive pages every hour and makes copies of the them on a publicly viewable webserver. (In some cases I believe it’s possible to directly query the Mailman database but I don’t have access to that, hence this slightly more clunky scraping solution.)

In addition to simply copying the files, the script can optionally perform any or all of these additional tasks:

• Create an RSS feed of recent emails sent to the list.

• Remove all email addresses from the pages, including those in Mailman’s obscured “phil at gyford.com” format.

• Replace the “More info on this list” URL with an alternative.

• Remove some or all of the levels of quoted emails included on the page. (Pretend Office’s public archive includes only a single level of quoting.)

• Search and replace any custom strings you like. (For Pretend Office I stripped out everyone’s surnames.)

• Add custom HTML into the <head> of every page (eg, for adding Google Analytics javascript).

This is all pretty flexible and does the job for me. It can scrape both public and private Mailman archives, assuming you have an email address and password that allows you access to the latter.

There are some less-than-ideal issues:

• The script doesn’t save state between runs, so it has to fetch at least as many pages as you want entries in the RSS feed every time. But this isn’t the end of the world.

• The RSS feed doesn’t include the full text of emails. I think PyRSS2Gen can be extended to allow this but my Python isn’t good enough to work out how — if you know how please do let me know so I can add it.

• The scraping of the source pages may break. I’ve tried it on a couple of Mailman archives and it was fine but scraping is always fragile.

Maybe that’s all useful to someone, somewhere, someday.

It is my very first attempt at Python, so be gentle with me and, if you’re so inclined, tell me all the things I could have done better. I’ve also never used Git or GitHub before, both of which I found as baffling as most version control systems. Again, let me know if I’ve goofed somewhere. Thanks.

Mailman Archive Scraper at GitHub.

OK, there are plenty of differences between the theatre and a mailing list. On stage you have an audience, it’s in real time, you can’t ignore what other people do… it’s entirely different.

And yet there are a number of guidelines I picked up when doing theatrical improvisation that keep coming back to me when taking part in Pretend Office. The collaborative process of creating an unplanned narrative in real (if slow) time is, context aside, remarkably akin to that used on stage.

Here are half a dozen guidelines that apply to both forms of improvisation:

• Don’t kill proposals. If someone suggests a theme, don’t reply with something that kills it. Build on an idea, don’t contradict it. Replying to every suggestion with the equivalent of “Yes, and…” instead of “No, but…” is a good tactic.

• Keep things open. Help people with the above rule by making proposals that give them room to build on it. Don’t leave dead ends.

• Don’t keep pushing. On the other hand, if you keep proposing something and no one is following up on it, don’t keep at it. It’s probably an idea that no one can tell how to follow up. Move on.

• Be adaptable. It’s easy to have a grand plan for a situation and how you it could turn out. However obvious it seems to you, other people probably don’t see it the same way. Or they have an even better idea. Be prepared to go with the flow and ditch your original plan.

• Don’t over do it. Improvisation can get very silly very fast. But you don’t want to get too silly in a way that breaks the frame of the world. For example, in The Thick of It or In The Loop we know that many stupid situations will occur. But if the Prime Minister made an appearance and was played by an elephant it would be too much — it’s the difference between a crazy world and an absurdist one.

• Bring things back. It’s enormously satisfying, both for the audience and actors, when things that we like return. So don’t forget good stuff that’s happened before and repeat them in some way.

These aren’t rules by any means, I’ve never mentioned these to anyone else in the (pretend) office, and I don’t expect anyone to pay any attention to them, never mind follow them. But I find these similarities between the two physically different forms of improvisation fascinating.

A little backstory. A few times over the past couple of years I’ve discussed with freelancing friends how we miss out on some of the aspects of working in a proper company: the Christmas lunch, the after-work drinks, the fire alarm tests. All that bonding.

A couple of us thought that maybe we should start an email list to compensate in some way, although we weren’t quite sure what it would be for. Maybe we’d just send round stupid videos and fail to organise a get-together in December, but it might be fun. So I set up the Pretend Office mailing list with no expectations.

And a weird thing happened.

With no planning, we all started acting as if we were people in a real office. Almost immediately we began to adopt characters and send officious announcements. Soon we were referring to characters in the office who didn’t exist in real life. Meeting rooms were booked, couriers arrived, servers went down, timesheets were requested, and embarrassing emails were accidentally sent to everyone in the company.

I can’t remember the last time I laughed at email so much. It was, and is, the most fun I’ve had on email for a long, long time. I have no idea if it’s funny for other people to read — a few friends I’ve shown it to have loved it, but they’ve known some of the people involved. I hope there’s something there for others who come to it completely unconnected.

After the first few fun days I was a bit worried that we’d used up every office topic. But several weeks in and we’re still going. Longer story arcs have emerged, new people have joined and, while we’ve never yet mentioned what this company does, a world is gradually being created.

I’ll write a bit more about what it’s like, for me, to take part in this, as I’ve found it fascinating as well as hilarious, but in the meantime I hope you enjoy reading some of it.

Strictly speaking this is all copyright infringement of course. For the first two or three I tried mailing the authors but the emails always bounced. Eventually I just stopped trying. The sites were generally last updated in the late 1990s or early 2000s and seem long dormant. Should any authors want them removed I’d be happy to do so but I hope they’re still useful to someone.

Here’s what I’ve archived…

A guide to the alleys, courts, passages and yards of central London by Ivor Hoole

If I could only save one GeoCities site, this would be it. In fact, it’s the only GeoCities site I could recall before I started this. Ivor Hoole has visited, researched and described more than 400 neglected pathways in London. I can’t vouch for the accuracy but it seems like an awesome resource that should be much better known. It’s crying out for a modern interpretation with up-to-date mapping.

It was last updated in August, or maybe November, 2004. Emails sent to two addresses bounced and the last activity I can find online is a post (scroll down) from an Ivor Hoole trying to track down an Evelyn Harris in April 2005. There is then an obituary for an Ivor Hoole from August of that year…

Maritime Archives

Staying in the same “neighbourhood” (The Tropics), this typical GeoCities site by “slcwc” or “Raistlin”. Information about various historical ships, all copied from an out of print book from 1978.

Don’t miss the repeating sound of ocean waves as you browse the site; the midi music files (about half of which still work); the pop-up random quotes; the search page listing Lycos, Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, Web Crawler and DejaNews; and the GeoCities-standard design of the home page, animated gifs, java water reflections and all.

The Coinage of Baltic Countries

“The collector’s homepage, dedicated to the coinage during the different periods in the history of Baltic countries - the Livonia Confederation, the Free City of Riga, coinage of Poland in Riga, Duchy of Livonia, Duchy of Courland…” last updated in September 1999 by Girts Eisters. More 20th century web styles and lots of obscure information about a really specific subject — the very best of the web.

The Davenport Arabian Horse and Related Interests

An awful lot of information about another subject that’s of huge interest to a small number of people. Excellent.

The Family Tree and The Littleport Society

Created by Andrew Martin, about his own genealogical research and the Littleport Society which “was founded in 1987 and it is the only non-political, non-sectarian organization in Littleport whose membership is open to residents and anybody else who holds an interest in this fenland town.” Last updated in May 1999.

The Diary of John Evelyn

“Set in hypertext markup” by Anthony Sallis in April 1999, extracts from Evelyn’s diary, a contemporary of Samuel Pepys. Very handy.

Kim’s Famous Love Letters

Kim wanted to make a new site but didn’t know what it should be about. She thought for days and days and, because she loves “the romance in history”, she “decided to do a site all on famous love letters written throughout history.” All the information is copied from a published book of letters. But I bet the book’s pages doesn’t have a background of repeating love hearts.

Jack of Newbury (c.1465-1519/20)

I haven’t read through it all but I think it’s about this chap and his descendants. Every page is designed entirely differently. So many colours, so much information.

English Revolution

More history, courtesy of Christopher O’Riordan, written in the 1980s and put on GeoCities around 2001. Includes ‘Popular Exploitation of Enemy Estates in the English Revolution’ and ‘Self-determination and the London Transport Workers in the Century of Revolution’. For good measure I also archived the related site by the same author The Thames Watermen in the Century of Revolution.

John H. Bartlett

A site about (or by?) an actor who died in December 2002, and some bits of historical theatre information. More classic GeoCities design work there, and a site keeping the memory of someone alive.

Ocean Liners of a Bygone Era

“A look into the world’s most exciting chapters of maritime history.” Lots and lots of stuff about early twenty century steam ships by a guy in Knoxville, Tennessee called Jason. It must have taken ages to collate all the information and photos. Also includes details of his holiday in London.

So there we go. Little of that could be classed as good, in the sense of well designed, well organised and authoritative material. And yet it’s all the results of people thinking about what they’re passionate about and putting it online. Every site has taken hours and days and maybe weeks of work by its creator. And it’s all a tiny, tiny fraction of what Yahoo! will shortly be erasing from the world.

Of course, GeoCities is, and always has been, awful. Its “neighbourhood” structure (described in this post by Jason Scott about Archive Team’s medal-worthy efforts to archive everything at GeoCities) is bizarre. The sites are primitive both technically and in terms of design. It’s a world of abandoned and forgotten pages created in a world when any and all new technologies and styles were utilised in an effort to fend off anything that could be termed “good design”. Tiled backgrounds, clashing colours, rivers of centered text, animated gifs, frames, midi background music, guestbook pages, Java applets… it’s enough to make the owner of your average multi-coloured mess of a MySpace page look like a hard core advocate of the International Typographic Style.

GeoCities is an awful, ugly, decrepit mess. And this is why it will be sorely missed. It’s not only a fine example of the amateur web vernacular but much of it is an increasingly rare example of a period web vernacular. GeoCities sites show what normal, non-designer, people will create if given the tools available around the turn of the millennium.

This isn’t solely a matter of a period style of graphic design. It’s about the changing concept of what a peronsal website is. GeoCities began in the mid 1990s and many of the abandoned websites there were last updated within a couple of years of 2000. This was before weblogs became widespread, an era when people had “homepages” rather than “blogs”. Consequently the structure of these sites is different to most modern day ones created by ordinary people.

Today, if you want a website, it’s often easiest to set up a weblog and start posting, creating an archive of individual articles. Ten years ago a personal website was usually a collection of static HTML pages created by hand or using primitive tools. Consequently every GeoCities site has its own unique structure appropriate to its content.

Because of this the websites appear less like journals and more like published pamphlets. Despite the often confusing designs they are frequently a more coherent whole — in terms of structure — than a modern weblog. A weblog is a stream of posts organised by date or category or tag, while a GeoCities site is created with a structure that is, hopefully, more related to its content. The creator probably thought about what they wanted to publish and produced a website which accommodated that from the start.

This isn’t better or worse than a weblog but it’s a fundamentally different kind of site and one that is probably increasingly rare among amateur website creators. Anyone who’s passionate about a topic today is usually best served by firing up a free or cheap weblog and throwing stuff up, one post at a time. Without that the author had to consider everything they wanted to publish and create a site to match, updating content in place as they wrote more.

While I rarely visit any GeoCities-hosted sites I’m still bothered that it’s disappearing. In the same way, I rarely read old books or newspapers but that doesn’t mean I’d be happy if they were all destroyed. It’s a shame that while many companies — such as newspapers, magazines and broadcasters — are putting much of their historical archives online for the first time, we’re simultaneously destroying online archives created by individuals. It’s only thanks to the efforts of people like the Internet Archive and Archive Team that we’ll have a record of what people, rather than companies, published in the past.

As companies like Yahoo! switch off swathes of our online universe little fragments of our collective history disappear. They might be ugly and neglected fragments of our history but they’re still what got us where we are today.