Republishing in full not allowed without permission.. Source: bhatt.id.au/blog/

This is a list of articles, photography and other media work I’ve done as a freelance photographer/journalist during January 2012. I intend to continue writing freelance articles and do more radio interviews in the future. They will be linked to on a regular basis.

Interviews, Talks and Events

Listen to my 20th January 2012 – discussion on ABC Radio NSW and ACT Evenings with Dominic Knight re Cricket Australia photography rules. MP3 recording courtesy of ABC Radio.

27th January 2012 – 20 minute discussion on ABC Adelaide Radio Mornings with Ian Henschke about the new Facebook Timeline feature and upcoming changes to Google’s Privacy policy.

Print Journalism

I wrote quite a few articles for GEARE Magazine about: Geocaching, Introduction to 3D Printing, Big feature article on Cameras and other Tech to take on a Safari trip, How to take Panorama photos, Underwater cameras review, Kindle 4 ereader review, Motorola Razr review and Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook review.

It is uncertain when this issue will be published and get to newsagents, my guess is early March.

Online Reviews & Analysis

Technology Spectator: Thwarting the great firewall on 19th January 2012. When travelling overseas business executives need to stay connected to their email accounts, keep track of industry news and use social media. But if you’re travelling to China, Saudi Arabia or another authoritarian regime, you’ll need a virtual private network (VPN) to bypass state censorship restrictions which hinder accessing parts of the internet.

Technology Spectator: EXCLUSIVE: Cricket Australia’s poor Twitter form on 20th January 2012. . If you take a photo at an Australian cricket match this summer and publish it to Twitter or Facebook you could be slapped with a ban from Cricket Australia thanks to draconian rules in place to protect media broadcast partners.

ABC The Drum Unleashed: Digital purchases: nothing to hold, nothing to keep on 24th January 2012. What happens to the concept of ownership of books, music, DVD Movie and TV series collections etc in the shift from analogue to digital?

Technology Spectator: Cricket Australia’s Twitter reality check on 25th January 2012. Cricket Australia is open to changing its policy on spectators posting photos taken at the game on social media sites, says chief executive officer James Sutherland.

Technology Spectator: REVIEW: HTC Velocity 4G on 30th January 2012. The HTC Velocity 4G launched last week by Telstra is the first LTE/4G mobile phone available in Australia. Until now the only device able to use Telstra’s new mobile network has been a 4G USB laptop modem that I tested in late 2011.

Photojournalism

My favourite photos for January are:

My full moon photo was featured as an “Interesting Photo” by Flickr on 9th January.

Visit the Rambling Thoughts Blog regularly to read articles about Technology, Personal Finance, TV Shows, Politics, Environment, Books and more

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People of Australia rejoice. There’s a new crime drama on TV and it isn’t Underbelly 52: NSW Rum Rebellion. The Straits is a new ten part series set in far north tropical Queensland and the Torres Strait. I just watched the media preview disk of the first 2 episodes and will definitely see the rest of the series via ABC iView.

Most of you won’t have ever traveled to the really northern parts of Queensland or looked at a map of Islands in the Torres Strait, so you won’t have realised that it’s relatively easy to hop between them to Papua New Guinea (PNG).

PNG’s Highlands are infamous for tribal fights. Traditional fighting weapons are spears, and bows and arrows but nowadays sophisticated weaponry such as army-issue machine guns are commonly used. Most illegal weapons in PNG are stolen from police or military armouries, while weapons smuggled into PNG often come from Australia by sea.

The show’s storyline revolves around ructions in the Montebello family led by patriarch Harry, over which of the 3 brothers will take over their smuggling business.

Fans of HBO’s Deadwood TV series and the films Bourne Supremecy, X-Men 2 will be familiar with Brian Cox who plays Harry Montebello. If you thought being fed to the pigs alive in the US wild west frontier town of Deadwood was a really painful way to die you haven’t seen payback in Far North Queensland and PNG style.

There are similarities between The Straits, the aforementioned Deadwood and the FX cable TV show Justified which centres around Kentucky crime families. All 3 shows are quality crime dramas about life on the edge of civilised territory where the black market flourishes.

ABC TV commissioned Matchbox Pictures to create a 10 episodes series of The Straits and their team has done an HBO-esque job with presumably far less budget. If successful I’m sure ABC/Matchbox hope to sell broadcast rights for the show to overseas networks.

Pay attention to the screen while watching because bikey gangs, smugglers, raskols and a family plotting against each other make for an interesting and unpredictable plot. I wonder what Tourism Queensland thinks of the show’s tagline “Beautiful One Day, Deadly The Next” ?

The Straits premieres as a double episode on Thursday 2nd February at 830pm on ABC1 and is repeated on ABC2 at 1030pm Friday 3rd February. Let’s see how it competes against CSI on 9, Law and Order on 10 and Desperate Housewives on 7. Perhaps it deserved the Sunday night flagship timeslot on ABC 1 instead?

Other Reviews

Tim Winton wrote of people who live in frontier towns – like those in our north on the shores of the narrow, shallow waters between us and PNG – that they measure up to the myth, “do things, remember things, and recall things in their carriage that the rest of us just dreamt of as children”. And this series gets what Winton called “the scale of things, the grandeur and craziness of it” just right.
- The Australian

In the premiere there’s a hefty dose of crimes: drug importation by boat across the Torres Straits from PNG, drug manufacturing, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, use of firearms, kidnapping, embezzlement and even murder (and what a novel death scene it is!).

These characters should be entirely unlikeable. They are, after all, violent crooks with no sign of redemption (yet).

Yet there is an empathy cleverly created by the boys’ inability to rise to the ambitions of their father. However flawed they are, there is also devotion to the family unit.
- TV Tonight

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I’ve always been a cricket fan. Last week I attended a T20 Big Bash league match at the Sydney Cricket Ground and found that the Cricket Australia terms and conditions of spectator entry regarding photography inside the venue were seemingly arbitrarily enforced.

When entering private land you consent to rules that land owners impose on you including re: photography. Unfortunately rights to take photos in public areas are becoming equally restricted and often mistakenly overpoliced by security guards (see http://photorights.4020.net)

This prompted me to write an article about the matter for Technology Specator:

If you take a photo at an Australian cricket match this summer and publish it to Twitter or Facebook you could be slapped with a ban from Cricket Australia thanks to draconian rules in place to protect media broadcast partners.

Amatuer photographers theoretically risk being “prohibited and disqualified from purchasing tickets for or entering into” any Cricket Australia match or event ever again, but cricket venue entry rules regarding photography are honoured more in the breach than in the observance.
- read more at http://technologyspectator.com.au/emerging-tech/social-media/cricket-australias-poor-twitter-form

That evening I got invited to discuss the issue on ABC Radio NSW and ACT Evenings. Click on the link below to listen to the 10 minute discussion about the democratisation of photography and how corporate rules and the law are lagging behind the reality of cheap omni-present digital cameras.

Listen to my 20/01/2012 discussion on ABC Radio NSW and ACT Evenings with Dominic Knight re Cricket Australia photography rules. MP3 recording courtesy of ABC Radio.

Several days later Cricket Australia’s CEO commented on the issue so I wrote a followup story highlighting that:

In the meantime, the official Cricket Australia Twitter account and least two Big Bash T20 teams are openly encouraging fans to take match photos and share them online, muddying the legal waters around Cricket Australia’s terms of venue entry for spectators.
read more at http://technologyspectator.com.au/emerging-tech/social-media/cricket-australias-twitter-reality-check

Hopefully by the time the 2012-2013 Cricket season starts Cricket Australia will officially allow photos to be taken at venues for non-commercial personal uses such as publishing to personal blogs or social media accounts like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or Flickr.

Otherwise fans will not be able to capture photo memories of the atmosphere and famous players at matches as I did during the 2005 Super Test series (Flintoff, Mcgrath and Lara pictured below).

Visit the Rambling Thoughts Blog regularly to read articles about Technology, Personal Finance, TV Shows, Politics, Environment, Books and more

Republishing in full not allowed without permission.. Source: bhatt.id.au/blog/

What happens to the concept of ownership of books, music, DVD Movie & TV series collections etc in the shift from Analog to Digital?

As a journalist and keen observer of how technology affects society I see many upsides to digital content such as ease of use and the ability to carry around massive collections of books, music etc stored in small, light electronic devices.

However while we rush headlong into a digital content future there are several downsides that are not getting the attention they deserve.

EDITOR: This article was syndicated/re-published at the ABC Online – The Drum Unleashed opinion columns website under the title Digital purchases: nothing to hold, nothing to keep.

When I “buy” an eBook from Amazon.com or you “buy” a song from iTunes we aren’t actually buying anything at all. What we’re doing is paying for the legal licensing right to read/listen to some bits of digital information on a limited number of compatible devices.

CNET reported last week that EMI, one of the 4 largest recording industry companies in the world is suing MP3 reseller ReDigi because:

“Music buyers may be able to sell their used CDs and vinyl albums, but they’re not allowed to sell or distribute used digital tracks and albums in the same way.”

Within the next decade users of sites like Bookcrossing may only be able to swap older books that have been printed in paper versions as new books will likely be eBook only. The same will apply to 2nd hand book charity fundraisers like Lifeline Bookfest and charities like Room to Read which collects books and creates libraries in the 3rd world.

Restrictive Terms of Use

According to consumer rights organisation Choice:

“Under the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty of 1996, it is illegal in most countries (including Australia since 2007) to attempt to circumvent the copyright protections built into DRM [digital rights management], even when these measures go beyond the protection of legal rights. If you wish to have true ownership over the products you buy, and use them how and when you want to, ideally you would buy products that have no DRM at all”.

As an example this is a portion of the copyright warning included in The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien eBook which I purchased to read on my Kindle:

“By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable, right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen.”

Similar terms and conditions apply to content purchased from Apple’s iTunes store. Jonathan Handel, a Los Angeles-based entertainment attorney told CNN that:

‘When we buy something from iTunes, we are paying for the license to listen to music or watch a movie on our iPhone or other Apple device. But we are not buying the product itself and so we can’t actually own it’.

Corporate censorship and remote removal of digital content that you’ve purchased are also valid issues to consider such as Amazon remotely deleting purchased copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from Kindle devices in 2009 and Apple censoring an iPad version of a web comic based on James Joyce’s famous book Ulysses.

Losing Digital Content or Access To It

New York technology attorney Mark Grossman told CNN last year that:

‘Anyone who tried to take Apple to court over a lost digital file would lose very quickly. “The argument is, you could have backed it up,” he said. “The contract clearly says ‘we are not responsible,’ and it’s firmly established in the law.”’

There is no guarantee that 50 years in the future, or even 10 years in the future that the companies which we “bought” these books, music etc from will still exist.

Consumer electronics gadgets have a short lifespan due to planned obsolescence. Ebook readers, mobile phones and tablet devices can only be expected to last a few years before the battery or other parts of the hardware fails.

So if Amazon went out of business in 2020 and my Kindle’s storage got corrupted I wouldn’t be able to re-download the Kindle ebooks I’d purchased from their servers onto a new device.

Lending and Gifts

Analog printed books, music CD’s/LP’s are easy to lend, sell second hand or give away as gifts.

I have several books on my shelf that were given to me as presents by friends and teachers in primary and high school 15-20 years ago. If I wanted to I could give these books to future generations of my family with no legal issues at all.

Reading those paper books is easy but trying to open a digital file from that era is hard, especially if it’s stored in an obsolete computer document format on an obsolete storage format like 5.25″/3.5″ floppy disks.

This assumes that the storage hardware would work after such a length of time and the data had been backed up in the first place, which are topics I explored in a previous ABC The Drum Unleashed story “Digital Dark Ages?”.

If I really like an ebook I can’t move it from my computer backups folder to give it to a friend unless it is out of copyright and therefore public domain.

Unfortunately the Howard government’s 2004 Australia/USA Free Trade Agreement came at a price. A lengthy increase in the term of copyright meant that the potential benefit of many free public domain ebooks becoming available to Australians in the early 21st century was blocked.

Very limited lending of Kindle ebooks is available for US buyers but not to Australians. Even that restricted lending ability has been shown to be at the whim of Amazon who briefly blocked functionality for the 3rd party site Lendle last year.

Judging a Bookshelf

Judging a new friend’s bookshelf on your first visit to their place is human nature, don’t pretend you haven’t done it.

I’ve certainly done it because the books people read and keep as their favourites are often a strong predictor of their personality and interests in life, or at least how they want to be perceived.

One glance at a bookshelf that contains a battered Lonely Planet guide to Europe on Shoestring, glossy wilderness themed coffee table photobook and paperbacks of Robinson Crusoe reveals a lot.

The owner of those books is a traveller. They probably started when they were young and had a small budget. The glossy photobook could indicate that they’re a photographer who appreciates natural beauty and the Robinson Crusoe book that they’re more likely to go on a holiday to an isolated location than a bustling metropolis.

However within the next 5-10 years we may not be able to judge new friends by their bookshelves because it’s likely that their book collection won’t have any physical manifestation, instead living inside electronic devices like the Amazon Kindle or Apple iPad.

You may scoff but think about what’s happened to the music industry in the last 10 years. An 18 year old isn’t likely to buy a pile of CD’s and display them in their room. They’ll pirate the songs via Bit torrent or buy the song from iTunes and play it on their Apple device.

Unless you scroll through the contents of their phone when they leave it unlocked near you, the breadth and depth of their music collection will be uncertain.

With Eyes Wide Open

The shift from analog to digital for books, music, movies, DVD Movie & TV series collections etc etc is well underway and unstoppable.

However it is important that we understand the full implications of this shift, fight against onerous terms and conditions of use and question techno-utopian statements by cyberculture commentators like Kevin Kelly that “the trend is clear: access trumps possession. Access is better than ownership”.

Visit the Rambling Thoughts Blog regularly to read articles about Technology, Personal Finance, TV Shows, Politics, Environment, Books and more