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So you don’t need a licence like a radio station to get a base station. But you can’t do absolutely anything you like with it.The Department of Trade and Industry’s spectrum watchdog, the Radiocommunications Agency, has been seeking a consensus on how the law might be changed to permit commercial services on the 2.4GHz band. According to an Agency spokeswoman, the RA’s recommendations to government will be published “soon”.The RA can’t say how quickly the law will change, and neither can interested parties such as Telewest and BT. But Lowe believes the barriers to commercial exploitation will be removed by the end of the year BT is equally confident.

Indeed, it is planning to launch a public trial service next month. In the meantime, with little being done to police the Act, more hotspots will undoubtedly join Joltage’s UK outpost and extend similar collectives, like Sputnik, into Britain. But whoever serves up public Wi-Fi access, it’s clear there’s demand for it. The number of notebooks used on public transport and in coffee bars is a sign that while Purton may be the first village with high-speed wireless net access, it won’t be the last..

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” – Pogo, 1971

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” – Pogo, 1971
“How insane does an industry have to be when it manages to screw its partners, its customers and its sources, all in one move?” – Doc Searls, 2002One of the tough nuts technology hath wrought is copyright and its limits, and what to do about it. Information – aka “intellectual property”, aka “content” – is clearly the industry of the digital future. Creating things out of thin air and getting paid for it is a terrific business, whether it be music, movies, software or this column. There’s no question about this, unless you happen to be brain-dead, a hermit, a politician, a lawyer or an executive of a music, movie or software firm.Way too many people are spending what could be productive time dealing with this issue. I have no doubt that just the legal fees being expended on the issue of “copyright protection” could put a serious dent in world hunger.It’s not that the stakes aren’t high: in fact, that’s the problem. Copyright industries contributed $535bn to the American economy in 2001, says the Motion Picture Association of America. Copyrighted software, music, films, books and other content was growing twice as fast as all the other US industries combined.No one complains more about “piracy” than these industries, yet there is a close correlation between piracy and success.

The US recording industry complains that $4.5bn is lost annually, yet it generates $17bn in revenue. The software industry claims $12bn in annual piracy: Microsoft alone raked in $25bn last year.Software marketers will tell you that if people will steal software, you want ‘em stealing yours, not the competition’s These “thieves” become customers. Marketers also say that the hardest thing is to get people to care about your product. It’s hard, and expensive, to get the attention of media-saturated folk. When millions download a program, song or movie, they pay for bandwidth and give their time and attention.