UK copyright under attack!

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Under proposed new legislation contained in the recent Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which received Royal Ascent last week, you may end up not retaining the copyright of all the photographs that you take.

Here’s some more detailed information about this from the BBC, Mashable and The Register. As usual, the changes to the UK Copyright Law are buried in the main act and only now are seeing the light of day.

What to do? I’ve written to my MP about the changes, you can do the same using the Write to Them website to make your feelings known.

It seems the UK government is more interested in protecting the copyright of large media corporations (mostly USA based) than UK individuals copyright.

This is not right and need to be changed.

Copy of Letter to my MP.

I am sure that you will have seen some of the press coverage about this yesterday and today, such as from the BBC, Mashable and The Register. I cannot understand why the UK government seems so intent dismissing the copyright of creators of photographs. Yesterday I took a picture of a plant in my back garden. That image is mine and will always be so.

However, now that I have loaded this into social media and some of the Metadata has been stripped off – by them, it may be considered an ‘orphan’ work by some and according to my understanding of the potential legislation, available for reuse and profiteering by others without a single royalty payment being made to me. Surely this cannot be right?

Why does the UK government want to take away my copyright, yet seems so eager to legislate for big media (usually USA based) organisations to keep their copyright. These changes to copyright law will put the UK out of step with may other countries and I cannot understand the logic in the changes.

I would appreciate your comments and feedback on this and if you agree with the intention to strip my rights to copyright away.

I’ll also post any reply I get.

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This device could save you life!

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I was at our local supermarket, ASDA at the weekend and gave some money to a charity promoting the use of Defibrillators. During a short conversation with the collection guy we agreed that there were too few of these in public places such as Supermarkets and on the High Street and that more of them need to be available to reduce the risk of people dying from a sudden heart attack.

What surprised me from the conversation was that he said that many of the Supermarkets seem uninterested in having Defibrillators at their stores, even when they could be supplied for free! Surely this is a public services that the likes of ASDA, Tesco’s, Salisbury’s etc. would jump at to show their involvement with the local community?

How is it that the French seem to be way ahead on this? You see them every where in France.

I see from some Internet searches that some individual supermarkets have taken the step to have one on their premises.

But it seems rather disappointing that the big ones seem not to be interested.

Let’s hope they change their mind’s soon.

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Broadband Speed Monthly Figures

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Not a great deal to report on this front from February except for the uninterrupted service. However, I did find out that BT are upgrading my local fibre box which I am told will give even higher download speeds once all updates are complete.

On one of the monitoring days I did see some periods where the meter was reading around 52MB! But it only lasted for a few minutes so it’s not really worth logging that. Of course the next questions is to see what tools can accurately measure these higher speed.
Most of the Broadband speed checkers are nothing more than marketing tools, however there are a few that do seem to be able to give constant feedback such as ttbmeter from ThinkBroadband and the BBC iPlayer speed connection checker. However as I have mentioned in a number of previous posts, the test results you get with these tools does vary according to the age of PC that you use to check it and the quality of the network socket software on your PC.

On a more general front, I see that according to research from regulator Ofcom, the average speed of home broadband is now 12Mbps, the BBC article covering the background can be found here.

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Sibly Hall Phone Mast – Update

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View looking into Fulmer Close

Great front page news coverage in today’s Woodley & Earley Chronicle about the Sibly Hall phone mast that has appeared in Radstock Copse in the last two weeks – see previous post.

The story has not appeared one the Woodley & Earley Chronicle website as yet, but I would expect it there in the next 24 hours.

I would expect there to be more reaction to this story over the next few days.

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It has arrived!!

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View looking into Fulmer Close

Much to the consternation of local people, the Telecommunications Mast in Redhatch Copse, objected to by just about everybody during the Planning Application phase has finally been erected.

Not only does it seem to be placed closer to houses in the Fulmer Close and Sibley Park Road than it looked like it would be from the plans submitted to Wokingham Council Planning Department. We also now get to see what a 30 Meter mast looks like in reality! Clearly the ‘test’ pictures submitted in the Visual Impact Assessment along with the planning application showed little of the impact that the steel structure now appears to deliver. Was that a deliberate ploy?

View looking from Sibley Park Road

I understood that from 2013, local residents were going to be in a ‘real’ position to influence planning application decisions where they would have a direct and detrimental impact to the local environment. It appears that this is one example where that did not apply.

One wonders now, just how much impact the development of the houses on the Sibley Hall grounds will be when it goes ahead. Let alone the demolition of Sibley Hall itself. Clearly the impact to the local surroundings will be much higher than we have been led to believe based on the images, surveys and planning application information that was submitted and granted despite much local resident opposition.

What a difference moving the aerials from Sibley Hall has made.

Well done Wokingham Council, thanks for another job well done.

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Who will be held accountable for the Mid-Staffs debacle?

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The revelations delivered yesterday in the report into the Mid-Staffs NHS debacle left me stunned. I knew from reading many articles about this in the past that it would be bad, but this was just unbelievable.

What to do next? I am absolutely sure that the general public want someone to be held to account for this mess and despite the description of this disaster being revealed as a ‘Total Systems Failure’; these ‘Systems’ were put in place by Humans ranging from the then Government setting policy to the various levels of management in the NHS implementing these ‘Systems’.

For me, I would say that there has been a total ‘corruption of position’ within senior management associated with the Mid-Staffs crisis.

As these ‘Systems’ were run and managed by Humans, does it not show that either the wrong people were employed – though I guess that ‘must have an uncaring attitude to patients’ would not have appeared on any job description, or that the people that were employed got so involved in their part of running the ‘System’ that they became corrupted by their own position within the ‘System’ unable or unwilling to do anything against the ‘System’.

What is staggering to me is that some of the people involved in the Mid-Staff crisis seem to have been championed by others within the ‘System’ and moved on to higher level management jobs within the NHS. Did they then let out a sigh of relief or simply carry that corrupted position with them to their new ‘slot’ within the ‘System’? We may never really know, of course that is until the next enquiry exposes yet more ‘Systems’ failures.

It is sad that today no one seems to have the backbone to admit that they have done wrong, we still seem to ‘pay-off’ the failures who are then free to take up other positions within the same organisation to possibly continue their ‘corruption of yet another position’

When will we learn our lessons?

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MP’s and the trust of the people.

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With Chris Huhne now admitting perverting the course of justice one wonders what MP’s will be trying to do to make us believe that they are telling the truth when they speak to us! That is before the next incident occurs.
People like Chris Huhne do a great disservice to the majority of MP’s who I am sure are honest and hardworking, just like we thought he was.
But the next time I hear any politician speak on any subject, I shall in increase the amount of salt that I take with their comments!
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Broadband Speed Monthly Figures & BT Cloud

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Broadband Speed

As my January BT-ISP Broadband speed figures show it was a steady month with no outages and a steady 33MB download speed.

Lets hope that steady state continues.

BT Cloud

With regards to BT Cloud, a new service from BT to compete with the likes of on-line storage from Dropbox, Google, & Amazon. It seems that BT need to get their marketing act together.

Last week I received an email from BT inviting me to sign up to BT Cloud. Had a look and found that it implied that as a BT Infinity 2 user I was able to have 50GB as part of my contract – you can add further storage capacity if required after you sign up.

So signed up and connected my account to BT Cloud. Today received an email telling me that I now had 2GB of stage ready to use. After uploading some test files and checking the status, it did in fact say that I was using .001 % of my 2GB!

So went back and checked the BT web pages & emails and sure enough everywhere you look it says that BT Infinity 2 users can have 50GB of storage. When I tried to add more storage to my GB, it then told me that I already had 50GB inclusive with BT Infinity2!

So off to the phones, without dragging this out, after six calls to BT Sales & Technical (who did not even know what BT Cloud was!) I finally arrived at person in sales who told me to get the 50GB of storage, you had to renew your BT contract for a further 12 months. Nothing is stated about this on any of the related BT  Cloud web pages/emails.

On a technical point, when I received the initial email with the link to BT Cloud, I was asked to install BT Cloud on my PC. Stopping that download and fishing around I soon came across the Web interface through the new BT Services page, once you have logged in.

It certainly seems strange that BT would not have their ‘message’ completely sorted out before launching their product. To have to spend 30 minutes on the phone to find that I have to renew my contract is really a bit of a con! Lets se what happens with my feedback calls.

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Have High Street Gift Cards had their Day

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Gift_cards With the demise of Comet, Jessop’s and now doubts hanging over HMV, have high street gift cards & vouchers had their day?

Luckily I had spent my HMV gift vouchers in the week after Christmas. However, what about the people that had delayed their spend?

One friend who had received over £500.00 in Jessop’s vouchers from family & friends towards a high-end camera found to his dismay that once the problems with Jessop’s were announced, vouchers & gift card were immediately voided. The same has happened with HMV vouchers. Comet on the other hand did give a few days notice.

Listening to TV pundits, there may be a number of ways of getting some money back through the Credit card companies, though not if they were purchased with a Debit card. It’s been a costly experience for many high street customers which will make many think that they will not use gift cards again. I for one won’t.

Whilst we may have our issues about useless vouchers, we must not forget that with the demise of these stores, the hardest hit will be the staff who will find it very hard to find new jobs in a continually shrinking high street.

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