My message to the music and movie industry: Don't fight, debate.

SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and many more laws have sparked debate around copyright infringement. Pirates state that the prices for content are too damn high, while content creators say they really need the money to keep the content coming. But the reason most people download, is not as much about the money, as it is about the ease of it. So instead of fighting the pirates, the movie and music industry should listen to them, and see how they can help, it's the old idea of customer relations management, you see what your customers want, and provide it. To help move the content industry towards this situation, I'd like to give a shoutout to the companies that facilitate this process.

Spotify!

Spotify is an awesome app, if you haven't been living under a rock (I like cliché expressions), for the last year

or so, you've probably heard abot it. You can listen to any music you want from your computer, and for a small fee, also on your mobile devices and without ads. For me this is the best example of making it easier to be legal. Since I've started using spotify, I haven't illegally downloaded a single song, simply because it's much quicker to open up spotify and play it. I no longer have to go through the hassel of opening up my torrent client, looking for a torrent with a good seeder to leacher ratio, clicking the download button, and hoping it'll be a good quality torrent.

Netflix

Netflix is not yey available in Belgium, so I'm unable to say much about it. But the streaming of movies sounds like an easier thing to do than look for a version on the pirate bay that doesn't have japanese subtitles, or worse, is dubbed in German. I wish content creators weren't so picky about where their content could be viewed. Maybe I'm just ignorant of some facts, but I don't get the point. If I watch a movie in Belgium on netflix, and they get the money for it, what's the problem?

YouTube's content id

Youtube is a great way to share content, including content you don't have the right to redistribute. What I like about Youtube's way of handling this, is that they don't just allow copyright holders to take it down, but also to make use of theseuploads of their work. The claim many pirates have made, that these distributions of content also promote the content are valid, so content creaters can benefit a lot from just leaving them up on youtube, and making part of the money they would have made, by getting part of the revenue from the ads on youtube, and yes, I know google takes a cut of that too, but In my opinion, they deserve it fror creating this system.

Don't get squished

Play my code shows the power of the web as a platform. They've built a site where you can create any game you can imagine, and publish it for the world to play in their browser. Below, you can see my first steps into the playmycode world.

How retina ipad screens may even help the blind.

By now, everybody knows that the new ipad has a retina screen, which even to my visually impaired eyes, looked stunning. When I first heard about the ipad, I wasn't too hyped about it though, because the graphics and graphics performance were the only big new features, which to a visually impaired, isn't very interesting. But the increase in the number of people reading on retina screens may cause a change, that will be very beneficial to people who requir a screen reader to read.

Paper publisher's inability to change.

Last year, when my mom got an ipad 2, I was very excited. It was the first time that I'd be able to read the Humo, a Belgian magazine, or so I thought. After tripple clicking the home button to activate VoiceOver, I put my finger on a large piece of text, which was immediately followed by the disappointment of hearing the clicky noise you hear when you put your finger on a place where VoiceOver has nothing to read.

Not knowing much about magazines in the news stand, I tried another magazine, with the same result. I became suspicious about the way magazines published their content to these devices. After doing some research online, my suspicion proved right: to keep the pixel perfect control about the layout of their content, these magazines sent huge images to their readers, which is not a problem for sighted people, because the text is visible as usual. This only becomes a problem when you try to select text, or, as I found out, try to read it with voiceOver.

What these magazine publishers don't seem to get, is that people want to consume media in the form they prefer, not the form the publishers prefer. This is also shown by the increasing popularity of apps like instapaper or readability.

Publishers need to accept that on an iPad, their magazine will look different from the same edition viewed on an HD Television, but also know that people might want to view their content in a text-based browser. The fact that so many types of devices are now connected to the internet, makes it possible for people to read in whatever way they like, if publishers would make the content plain text. I've sent Humo a message, both via their website, and on twitter. On twitter, I got the typical "We'll look into it" response, and I haven't heard from them since.

Retina displays and bandwidth limits to the rescue!

People who have used the new ipad, will know that content that doesn't have a high enough resolution for the retina display, look worse than they would on a lower-res display. This is especially noticeable on the web, where many sites just give you images with normal resolution. Magazine publishers probably don't want their magazines to look bad on the new ipad, but shoving an image with 4 times as many pixels als they used to have down people's wifi, and possibly 3G, or LTE connections, will not make for a nice reading experience either, making for download times in which you could make a trip to the moon and back, and still see the spinning loading icon, and making you reach your download cap by downloading 1 magazine, and a lolcat picture. My hope is that publishers will finally start adopting plain text formats such as HTML, or ship their magazines in the ibook format or as pdf. This way, they'll give their users a much better reading experience, and avoid articles like this one,this and this one.