Today in the Weekly Hat, a special piracy-themed edition. Since it was quite easy to draw a line between our two main news stories, I decided it may as well be deliberate. So, we have piracy on both the high seas and the internet, in two large chunks. Plus the usual other stuff.

Oh, and if you like my bloggings (someone reads this, right?), I have another venture coming up in the next few days that might interest you. Announcement to follow, probably on my Twitter, or the next available Behatted newspost after the launch. And next week’s Weekly Hat. And anywhere else I can fit it in.

But today:

• Piracy: On the seas!: Britons kidnapped by pirates! Polite people aghast!
• Piracy: On the line!: UK government getting tough on web piracy! Internet users aghast!
• Media and stuff: Couldn’t think of a piracy connection for this bit. I did try.
• Behatted Photo Of The Week: But don’t worry, this bit is all pirated up.

Piracy: On the sea!

This week, seafaring pirates made a big news comeback in the UK by kidnapping a couple of our citizens. Having studied our PR tactics, they held on to them for a few days before announcing that, yes, they would quite like us to pay a big fat ransom. They have also stressed that their hostages will not be hurt “if they do not harm us”.

Now, this seems to be a negotiating failure, because once you’ve admitted you won’t harm your “hostages”, where do you go with this? You suggest a ransom amount, it isn’t paid, then what? Suggest another one, I suppose, going slightly lower, until you reach a level that both parties will accept.

This can go on for another day or two, until finally you end up handing back the hostages for £2.50. Have even the pirates gone soft? What would Long John Silver say?

Well, he’d probably start by pointing out that this isn’t exactly typical. Since piracy made its big comeback in the waters around Somalia and the like, people seem to be getting back into the habit of fearing them. I read a lengthy feature in Wired just the other month about the tactics used by companies who made their living retrieving hostages from pirates.

So maybe these pirates have just softened their normal hardened sensibilities to appeal to we Brits, with our crazy traditions, legendary reservedness and tight, tight purse strings. After all, they normally deal with big corporations and their ruthless hired negotiators, so spitballing with the family of some people from Kent must be weird.

Of course, these pirates are a huge disgrace to their predecessors. No parrots, wooden legs or hooks, nor are they as fey, made-up or clumsy as Captain Jack Sparrow. (A character who did more to rob pirates of their dignity than even Peter Pan.)  But on the other hand, if they still sailed around like that, people would laugh at them. Like it or not, they have moved with the times in order to remain a serious threat. Go team pirate!

Or, um, not in this case. This article now hits the obvious stumbling block: Piracy is seen as “cool”, generally featuring on the list of Objectively Cool Things with zombies, ninjas and Vikings. But then you realise that you wouldn’t particularly like it if you were kidnapped by pirates, would you? Or eaten by zombies? Or if your mum was raped and pillaged by Vikings?

(If you would like any of the above, then please comment below with your IP address so I can block you from ever accessing my website again. Thanks.)

Which is perhaps why many blogs have refrained from launching into idle commentary pieces on this delicate issue, because even though the alleged awesomeness of pirates!!!! provides ample fodder, there are people’s lives in danger, so you don’t want to tackle it with too much levity. For reasons of, y’know, good taste and shit.

Thank god for me, eh?

Piracy: On The Line!

Never has a theme been more obvious. This week, Peter Mandelson, in his bid to become The Most Popular Man In The World, announced tough new measures to cut off the internet connections of persistent filesharers, if they are caught three times.

Predictably, since freedom of access to absolutely everything is seen by most internet users as a fundamental right, this caused a bit of annoyance in more or less every online place it was discussed. Obviously, no-one is going to leap forward to defend their right to illegally download copyrighted material, for reasons that should be obvious from its name.

However, we are (possibly) talking about the curtailment of free speech or something, and people love that sort of thing. See also: Trafigura scandal.

Personally, I’m not… as incensed as I could be. Although I think this is a staggering over-reaction and gives far too much life-ruining power to people who should not have it, I will reluctantly concede that it was inevitable that something like this would happen. The internet wasn’t going to get away with casually trading in stuff they should have paid for indefinitely.

And at least they had the decency to wait until it became a lot easier to live without illegal downloading. From a UK perspective, most music nowadays appears on Spotify so quickly that it’s barely worth the effort of starting your BitTorrent client. Thanks to the rise of iPlayer and its ilk, even downloading TV shows seems a lot less necessary. If cinema tickets were just a little less psychotically expensive, we’d have the trifecta.

But the critics of this policy have many a valid point, such as the difficulty of “proving” that someone has done the deed, as well as the questionable sense of cutting off the internet connection to whole families because daddy done downloaded the new Coldplay album a few days before release day. Aren’t we meant to be striving for Digital Inclusion? Internet access for all? Other tedious buzzwords? And thus, isn’t this rather anti-point?

End of piece. Short summary: Stricter discipline for illegal downloads fair enough, cutting off internet dubious and complicated. Me am blog robot.

Media and stuff

• This week on The Sarah Jane Adventures, David Tennant appeared as Doctor Who, for the first time since the Easter special. Following this, he has only three ‘specials’ remaining before his well-publicised regeneration. Ratings duly doubled. The first and second parts are now up on iPlayer. But was it any good? Well… the second part was best. Thanks to some heavy acting by Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane herself) and Nigel Havers (the guest star who wasn’t the Doctor), the finale works nicely, the emotion comes off and the Doctor gets to run around and shout gibberish words, but still let the regular cast save the day. Oh, and there’s a few enigmatic hints about his upcoming demise. Good fun.
  The first part suffers somewhat from spending its whole length doing faintly predictable set-up. It’s still watchable, but in a more obvious way than usual. Oh, and K9 is brilliant in the first half. Steals the whole episode, even with the Doc’s big entrance.
• Elsewhere on the BBC, Barbara Windsor announces that she’s leaving Eastenders, after spending so long playing Peggy Mitchell that it’s hard to remember she’s a separate person. I doubt this is due to worries about typecasting, as she’s simply done it for long enough to be known as some kind of national treasure, and can now happily retire into just doing the small projects that please her. And good for her. Obviously, Peggy Mitchell is one of the most sanctimonious, irritating characters on TV, but that was exactly as written and Barbara Windsor’s energy made it work. Not that I’ve watched Eastenders for years, nor do I plan on doing so again.
• Bit of a specialist focus now, but the new REM live album, brilliantly entitled ‘Live At the Olympia’, is out now, and up on Spotify for free listening. It was recorded at the ‘live rehearsals’ that took place before the release of their last (rather good) album, Accelerate (also on Spotify). These featured a combination of the new material and some rather old and/or obscure stuff. If you like REM, it’s worth listening for free. The new material was a small return to form, and some of my favourite old songs are on there, including ‘Driver 8’ and ‘Disturbance At The Heron House’. Oh, and the version of ‘I’ve Been High’ on this album is fantastic. Pisses on the studio version.
• Also, someone shot a baboon and some of my fellow Twitter users seemed to think I should have been horrified. Unfortunately, I’ve spent too long caring about Twitter causes of late, and as a result, I don’t really care. Sorry.

Behatted Photo Of The Week

Carrying on with the piracy theme, this week sees the Behatting of Captain Jack Sparrow (it’s not the real one, but his waxwork from Madame Tussauds) by the Sea Captain (hat), as it seemed appropriate.

Small Print, Arr: Original photo yoinked from Michi1308 on Flickr, and both it and the above are covered under this Creative Commons Licence. Apologies for the “arr”, but I had to get one in somewhere.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 10:03 am and is filed under The Weekly Hat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.