3.5% of BBC's licence fee to upgrade broadband network
BT says it aims to get fast broadband to 10m homes by 2012

The Conservatives today claimed they were willing to loosen BT's grip on the local telephone network and use parts of the BBC licence fee to deliver "superfast" broadband to the majority of Britain's homes by 2017.

Using "market-based solutions" the party believes the UK can be the first leading European country to have speeds of "up to" 100 megabits per second (Mbps), the shadow chancellor George Osborne said. He said "the Conservatives would support changes to the regulatory framework", adding that private investors being allowed to pay for better cabling would encourage competition. If the market failed to deliver, then 3.5% of the licence fee currently used to pay for digital switchover could be diverted to pay for broadband expansion, Osborne said. That would raise between 750m and 1bn on the basis of 25m TV licences.

But Labour hit back, noting that the proposal to tax the BBC would benefit Rupert Murdoch's BskyB and the Tory donor Carphone Warehouse. Labour has committed to extending broadband to 90% of homes by 2012 at 2 Mbps. Labour has also planned a 50p a month levy a "broadband tax" which will be used to fund "next generation broadband" for areas where the market is unlikely to deliver.

This levy is expected to raise between 1-1.5bn by 2017 But Osborne claimed his plans were more ambitious than those of the government. "In the 19th century we built the railways," he said. "In the 20th century we built the motorways. In the 21st century let's build the superfast broadband network that will create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Britain."

He said the Conservatives would end BT's "local loop monopoly" and allow other operators to move in with their own ducts and fibre cables, an approach that has proved successful in countries such as Singapore and South Korea.

" I think the best way to deliver this is by breaking up the British Telecom monopoly at the moment, which holds back companies such as Carphone Warehouse or Virgin".

He added:" if we find the market can't do that, then use the BBC licence fee, the digital switch over money in the BBC licence fee, to get Broadband out to the rest of the country.

Shadow culture, media and sport secretary Jeremy Hunt said: "These regulatory changes will create the right conditions for sustainable growth and ensure that the digital sector plays a leading role in a competitive, balanced economy."

But financial secretary to the Treasury Stephen Timms said: "On broadband it's not Britain but the Tories that are playing catch-up. Labour have already announced measures for rolling out broadband across the country and the Tories have opposed the plans to make that happen."

Other Labour sources pointed out that the founder of Carphone Warehouse has donated 150,000 to the Tories and is a friend of many senior Tories.

Liberal Democrat culture, media and sport spokesman Don Foster said: "This announcement shows once again the fantasy world of Tory economics. Anyone can promise the earth what matters is how you pay for it. All independent research shows that the market simply cannot provide high speed broadband in all parts of the country in the short term without investment.

"Hints that the license fee payer will be hit are the closest the Tories come to explaining how they intend to pay for this."

A spokesman for BT said: "The UK boasts one of the most competitive broadband markets in the world with BT having a 25% market share. Ninety nine percent of homes can access copper broadband, prices are low and close to 20m homes are already enjoying services. Technology is moving on and BT is at the forefront of that revolution. We are investing 1.5bn to get fibre to at least 10 million homes by mid 2012 and we want to go further."

In an abrupt turnaround, the bookselling giant has reversed the stance it had taken with Macmillan over ebook pricing

Amazon has given in over the pricing of ebooks which prompted a row with the publishers Macmillan - to the extent that Amazon stopped selling both Macmillan's ebooks and its physical books in its US store.

The initial move had generated a great deal of entirely acceptable heat for Amazon, which wanted to be able to set the prices of ebooks and was prepared to use its power in selling physical ones to do it.

We wrote about that earlier today:

"Describing the move, Macmillan chief executive John Sargent signalled the impasse may not be resolved any time soon, sparking speculation that the row could affect Amazon operations outside its home market, including in the UK."

"Amazon and Macmillan both want a healthy and vibrant future for books. We clearly do not agree on how to get there. Meanwhile, the action they chose to take last night clearly defines the importance they attribute to their view. We hold our view equally strongly," said Sargent."

Wiser heads now seem to have prevailed at Amazon. In a new posting on its site (which is certified Amazon official - we don't want any old bod turning up claiming to be speaking for Amazon), the Amazon Kindle team says:

"We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative."

Where "attractively priced" means "priced at the price we tell you to set". However, it's clear that what Macmillan wanted to do was to set its own end prices - an intriguing case of resale price maintenance. Perhaps more precisely, Macmillan wanted to set the wholesale price, and also wanted to be sure that the wholesale price for an ebook wouldn't interfere with its physical books' price. And of course Apple having released the iPad and allowing publishers to set their own ebook prices - high, low, wherever - is also going to have played on Amazon's collective mind.

There's going to be more to play out on this. But the publishers have won this round for certain.

Listorious is building a directory of Twitter lists that will help you find the most interesting people in more specialised subject areas

Listorious goes some way to solving one of the biggest problems for Twitter users: finding people who are interested in the same topics as you. That could be something as broad as News or as select as the cast and writers from the BBC comedy, The Thick of It .

If you want a list devoted to Airports or New York City Food Trucks and Other Street Vendors, you can find them here. If you can't find what you want, you can create your own list on Twitter then add it to Listorious. If you don't add it, of course, then Listorious won't publish it.

Listorious provides a more open and democratic source of lists than Twitter's own Suggested User List (SUL), which offers new users a selection of people to follow. The SUL means some accounts now have hundreds of thousands of followers that they have not "earned" on the merits of their tweets.

Twitter has recently taken a step in the right direction by dividing the SUL into categories such as Books, Politics and Travel, but it's still dominated by American celebrities. If you want to find people in more specialised areas, or a decent sample of non-Americans, then you'll have to try a different directory. The main ones are probably Listorious, Twellow and WeFollow, but there are also more specialised guides such as Sawhorse Media's MuckRack (journalists), Championist (sport) and other subjects.

Which is not to say that Listorious couldn't be better. It now offers so many lists that most people are not going to look beyond the first few at the top the ones that already have the most followers. Also, Listorious works by using the tags added by whoever created the list, and these are not necessarily accurate. (It makes sense to use lots of tags because then your list appears in lots of Listorious categories, but if you make a mistake, you can't edit the tags later.)

If users could search using more than one tag, that would help people to narrow lists down to what they really want. Some form of geo-tagging would also be useful for international users.

For those who want a quicker option, Listorious has its own lists, often based on 140, which is the number of characters allowed in a tweet. The biggest is the Listorious 140, which shows the 140 biggest lists by number of followers. Actually, it shows the top 1,400, spread over 10 pages. There are similarly long lists of The Most Followed People on Twitter and The Most Listed People on Twitter. "Most listed" is probably a better guide to tweet quality than "most followed", though it only includes lists added to Listorious.

People have always created lists, and Listorious probably taps into some deep human need, even if it's only to save time by focusing on things you consider important. Listorious means you can save even more time by letting other people create them.

Xbox 360/PS3/PSP; 39.99; cert 18+; Visceral/EA

Turning Dante Alighieri's seminal poem into a video game sounds like an exercise with the potential to be a digital car-crash, but at least for gamers, Dante's Inferno provides a thoroughly entertaining experience. Literary sticklers, though, will be less impressed; the game has to take some serious liberties in order to be fun to play.

For a start, you play as Dante himself, magically transformed into an action-hero somewhat ironic, given his passivity and tendency to cower behind Virgil in the poem. And he appears to have been conflated with someone else possibly his ancestor Cacciaguida, mentioned in Paradiso as the action starts with him participating in a Crusade, only to return home to find Beatrice dead. Although alluded to, the famous forest where he encounters Virgil is eschewed Virgil first pops up at the gate to the Underworld, and generally plays a very peripheral part in proceedings. The philosophy with which Inferno is shot through is completely jettisoned, and the quotes the game occasionally chucks your way are very short and pretty random.

It would be churlish to be too critical, though, as this is a video game, rather than some scholarly evocation. It basically uses the poem as an excuse for creating a nightmarish, horror movie-inspired depiction of the nine circles of hell, populated by gruesome, outlandish monsters, demons and bosses. It's essentially a hack'n'slash, in which Dante is equipped with the Grim Reaper's scythe (wrested from him in the first boss-battle) and a Holy Cross which works as a ranged weapon; he also acquires magical abilities as the game progresses, and can cash in souls acquired by defeating enemies for new moves.

Unless you're squeamish, you'll appreciate Dante's moves he can, for example, skewer smaller enemies on his scythe, then opt either to punish or absolve them. Punishment brings Unholy experience points while absolution generates Holy ones, a game-mechanic which offers access to different types of upgrades. You often encounter fairly inventive mechanical puzzles and platform-style sequences involving climbing or swinging from ropes, which leaven the hacking and slashing by making the game feel like some sort of warped take on Tomb Raider. The boss-battles are suitably epic (although, disappointingly, they are invariably wrapped up by timed button-pressing sequences), betraying the obvious influence of the God of War games.

But Dante's Inferno's most impressive aspect is its art direction and character design, although be warned: it won't be to all tastes. The scriptwriter and character designers have credits for films including the Hellboy and Hellraiser series on their CVs, which shows, and there's a pervasive undercurrent of gothic soft porn: the boss in the Lust circle, for example, is a giant naked houri who spews babies equipped with hands replaced by blades from her right nipple, and her minions are also naked women with giant scorpion-like stings that emerge from their nether regions. Dante's Inferno, then, is not for the faint-hearted nor fastidious, nor does it do much to counter those who argue that games are intellectual. But at least it's action-packed and fun to play.

Rating: 4/5

The Apple iPad's closed, iPhone-like environment could shut out the next computing revolution, say industry veterans

Apple's new iPad tablet computer could hamper innovation and cause long-term damage if it becomes a hit, according to experts.

Just as Steve Jobs tries to wow the world with the "magical" new device - unveiled on Wednesday at a media-saturated launch event in San Francisco leading industry figures have told the Guardian that the machine marks a fundamental shift in the way the computer industry works.

The iPad, a 10-inch touchscreen computer that will cost upwards of 300, was greeted by many admirers as a significant step forward. But in developing it using the closed model of the iPhone, industry insiders said, Apple could wrestle even more power away from its rivals and partners.

"It's chilling," said Brewster Kahle, a technology veteran and director of the Internet Archive. "We may be seeing the iPhone-ification of the Macintosh."

The concerns come because contrary to the predictions of many pundits the iPad is more like a scaled-up version of the iPhone than a scaled-down laptop computer. That means it can only run one program at a time, and even then those applications must be approved by Apple before they can be loaded on to the machine. This is the opposite of the traditional model used by the computer industry, where the makers of operating systems have little or no control over what software their users buy or download.

Kahle told the Guardian that such a lockdown would prevent major innovation from software developers.

"They really control the horizontal and the vertical by going with the iPhone platform... I think it's discouraging," he said. "The future is controlled, and it's controlled by Apple."

Referring to some major innovations like web browsers, email and instant messaging, he added that Apple could easily block in favour of developing a competing product or simply limiting new ideas.

"All of those started out as independent applications by independent organisations that were not in the plan of any of the platform makers," he said. "If you were to come up with these now on the iPhone, you couldn't even get out of the starting gate."

Kahle, whose organisation is trying to assemble a vast library of digital assets for access by the public, is not the only person concerned that the move to what Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain calls "tethered appliances" could have long-lasting effects on modern culture.

The Free Software Foundation staged a protest at the launch event and argued that the iPad could set a precedent that would fundamentally change the way we related to technology.

"This past year, we have seen how human rights and democracy protesters can have the technology they use turned against them by the corporations who supply the products and services they rely on," said Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF.

"Your computer should be yours to control. By imposing such restrictions on users, Steve Jobs is building a legacy that endangers our freedom for his profits."

Apple has previously come in for criticism for its seemingly arbitrary approval policy for applications submitted for use on the iPhone a system that has seen some applications banned from going on sale for containing "sexual content", while allowing others get through.

Last summer, Google accused its Silicon Valley neighbour of unfairly blocking rival companies from putting their software on the iPhone, a claim that led to an investigation by US regulators.

Kahle, who oversees the OpenLibrary project that aims to put millions of books online, also said that he hoped Apple's iTunes model would not become as dominant as it has in the music world and that the company would open up the system to benefit everyone.

"Apple is going towards having a single store and aggregating everyone into that store. That is not the web, that is a pre-web world. We think that you not only want interesting applications that weren't predicted and weren't previously approved by Apple, but you want people to be able to set up and sell and lend books. Does this do that? I see no indications yet."

IE8 has just taken the "most used" spot from IE6, which has been hit by the decline in the use of Windows XP, on Net Applications' market share figures for January 2010. Meanwhile, Windows 7 use has just hit 10%

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 has finally become the world's most-used browser, according to Net Applications' figures based on monitoring website usage. IE8 has taken over from IE6, which has been hit by the decline in the use of Windows XP.

In January 2010, NetApps reckons IE8 had 22.31% of the market, with IE6 on 20.07%. Firefox 3.5 took third place with 17.01%, ahead of IE7 (14.58%), Firefox 3.0 (5.29%), Google Chrome (3.92%) and Apple Safari (3.55%). Actually, IE8's lead is even larger if its 3% market share in "compatibility mode" is counted.

The decade-old IE6 had a transitory spot at the top of the chart because of IE7 users switching to IE8. This put both IE7 and IE8 below IE6, according to NetApps, even while IE6 was losing 8 points of market share.

IE6 has maintained its user base because it shipped with what has been by far the world's most popular operating system, Windows XP. However, XP is now in decline. According to NetApps, XP's market share fell from 75.02% in March 2009 to 66.31% in January 2010. IE6's decline is very similar to XP's decline. It appears that the most effective strategy for those who want to be rid of IE6 would be to encourage Windows XP users to upgrade to Windows 7.

Windows XP, launched in 2001, still had two-thirds of the market in January 2010, ahead of Windows Vista (17.39%), Windows 7 (7.51%), Mac OS X 10.5 (2.36%), Mac OS X 10.6 (1.79%) and Linux (1/02%).

NetApps has been tracking Windows 7's rapid growth separately, and notes that on the last day of January, it managed to beat the 10% barrier. However, usage is noticeably higher at weekends.

There's no guarantee that NetApps' numbers are accurate, and they are very unlikely to be correct to two decimal places. However, they do appear to be a good indicator of market trends.

The first results from our crowd-sourced search for the latest trends in technology start-ups

A little while ago we started a crowd-sourced research project looking at trends and ideas from the start-up scene. In the next couple of weeks, we will go over what we've learnt.

While everyone hates the recession, this could actually be a very good for time ambitious entrepreneurs. There are three reasons for that.

First, mobile technology is just about to take its next big step perhaps even to begin a new bubble.

The second and third points go together. As customers for every sort of business start to do their research, browsing and buying online, the internet becomes a important place for every business, and not just the digital ones.
And cloud computing is making it possible to bring services to small businesses that up till now were only available for big companies.

So among start-ups, the thousands of small and middle sized businesses are a new attractive market, and this little lovely blog about the lifestyle of shedworkers shows you how that looks in real life. To provide services and advice for these smaller business could mean earning real money, at least if thousands of them will ask you for help with their web design, their search-engine optimisation or their search for a decent coder.

If you want a good indication of how promising this market looks, consider Marco Boerries, the former top mobile executive at Yahoo who has successfully sold several companies in the past. This is where his latest start-up, NumberFour, is pointed.

Most of these services address straightforward practical problems. A lot of companies, for example, have asked a web designer to build them a site and now have to get hold of him again every time they need to change it, even a little bit. Buildor/Lite is aimed at companies who prefer to control their content directly. Their service aims to make editing a website as simple as a Microsoft Word document by loading pages into their application via Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 browser, where you can edit it. Perfect for companies that don't have too much technical knowledge. There are a lot of those.

Then, once you've set up your site, you want people to look at it. Plug in SEO is an online tool that helps you monitor and optimise how well your website ranks in search engines. It's so simple to use that even my dad could make it work for his blog. You take your site's URL, some keywords and some competitor URLs and within minutes Plug in SEO will start giving you useful information if you want to try it, it is free for 30 days. Afterwards it costs 19 from 5,000 visits a month onwards.

Something else that can help you be found on the internet is the opinions of your customers. They make you visible in search engines, and they carry weight with other potential customers. The Irish start-up LouderVoice helps you with that. If you install their widget it will help you to add reviews to your site, and pushes them to Facebook and Twitter.

For some new companies on the internet, the web is an unknown terrain. These are addressed by Influencefinder which is crawling the web to find out where it is important for a business to be, and then offering the tools to get there and manage your presence.

And if, after all this, a company gets to the point of setting up its own server, there is Server Density from Worcestershire to help. For 7 or $11 after a free trial period, they will monitor servers, and alert you in case of breakdown via email or text message, or via their fancy iPhone app.

Finally, for companies that really want to get into it, there is Codility. If you need some programming for your own tools, and want to find a coder, Codility provides an online assessment test that can put you in touch with someone directly.

These start-ups are a random selection from among a lot of different companies that head in the same direction: helping small and middle-sized businesses to perform on this complicated thing called the internet.

Some of them might provide services that are too small to be relevant, and some of them might team up. But you can be sure that, sooner or later, there will be a bigger name that will provide the new market with an all-round business package. In the meantime, however, businesses that serve real needs will always have a chance.

Reports say planned human flights to the moon and Mars likely to be ditched in effort to rein in US deficit

Nasa's plans to send a manned mission to the moon and launch the US into a bold new era of space exploration are likely to remain on the ground today when Barack Obama unveils his budget.

The president wants to cut back or abandon 120 government programmes to help rein in the US deficit among them the funding of the US space administration as part of the $3.8tn ( 2.4tn) budget.

According to the Washington Post, Obama will seek to shelve the $81bn Constellation programme, which called for a return to the moon by 2020 and human landings on Mars by the middle of the century. The plans were laid out by his predecessor, George Bush, in 2004.

The budget could also spell the end for Nasa's successor to the space shuttle, the Ares 1 rocket, which has already cost billions of dollars to develop.

The government will instead call for $6bn to be spent over five years to develop a commercial craft to transport astronauts into orbit. Such a move would mark a sea change in how Nasa works, forcing it to rely on a private company to design and manufacture a spacecraft.

Michael Griffin, a former Nasa administrator who championed the Constellation programme, told the Post the budget would prevent the US from being "a significant player in human space flight for the foreseeable future".

"The path that they're on with this budget is a path that can't work."

While commercial firms such as SpaceX and Orbital Sciences had a role to play in space flight, they were not ready to take astronauts into orbit, he said.

"One day it will be like commercial airline travel, just not yet. It's like 1920. Lindbergh hasn't flown the Atlantic, and they're trying to sell 747s to Pan Am."

His remarks were dismissed by John Gedmark, executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

"The defence department began using commercial rockets a long time ago to launch priceless national security satellites that our troops' lives depend on," he said. "If the Pentagon can trust private industry with this responsibility, we think Nasa can too."

Yesterday, a White House spokesman said the president's commitment to a "robust 21st century space programme" would be reflected in the budget.

"Nasa is vital not only to spaceflight, but also for critical scientific and technological advancements," he said. "The expertise at Nasa is essential to developing innovative new opportunities, industries, and jobs. The president's budget will take steps in that direction."

An expert panel appointed by the president last year concluded that Nasa would need another $3bn a year to conduct a functional human spaceflight programme three times the amount they are to receive in the budget.

The panel said the Constellation programme would not have the money to fulfil its aim of a moon landing in 2020, the first such mission since the last Apollo lunar mission in 1972.

Football fans watching Arsenal v Manchester United live were impressed by the satellite broadcaster's new 3D technology

There was excitement at Fagan's pub yesterday in Dublin as Arsenal experienced their own Avatar moment annihilation in 3D.

And it wasn't because the former taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, dropped in to his local where TV history was being made with what BSkyB billed as the world's first live 3D sports broadcast.

Hundreds crammed in to watch the Arsenal v Manchester United clash on the specially installed 47-inch LG TV and many were impressed.

"It's just like pop-out footballers," said Gar Deedy. "I'd be the first to sign up for it."

"Absolutely fantastic, you feel you're at the game," said Michael Fulton.

There was widespread agreement that the biggest impact was felt with low-angle telescopic shots and that a new dimension was added to Sky's hallmark swoosh graphics.

"The best bit was when the players came out of the tunnel it was amazing, they looked like they were running right past you," said John Cormican, who said it was much more impressive than high definition TV.

Another Avatar moment came in the 13th minute when Andrey Arshavin shot just past the post. The camera angle again was a low long-lens shot.

Football fans were quickly lost in the action of the game and some were not so taken with the new technology. "It looks slightly surreal, like a computer game. I'm not sure it's adding anything to the football experience. It's interesting, but it's not knocking me for six. To have to invest in a TV just for that? I can see Avatar working in 3D, but I don't know about this," said Pat O'Mahony.

Without the 3D glasses, everything appeared in double vision and the impact was best if you were standing directly in front of the TV.

"If you step to the side or sit down, it gets a bit blurry," said Ger Madden, who was there with some work colleagues doing a recce for a rival pub.

Fagan's was one of nine pubs across the UK and Ireland that were treated to the trial broadcast by Sky, which is to launch Europe's first dedicated 3D channel later this year. From April it is planning to broadcast one premiership match a week in 3D.

When told the recommended retail price for the 3D sets coming out at the end of March would be 2,500, hardcore fans up at the front didn't baulk.

"I paid that already for a Panasonic HD set when they came out first," said John Cormican. Another of his Man Utd-supporting pals said he was definitely in. "I'd buy it 60% for Man Utd, but like HDTV the price will come down, so me, on a moderate wage, I'm going to wait," said IT consultant Johnny Keogh.

A change of heart has helped Tiscali customers left worse off after merger with TalkTalk. Miles Brignall reports

The home phone and broadband supplier TalkTalk has been forced into a U-turn after telling customers of the recently merged Tiscali that it would not be honouring contracts offered prior to the takeover.

As Guardian Money revealed shortly before Christmas, the merger of the broadband and phone giants, originally announced in May 2009, has resulted in a big price increase for some Tiscali customers pushed on to the higher TalkTalk tariffs. Some broadband-only customers face costs rising from 14.99 to 19.99 a month.

It was initially thought most of those affected were out of contract. However, in the past two weeks, TalkTalk has been telling customers who had recently signed new agreements it would not be honouring those struck with Tiscali salespeople even if it was just a few weeks before the known-about merger. Some say they were told by TalkTalk staff that the fact they had signed an 18-month contract at an agreed price was "meaningless" as they were TalkTalk customers now.

One such customer is new mum Sarah Gladwin. The bank manager, who lives in Richmond, Surrey, was contemplating leaving Tiscali and finding a better deal after reading our original article.

Out of contract and free to take her business elsewhere, she called the Tiscali sales team in late December and was offered line rental, broadband, and free calls in the evenings and at weekends its basic phone/internet package for a very attractive 12 a month, with the first three months free.

She had to sign up for 18 months. "I was very happy with the deal. Confirmation came by email the same day and later by post. Both stated that my Tiscali package had been successfully upgraded, as per my order. We received a new wireless router in about three days. All great, or so I thought."

A few days ago she received a letter welcoming her to TalkTalk and saying that, in future, she would be paying 18.50 a month. Other readers have contacted Money complaining about the same thing.

"Obviously, I didn't want to pay nearly 50% more, so I phoned them to say 'no thank you, we'll continue with our agreed contract made last month'. But the call centre did not understand. It offered me three months free after speaking to a 'supervisor'.

"I explained I already had an 18-month contract with three months free, and a cheaper monthly fee, but all she kept saying was 'we're Talk Talk now'. After 45 minutes, I gave up," says Gladwin. A second phone call elicited the same take or leave it response.

"How can you deal with a company that treats its customers in this way?" she says.

TalkTalk originally said it wanted to streamline its complicated range of tariffs down to one. "Our aim, at the end of this process, is to have one clearly understood set of prices. That will mean no one is paying more than the TalkTalk tariff and is fair to everyone," it said in December, seemingly unaware its colleagues at Tiscali were offering different deals to retain customers.

Consumer law expert Dr Christian Twigg-Flesner at the University of Hull says telecoms companies and financial services providers rely on "unilateral variation clauses" to allow them to vary prices in this way.

"Most of the banks have these in their terms to allow them to change interest rates and the like. However, in this case, customers might be able to argue the company was misrepresenting its offer.

"But, as a consumer, you can't force a company to honour a deal. Unfortunately, English law is reluctant to hold companies to contracts as long as they give the consumer the chance to opt out," he says.

After Money raised the issue with TalkTalk the company had a change of heart, and says it will now honour the contracts with Tiscali albeit with a rather complicated billing arrangement.

A spokesman says: "Customers who signed up with Tiscali or altered their package between September and December 2009 will be offered six months service at half price when they sign up to a new contract with TalkTalk. Those customers who want to stick with the original deal they signed, can do so. They will have to pay the TalkTalk tariff, but their account will be credited, up-front, with the difference, meaning they will pay nothing for the first few months."

He explained the company's recent downturn in customer service on the poor weather, during which just 25% of its staff were able to get to work at its Preston and Warrington centres.

"It caused us big problems in terms of answering calls and it came at the worst time, but we are now back to normal," he says.

Meanwhile, the regulator Ofcom may have had a hand in the about- turn.

"Ofcom is aware of this issue; we are monitoring complaints and we are in touch with TalkTalk," it says.

Cable company reaps benefit of having BBC iPlayer and ITV Player with EastEnders and The X Factor popular choices

The cable TV company Virgin Media recorded 750m views of video-on-demand content last year, a 50% year-on-year increase, driven by the success of the BBC iPlayer and the ITV Player on its service.

In December Virgin Media recorded 76m views of content on its on-demand service, a 6% increase on November.

The most popular shows last month included Gavin & Stacey, EastEnders, Coronation Street, The X Factor, and the Royle Family and Doctor Who Christmas specials.

Virgin Media said that 59% of its 3.9 million TV subscribers regularly accessed video-on-demand content last year, an increase of 250,000 homes compared with 2008.

The cable company said that on-demand views of iPlayer content had grown from 10.5m in June 2008, when it launched, to 20m views in December.

Virgin Media added that Coronation Street, The X Factor and I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! helped drive 25m views in the last three months of 2009 on the ITV Player.

In total 11m movies were watched on demand last year, with December seeing a 29% boost over November usage.

Kids' programming, such as High School Musical, Hannah Montana and Dora the Explorer, generated almost 22m views last year.

 To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

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Technology Guardian's Dr Aleks Krotoski turns TV presenter tomorrow night for a new BBC series that examines the impact of the world wide web

You may have noticed the absence from these parts particularly on the Games blog of our colleague Aleks Krotoski in recent months. That's because she's been busy travelling the world for a new BBC series about the history of the world wide web and finishing her PhD, of course.

The first part of the fruits of her labours, The Virtual Revolution, airs Saturday at 8.30pm on BBC2. Travelling with a team of BBC documentary makers, and accompanied on part of the journey by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Aleks journeys across four continents and six countries and speaks to more than 50 people who have made the web what it is today including some rather famous names, such as Bill Gates, Al Gore, Stephen Fry, Jimmy Wales, Arianna Huffington, Mark Zuckerberg, Chad Hurley, Stewart Brand, Jeff Bezos and the President of Estonia.

For Dr Aleks (as she now insists we call her), the making of the series was a very personal journey: "It was an amazing opportunity to meet the people who have helped to create exactly the things I've been writing about and studying for the past decade," she says. "I managed to meet most of the people I referenced in my PhD thesis, and was able to ask them all of the difficult questions I had been thinking about in my research.

"It really was an extraordinary adventure that allowed me to test a few theories, challenge some of my long-held ideas and to dream up a few more along the way."

You can find out more about The Virtual Revolution at this article by Dr Aleks in the Observer, or by listening to the Tech Weekly podcast.

And after watching the first episode on Saturday night, please pop back here and give us your thoughts in the comments

Xbox 360/PC; 49.99, cert 18+; Bioware/EA

The original Mass Effect was a near-classic. The narrative and gripping combat of this sci-fi role-playing game (RPG) only let down by technical glitches. Mass Effect 2 fixes this and is a title that will appeal to a wide range of gamers, especially those who enjoy in-game conversation as much as combat.

Continuing where the original left off, Mass Effect 2 sees you guiding your Commander through a twisting plot and some great set pieces. This is very much an RPG though, with plenty of stats and text. But action is key, with combat crucial to the game. The combat has been made more transparent and more reliant on skill than stats. Gears of War fans should feel right at home with the cover mechanics and controls. Thankfully, there is still a huge emphasis on tactics and RPG stats Modern Warfare 3 this is most definitely not.

The narrative and characters are what really drive Mass Effect 2. Idle chit-chat with the numerous crew members and bystanders soon draws out motives, feelings and possibly romance. The excellent facial animations and acting help too, giving a surprising emotional pull to proceedings. One of the nice touches is the ability to import your character from the first game. Players that do so are rewarded with money and other goodies. But the real benefit is the continuation of the story with decisions you made in the first game which characters were killed off, for example having implications in the sequel.

Mass Effect 2 is a looker, too. The influences are pure retro sci-fi. So think the minimalist look of Star Wars and Space Odyssey. Blade Runner and X-Files are hinted at as well. The soundtrack mirrors this with swooping Vangelis-style pads providing a suitably synthetic mood. The universe feels more alive this time round. Planetary exploration is vastly improved from the original game. Now going off piste is truly rewarding with numerous side-missions to beef up the coffers and the characters.

Downsides? The loading times are still noticeably intrusive albeit improved on the original game. The graphics are occasionally glitchy, but more importantly the font is tiny, even on an HD screen. For a game that involves more reading than most this a major issue. Playing on a non-HD screen is very uncomfortable indeed. Nevertheless, the gripping and engaging action overcomes these issues. It may only be January, but Mass Effect 2 is already a serious contender for game of the year.

Rating: 5/5

Work and friends are being neglected, but no one will intervene in my video game addiction

Recently a friend confessed that he was hopelessly addicted to a computer game, yet declined to tell me which one. "It will eat up your life," he cautioned. "I'm spending 12 hours a day on it, and my eyes have gone funny."

"It won't do that to me," I assured him, safe in the knowledge that I had never been addicted to anything. I thought people who claimed to be hooked on electronic games were either very weak-willed, or were making excuses so they didn't have to do dull stuff instead.

"If you're sure," the friend replied, before confiding dolefully, "it's called Drop 7. It's like Tetris, but worse."

The next day, bored on a long train journey, I decided to download the game and discover whether it really was as compelling as the friend insisted. If it helped swallow five hours of nothing but cows whizzing by, that would surely be a good thing.

The game was very similar to the shape-fitting puzzle Tetris, but used numbers instead of shapes. I spent an hour working out how to play it; after that, I was mesmerised, barely registering train announcements or the tea trolley. There was, I realised, something strangely satisfying about exploding the brightly coloured blocks: it took skill and strategy.

As the train pulled into its destination, I briefly found myself wishing the journey had been longer, so I could have dropped more virtual circles, before shaking the thought out of my head. The game had been a pleasant enough diversion, now it was time to forget it.

To my dismay, I found this difficult. When an acquaintance met me off the train and asked what I'd like to do before dinner, I lied and said: "Have a sleep" aware that saying "play a computer game on my phone" would sound weird and antisocial.

He duly left me in my bedroom, where I proceeded to manoeuvre numbers around a bleeping screen. Each time I started a game, I promised myself it would be the last; each time, I broke my promise.

During dinner, in a break between courses, I did the unforgiveable: I began playing the game under the table. Seconds later, I was discovered. "I'm sorry our conversation isn't interesting enough for you!" my host snapped, only to be met with an eloquent "Mmph?"

That night, when I tried to sleep, all I could see were numbered spheres falling down behind my eyes. It was as though the game had somehow inserted hooks into my neurons and synapses, and now it was their sole focus of interest. At the end of the next day, I resolved to take drastic action and deleted the game from my phone, only to crack and download it again within an hour.

As a child, I had read books while my brother squashed imaginary mushrooms on his Nintendo console; as a student, I had played the piano while friends mashed opponents at Street Fighter III. In my first ever Guardian column I lamented the silliness of addiction. Now I was the silly one, wasting my life and feeling guilty and ashamed.

The trouble with this kind of obsession is that no one is going to stage an intervention. It's up to you if you want to fritter away the only life you have. It's true that no one will ever lament on their deathbed, "I wish I'd played more computer games", but addicts know this, and it makes little difference. Games give us some semblance of control in an illogical and chaotic world; beguilingly, they reward and punish us in a logical, reassuring way.

It's been two months now, and I still haven't shaken my attachment to Drop 7, neglecting work and friends in favour of small coloured circles. I don't have shares in the game and don't know anyone involved in it; part of me wishes I did, so I could bribe or blackmail them into deleting it forever.

Two weeks ago, in a panic, I eventually called the friend who had warned me about the game's intoxicating properties, and admitted that he had been right. To his credit, he didn't say "I told you so", but merely replied: "I don't play that any more."

Excited, I wondered what the secret solution to the sleepless nights, listless days and sense of self-loathing was. Maybe there was hope after all. "How did you stop?" I demanded eagerly, vowing to do whatever he'd done.

He sighed: "I found a game that's even more addictive."

There are now dozens of websites to help budding authors to publish their novels, poems and pictures and, perhaps, even make a profit from it

If you want to realise a dream by publishing your own book, there are lots of companies willing to extract upwards of $500 from you for the privilege. At the other end of the spectrum is Amazon's digital text platform, which allows you to upload your pre-prepared files to its Kindle reader and then set your own price.

The catch? Amazon takes 65% of the income from sales. Ouch. Fortunately, there are lots of other options of which more later for budding authors. What you get out of them is subject only to the limits of your imagination.

It doesn't have to be an embryonic bestseller because self-publishing is best suited to limited editions. Anything over 1,000 copies and you would be better off going to a traditional printer to take advantage of economies of scale. I know a lot people who are self-publishing a record of their own lives together with memories of their parents and grandparents as a bit of family history. That's not vanity publishing, just a great way to preserve memories for future generations and add to the archive of local history. Self-publishing is ideal for that.

Others publish their blogs or photo albums. Every year I try to put the best photos of the past 12 months from a photo site (Flickr.com in my case) so we have the equivalent of the traditional photo album which will last longer than my Flickr subscription and my hard disk. You could equally download an out-of-copyright book from the not-for-profit Gutenberg archive or from the millions of books Google has scanned (maybe for your book club) or extracts from the Wikipedia and it's all legal.

For years I have written poems as a relaxing pastime rather like other people collect stamps. I couldn't face the prospect of collecting rejection notes from agents and publishers so decided to self publish. The first book I did by paying for 1,000 copies to be printed in the traditional way (because it was only a little bit more expensive than printing 500). Expensive mistake.

By the time a second book was ready new technology came to the rescue. I used Lulu.com, which enables you to upload files and cover designs for nothing, and launched it in the virtual world Second Life (at no extra cost to a member). For marketing, I experimented with "product placement" by attaching poems to photos or paintings on Flickr and other sites thereby generating discussions that you wouldn't get with traditional publishing where the author is remote from the reader.

Through a chance meeting on Facebook, the Glasgow indie group A Band Called Quinn is recording a number of the poems for a CD, including Truth which can be experienced here on YouTube. My new book I hope to publish on Lulu and an iPhone app, if I can find a decent one. The point about all this is that new technology offers new and cheap ways both to publish and promote your books and we are only at the start of the learning curve.

Which self-publishing site to choose? There has been a lot of change recently. This is partly because of Amazon entering the market (and now Apple as well) but also because the process is becoming simpler and the operation more vertically integrated. Amazon has bought Createspace and Lulu has purchased We Read, a social book club with a presence on Facebook and other social sites with a claimed 3 million readers. This could help it towards reaching the nirvana of self-publishing: to become the iTunes of books.

I've had mixed feelings about Lulu in recent years. In principle, it is a breath of fresh air being an open source site that claims to put the interests of authors above all else (unlike the increasingly proprietary Amazon). In practice, there have been problems not least ludicrously high postage costs (sometimes more than the cost of the book) delays of weeks before delivery and issues about payments which readers have told me about.

They seem to be through these problems, however, and now print in the UK so delivery takes days rather than weeks and postage is down to more reasonable levels. The proof of my latest book arrived while writing this column, five days after pressing the final button.

If you use their template, publishing is remarkably easy you upload your manuscript in PDF form, drag photos across for the front and back covers. It could all be over in 20 minutes (if you don't make silly mistakes as I tend to). It doesn't cost you anything until the first purchase and Lulu lets you keep 80% of the proceeds (after deduction of the printing cost of each book). Lulu expanded by 20% last year and publishes over 400,000 titles a year which it claims is "almost twice as many as by America's entire traditional publishing industry".

Lulu is my favourite for text-driven books, but if you are more interested in picture-driven publications then Blurb.com is the one to choose. It is easy to use if you stick to the easy templates and you can easily import photos directly from Flickr other photo sites. The standard of reproduction is impressive (as long as the original resolution is good) and they helpfully flag up photos that they don't think make the grade in terms of quality. Lulu and Blurb aren't the only fruit and, if you have time, it is worth trawling through some of the dozens if not hundreds of minnows that keep popping up while being on guard lest they are trying to take a quick buck from you. There are various lists of top 10s on the web, or just try your luck with something like Fastpencil which looks easy to use though I haven't followed it through to publication or CompletelyNovel which is based in the UK.

The digital revolution has turned the music industry upside down but it is moving at a more leisurely pace in books where self-publishing hasn't yet taken off in a really big way.

The question this week is whether, once again, Apple will change the game by providing an easy way to publish and generate a conversation. There is still a vast market out there for the taking.

twitter.com/vickeegan

The Sixty One

The Sixty One is a music exploration site with an unusual but beautiful interface. Without much hand-holding, you're invited to enjoy new music including some free downloads while perusing full-page pictures, info boxes and slick graphics; some straightforward interactive touches also make an interesting departure from standard music blog layouts. Although it's mainly built around unknown US college acts, dig around to find tracks by the Killers and Portishead, as well as a band who hold the world record for the most crumpets eaten at a live concert.

Kid Casting

You know when a movie has a flashback scene and you get to see the character as a child? Well, that's what this website has dedicated itself to documenting, with hundreds of side-by-side screen grabs of the adult and flashback kid versions. Great fun especially if the film stars Woody Allen, whose gawky alter egos are boss-eyed, where everyone else's are cuter mini lookalikes. Some kids reappear several times; a young man called Troy Gentile has a permanent gig as Jack Black's younger self. Others eclipsed the careers of the main actors (Dakota Fanning played a miniature Reese Witherspoon in her first movie). But for many, roles like 30 seconds as a 12-year-old Brad Pitt will remain career peaks.

BLOG ROLL: LOST

Dark UFO

Theories, spoilers and Nike's Dharma trainers.

Lost media

The Lost cast's chatshow appearances on one site.

The Tail Section

Sayid's best moments, 42 signs you're addicted to Lost and episode recaps.

Daily Lost News

The Flight 815 crash in real time and Lost re-enacted by an Italian family.

Lost Initiative

Sky's site with cast interviews, clues, chat and Iain Lee's weekly podcast.

Fuck Yeah Lost

Fan videos, bento boxes and updates on the producers' Twitter activity.

Lost Books

Tracking every literary reference from Flannery O'Connor to Dostoevsky.

Lost ROFL

Childish humour applied to the sci-fi soap.

Lost in Lost

The Guardian's Lost blog.

WHAT WE LEARNED ON THE WEB THIS WEEK

A deeper understanding of the ampersand

The Lady Gaga is edible

Five ways to be boring on Second Life

What's been on Bill Gates's mind

Some hairstyles Indian men should avoid

James Joyce is now available in cartoon format

Life is hard for a man with tiny hands

How to make your own Star Trek phaser

The irresistible science of Ke$ha

When it's OK to eat stuff you've dropped on the floor

Computer experts in the US can now identify people from personal information, leading to concerns over security and confidentiality

Computer scientists in the US have discovered ways to "re-identify" the names of people included in supposedly anonymous datasets.

In one example, a movie rental company released an anonymous list of film-ratings taken from its 500,000 subscribers. Using a statistical "de-anonymisation" technique, the academics were able to identify individuals and their film preferences.

The discovery raises concerns about how safe it is to release personal information such as medical records or mobile phone data even if details such as names or national insurance numbers have been removed. There are fears the information could be accessed by criminals.

The discovery has led British researchers to raise the issue in a report they are writing for the European commission. Dr Ian Brown, of the Oxford Internet Institute and a co-author, said the example of the film list was relatively trivial. "But this raises concerns for more sensitive data such as medical records. Epidemiologists say they could do interesting research if they had access to more anonymous data. This shows it is difficult to do that in a way that can't be reversed."

One concern is that criminals could identify individuals through mobile phone data and use the information to track people's movements and find out when they are away from home. "That is one worry. Other people who you might worry about accessing that information include employers, insurers or the government. There are a whole range of potential users," Brown said.

Experts say the discovery that lists can be "de-anonymised" needs to be included in the debate about how information is released and where to draw the line. But they also highlight the benefits of letting researchers and others access large datasets.

Last week Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, launched a new website data.gov.uk on which members of the public will be able to access information on crime rates, exam results, house prices and more.

"They are talking about non-personal data," said Brown. "But another thing they are looking at releasing is crime reports down to street level. You have to think about how people might be able to link that back to individuals."

William Heath, founder of Ctrl-Shift, which specialises in how personal data are used, said: "If you take it in the light of Friday's news about data.gov.uk, the government has clearly done something really good to make public data available. Now they need a more enlightened approach to personal data, but you can't simply say anonymised data can be safely made public because it is clear how hard it is truly to anonymise data."

Before our digital lives disappear too far into 'the cloud', we must wrest it from corporate and governmental control

The internet, our relationship with it, and our culture are about to undergo a change as profound and unsettling as the development of web 2.0 in the last decade, which made social media and search Google and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter mass, global phenomena. The rise of "cloud computing" will trigger a battle for control over a digital landscape that is only just coming into view.

The internet we have grown up with is a decentralised network of separate computers, with their own software and data. Cloud computing may look like an extension of this network-centric logic but, in fact, it is quite different.

As cloud computing comes of age, our links to one another will be increasingly routed through a vast shared "cloud" of data and software. These clouds, supported by huge server farms all over the world, will allow us to access data from many devices, not just computers; to use programs only when we need them and to share expensive resources such as servers more efficiently. Instead of linking to one another through a dumb, decentralised network, we will all be linking to and through shared clouds.

Which raises the question: whose clouds will these be?

Cloud computing is bringing with it "cloud capitalism". Companies will make money from organising these clouds for us. Apple already is, with its iTunes cloud of music and its cloud of thousands of third-party apps to run on the iPhone. Cloud computing will also bring a kind of cloud culture: increasingly, we will express ourselves through these clouds of films, videos, pictures, books, stories and music.

But cloud capitalism and cloud culture will not always be in harmony. The best way to understand the coming conflicts over the cloud is to look at the issues already being raised by some of the earliest applications. China, where Google is belatedly standing up for the principles of a cloud free from government interference, is the most immediate example.

But Google also has a more pragmatic, commercial motive. Gmail is a cloud service. Users do not store their messages on their own computers but in a remote cloud run by Google. (The Guardian newspaper recently junked its own, costly email service in favour of Google's enterprise-level Gmail offering.) If Google cannot maintain the integrity of the Gmail cloud, it does not have a secure service to sell. There will be many battles of this kind in years to come where corporations, citizens and governments struggle for control of the cloud.

An equally significant battle involving Google's influence over the cloud is being played out in a nondescript courtroom in New York, where the company has been defending its plans, devised with several university libraries, to create a cloud of more than 10m digital books. The question is: on what terms will Google make these available to readers and recompense their authors and publishers?

This shared cultural cloud will come at a price that is difficult to calculate. Google will acquire considerable power over the future of publishing and books which books to include in the cloud and which not.

The French and German governments warned the court that the company's plans would create an "uncontrolled, autocratic concentration of power in a single corporate entity" that would threaten a fundamental human right: the free flow of ideas through literature. Google's peers are also opposed. The Open Book Alliance, which includes Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo, wants to create its own cloud of digitised books.

This dispute is a template for many others to come. Governments will also have their own views about these clouds, seeing in them threats to national culture (the French response); threats to security (the Chinese response) or threats to competition (the response of the US department of justice).

Thus, just as it is emerging, open cloud culture is threatened on all sides by vested interests of traditional media companies, hungry new monopolists and governments that are intent of reasserting control over the unruly web. The "netizen" beneficiaries of open cloud culture are far less well funded and organised than its opponents. That is why before cloud capitalism becomes entrenched, there should a clear statement of principles to defend the public, open cloud against the encroachments of both corporations and governments.

I propose five main points towards that manifesto, an Open Cloud Declaration:

The first main threat to open cloud culture is homogeneity: we do not want a digital sky dominated by standardised clouds branded Google and Apple. The first principle should be variety: we need public clouds, such as the World Digital Library being created by a set of leading museums around the world and open, social clouds such as Wikipedia.

The second threat to open cloud culture is corporate control. To counter that, we need new approaches to regulate these commercial clouds, to limit their power and to expose them to competition, ensuring people have a diversity of potential suppliers of cloud-based services. Personal information stored in clouds needs to be safe and clearly to belong to the person rather than the cloud. The emergence of cloud capitalism will need to be matched by new forms of media regulation.

The third threat is the rearguard action being fought by industrial-era media companies to prevent clouds forming. At the heart of this is copyright. Cloud culture will breed creativity only if people can easily collaborate, share and create. New forms of licensing are required, building on open access and creative commons, which are designed to allow sharing but also to channel rewards to creative artists.

The fourth threat comes from attempted government control of the cloud on grounds of state security, public decency or economic necessity. These threats do not just come from authoritarian regimes in the east, but also from western liberal democracies where governments lack the courage to stand up for the open web. To counter that we need to find ways to support online activists in authoritarian regimes with ways around firewalls and to connect them with potential supporters outside.

The fifth, and most significant challenge to a truly open, public web is inequality. When people from the poorest countries arrive in the digital world, as many million will in this decade through the mobile web, they will find people in the rich countries a long way ahead. For cloud culture genuinely to promote global cultural relations, we should focus on: open source development of tools that develop capabilities outside the dominant regions; creating more initiatives like Wikipedia that are public, but diverse and global in reach; promoting more global exchanges such as Kiva which allow resources and skills in one place to be matched with need in another.

The potential for a more cosmopolitan, open cloud, which can connect hundreds of millions of people all over the world in shared endeavours, will only be realised if we tackle these threats. We are entering a new, exciting and yet dangerous phase in the web's development. Huge untold opportunities will exist for anyone connected to the web and by the end of this decade that will be several billion people to draw on shared culture resources and add to them through their own creative expression.

Yet if we are not vigilant, we will find our culture will belong to corporations and governments, rather than us. That is why we need an Open Cloud Declaration, a set of principles for a global campaign to keep open a large, public, diverse space for clouds in all possible shapes and sizes.

This is an edited version of a pamphlet written for Counterpoint, the independent thinktank of the British Council. "Cloud Culture: The Future of Global Cultural Relations" by Charles Leadbeater, will be published on 8 February.

Whistleblowing website says it cannot continue without public donations and has appealed for cash

The whistleblowing website Wikileaks has temporarily shut down because of a lack of funds.

The site, which has been a major irritant to governments and big businesses since it launched in 2007, says it cannot keep going without more public donations.

Wikileaks' organisers announced the suspension in a statement on its site. "To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, but will be back soon," it says.

Pleading for more cash, it explained that publishing hundreds of thousands of previously secret documents each year costs money.

"If staff are paid, our yearly budget is $600,000 [ 372,000]," it said.

The site, which is part of the not-for-profit group Sunshine Press, adds: "We have raised just over $130,000 for this year but cannot meaningfully continue operations until costs are covered. These amount to just under $200,000pa."

Wikileaks refuses to accept corporate or government funding for fear of compromising its integrity.

Described by the Guardian as the "brown paper envelope for the digital age", it rose to prominence last year by hosting the Minton report on the activities of the oil trader Trafigura while the firm's lawyers were trying to prevent the press from revealing its contents.

Last year it also published a membership list of the British National party and it told the unfolding secret story of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon by releasing 500,000 intercepted pager messages.

Wikileaks's appeal for cash has prompted widespread support on the web. A Facebook group called Save Wikileaks has been formed and there are numerous supportive messages on Twitter.

Blogging for the Spectator Martin Bright, the former political editor of the New Statesman, wrote: "I know money is tight, but I urge anyone who cares about liberty to visit the site and donate."

Peugeot Citro n to recall about 90,000 cars made in the Czech Republic at factory it shares with crisis-struck Toyota

Peugeot Citro n, Europe's second- biggest carmaker, yesterday announced a recall of about 90,000 cars manufactured at its plant in the Czech Republic amid concerns they may have faulty accelerator pedals.

The company said it had decided to withdraw some of its Peugeot 107 and Citro n C1 models following a similar move by Toyota last week.

The Japanese car giant is to recall 1.8 million cars across Europe, including about 220,000 in the UK, on safety grounds. It has already recalled 2.3 million US-built vehicles and some manufactured in China.

There are concerns some of the vehicles have been fitted with pedals that may stick in the depressed position.

In the US, the sudden acceleration of Toyota vehicles has been linked to 19 deaths in the past decade, Henry Waxman, chairman of the US House energy and commerce committee, said in a statement. A spokesman for Peugeot Citro n said he was not aware of any injuries caused by the problem in the vehicles it is recalling, which were all made from 2005 to mid-2009 at the Kolin plant east of Prague, run jointly between Peugeot Citro n and Toyota.

Toyota says it is withdrawing cars manufactured over the past four years, including some from the Aygo, iQ, Yaris, Auris, Corolla, Verso, Avensis and Rav4 ranges. So far, Toyota has withdrawn 7.5 million cars and trucks, almost as many as it sold worldwide in 2009. The company president, Akio Toyoda, apologised.

Microsoft founder plays down Beijing's attempts to stifle dissent on the internet as 'very limited'

After pouring billions of dollars into the global fight against malaria and rebranding Microsoft in a more cuddly, human way, Bill Gates had just about shaken off accusations that he represented all that was unappealing about aggressive American capitalism.

But today his reinvention suffered something of a setback when he played down China's attempts to stifle dissent on the internet as "very limited".

Less than two weeks after Google said it planned to uncensor its Chinese search engine in protest at attempts to break into the email accounts of human rights activists, Gates criticised his rival's decision and insisted that agreeing to Beijing's demands was just part of doing business in the country. "You've got to decide: do you want to obey the laws of the countries you're in or not? If not, you may not end up doing business there," he told ABC's Good Morning America programme.

He also brushed aside accusations that Microsoft has been complicit in helping filter the web by saying that it was not an issue because any censorship could be circumvented with technical knowledge. "Chinese efforts to censor the internet have been very limited," he said. "It's easy to go around it, so I think keeping the internet thriving there is very important."

Gates's comments echo those last week by Microsoft chief executive, Steve Ballmer, who took a swipe at Google by suggesting that the company had over-reacted in China. "People are always trying to break into other people's data," he said on Friday. "There's always somebody trying to break into Microsoft."

Ballmer also likened Microsoft's complicity in actively filtering internet content to the oil industry's decision to import oil from Saudi Arabia, despite the censorship that takes place there. "If the Chinese government gives us proper legal notice, we'll take that piece of information out of the Bing search engine," adding that even countries with "extreme" free speech laws, such as the US, exercised some censorship.

The comments of both men come despite the fact that efforts to censor the internet in China a project known as the Golden Shield are among the most extensive in the world. The country's estimated 300 million internet users are almost all affected by the various blocks and filters, which include direct censorship of anti-government protesters, members of the Falun Gong religious group, Tibetan independence campaigners and the Taiwanese media. At various points, Beijing has also blocked access to international news websites including the BBC and the Guardian, and around 50 Chinese bloggers are in prison as a result of their postings.

Google's stance has drawn widespread support from the human rights community and freedom of speech campaigners, but the Chinese authorities have repeatedly denied any link to the hacking.

Today the government made its most direct response to the issue yet rejecting suggestions that it turned a blind eye to the activities of some hackers, and defending its right to punish those who challenge its rule.

"Any accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyber attacks, either in an explicit or indirect way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China. We are firmly opposed to that," a government spokesman told the state news agency, Xinhua, adding that China was itself the victim of numerous internet-based attacks.

Internet service provider criticised by human rights watchdog for plans to analyse online activity of customers

Plans for Virgin Media to monitor customers' internet use for possible copyright infringement have come under fire by a human rights watchdog. The group Privacy International has expressed concern over Virgin Media's use of Cview, a software programme that would allow the internet service provider to analyse the online activity of customers. This would potentially include those who are sharing music online through unauthorised peer-to-peer sites.

This latest move comes less than a year after Virgin Media announced that it was in talks with Universal Music to create a subscription service that offered unlimited downloads for a monthly fee. It is thought that the implementation of software which would allow Virgin Media to scrutinise what customers are doing online is a result of their ongoing discussions with the record industry.

Alexander Hanff, head of ethical networks at Privacy International, told the BBC: "Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) intercepting communications is a criminal offence regardless of what you do with the data." Privacy International has asked the European Commission to investigate the use of Cview.

However, Virgin Media claims use of the software will not violate the privacy of its customers and will not be used to identify individuals. "CView works at a core-network level, and simply analyses, entirely anonymously, the percentage of data that flows across the network that is copyrighted and being shared unlawfully," said Virgin Media spokeswoman Emma Hutchinson. She said that "at no point will we collect or share customer data as part of this trial".

The proposal for the use of Cview software suggests that 40% of the activity on Virgin Media's network would be analysed in a trial study. Hutchinson confirmed that it would initially concentrate on traffic to three major P2P websites with links to unauthorised filesharing: Gnutella, eDonkey and BitTorrent. However, the trial is still in the planning stages and it is not clear exactly when Cview will be up and running.

Copyright may not be perfect, but when applied with common sense, it's the best system we've got

On 5 January, the Independent's website ran a photo uploaded to the Flickr image-sharing site by user Peter Zabulis. Zabulis flagged his photo of a snowed-over field as "all rights reserved," and he took exception to the Independent's use of the image without permission, and he wrote to them to tell them so.

Exception turned to outrage as a terse note from the Independent claimed that by posting the photo to Flickr, Zabulis had not asserted his copyright (whatever that means) and thus copyright had not been breached. The ensuing debate including a public pillorying of the Independent for failing to grasp the nature of Flickr, copyright and photographer's rights generated a lot of heat, but not much light (one bright spot: the Independent paid Zabulis and apologised to him).

Debates about copyright fall apart when they're pitched in terms of absolutes: "Copyright prohibits all copying", or "Non-commercial copying is always legal". Copyright started life as an industrial regulation that set out the rules governing the relationship between different actors in the supply-chain of the "creative industries" (originally just publishing, later music, film, software and many other industries).

Much of copyright was created by simply enshrining existing business practices into law for better or for worse. Many artists have pointed out that copyright, even at its best, can present a playing field tilted in favour of the companies that shepherded its passage into law.

Theoretically, copyright also bound the activities of non-industrial actors fans, audiences, readers, people who were whistling in the shower. But practically speaking, the average person would virtually never interact with copyright: first, because the personal means of interacting with copyrighted works (reading books, listening to records) did not involve making copies, and second, because when copies were made, they were invisible to the copyright industries' radar. No one was going to come by your office to look for photocopied Garfield cartoons stuck on your cubicle.

Which isn't to say that there weren't a myriad of rules, formal and informal, governing the use of creative works by individuals. Certain songs could be sung at the pub, but not in front of a nursery school.

Recounting the plot of last night's TV show to a mate was permissible, but spoiling the ending wasn't. Tracing a library book illustration for a science project was OK: cutting up the book was not. Pretending to have made up a ghost story that you read in a Poe collection was plagiarism, not culture.

Now, thanks to the internet (which runs by copying things, and which makes all those copies visible with a simple search) copyright has been stretched to cover both industrial and non-industrial uses of creative works, and what's more, the definition of industrial and non-industrial has become a lot fuzzier.

We're trying to retrofit the rules that governed multi-stage rocket ships (huge publishing conglomerates) to cover the activity of pedestrians (people who post quotes from books on their personal blogs). And the pedestrians aren't buying it: they hear that they need a law degree to safely quote from their favourite TV show and they assume that the system is irredeemably broken and not worth attending to at all.

It's an impossible situation. As an author, I depend on there being some rules of the road when I negotiate with my publishers, and it's in every commercial creator's interest to try to find a moderate, coherent copyright rule that avoid dumb absolutes in favour of nuance and fairness. I don't pretend that I have all the answers, but here's some of the principles that I think a good copyright system must embrace if is to succeed. Many of these principles are already in various nations' copyright rules as part of "fair dealing" or "fair use," but these user-rights in copyright are complex and difficult to navigate and vary from country to country.

As we on the internet create the norms that will be enshrined in future copyright, here's what I think we should keep in mind: "All rights reserved" doesn't cover commentary or reportage. If the Independent had been commenting on Zabulis's photo ("Witness the interplay of lights and darks" or "Area man sneaks into snowy field, takes photo for proof") then reproducing as much of Zabulis's photo as they needed to in order to report thoroughly on the subject should be fair game. Likewise, Zabulis was in the right to reproduce a screenshot from the Independent's website in order to show people how his image had been taken without permission.

Commercial and non-commercial are different. While there's a lot of grey area between "commercial" and "non-commercial", there are also some bright lines. Newspapers should have to pay photographers for stock images; kids working on school reports (and other non-commercial users) should be able to clip images and use them for without negotiating a rights agreement with a copyright holder.

Incidental use isn't infringement. If Zabulis's photo had included a blowing piece of trash bearing a copyrighted work (say, a copy of the Independent), he should still be allowed to sell and publish his photo without the Independent's permission. Incidental copying includes (for example), Google copying every page on the web in order to create an index of the words on those pages.

Some commercial copying is OK. For example, when a giant movie studio sits down to create a movie (whose copyright they will eventually defend with the atavistic savagery of a maddened grizzly), the designers for the film will create a series of "mood books" filled with clipped, scanned and copied text, images, even video clips, to help the design team agree on the look and feel of the movie. The studio doesn't and shouldn't need permission to make these uses, though they are commercial and involve copying. There are many other cases like this, from pasting articles into an email you send to your boss to photocopying an inspirational text and tacking it up in the break room. They share one common trait: they don't displace any revenue for the rightsholder.

When copyright cartels endanger a new medium, their copyrights should be converted into economic rights or thrown out. This principle is as old as sound recordings: when the sheet-music publishers refused to license their work for records, the state intervened and forced them to sell at a fixed rate. Today, many copyrights are relegated to economic rights: a performer has the right to be compensated for the playback of his CD in a shop, but not to stop the shop from playing the music. Copyright's purpose is to promote participation in culture: where refuseniks subvert that goal, their copyrights should be limited.

This is just a partial list, and it may strike you as radical. But before you dismiss it, consider this: most copyright systems are supposed to work this way in theory. But between corporate bullies who like to assert that "all rights reserved" means that no one is allowed to do anything without permission, and personal theories of what copyright means based on half-remembered lectures from the company lawyer, we treat copyright as absolute. And when we do, we turn a system with a real purpose (providing a framework for participants in creative businesses) into a caricature of itself, one that no one can respect.

Top Disney animator Andreas Deja is overwhelmed by the clarity of his new high-definition TV system

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
That's an easy answer it is my 65in screen and high-definition setup. I am an absolute nut when it comes to high definition and Blu-ray; it has absolutely improved my life. When I saw it in my house for the first time, it felt like somebody had opened a window. The image is so overwhelming it's pure joy.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
Just before I went on a trip a week and a half ago, I set my TiVo for the series Legend of the Seeker. It's extremely well done, I love it, so I didn't want to miss an episode while I was away.

What additional features would you add if you could?
More storage in my TiVo box. I get frustrated when I have to delete things that I haven't been able to watch. I'm a big nut for nature programmes.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years time?
I hope it will still be around but I think we will be downloading these things in the future. I like my current setup so much I know I will still like it in 10 years.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
Passwords that you need to create for all sorts of accounts. I keep forgetting them, and it drives me kind of crazy. We are living in an age of passwords.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
I have had bad luck with cordless phones and fax machines. I keep buying them and they keep breaking on me. They last for eight or nine months then I have to get a new one.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
I would say if you like high definition as much as I do, and if you like Blu-ray, get the PS3 player because it has the most capacity and plays Blu-rays the best.

Do you consider yourself to be a Luddite or a nerd?
I'm a little bit of a Luddite I need to have things explained to me. I hate manuals, so I have to have a friend who knows the technology to explain it for me. But I can be a little bit nerdy, too.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
I bought my first high-definition setup about 10 years ago when the technology was brand new and very expensive. It was a 60in screen and speaker system. It was ridiculously expensive, but I didn't regret it at all.

Mac or PC, and why?
Mac, because I hardly ever get any junk mail or viruses on the Mac. Once I switched I didn't want to look back, so I'm kind of sold on Mac.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I still buy CDs and DVDs. My last purchase was on Oxford Street, London I bought the BBC series Life, and even though my Blu-ray player does not play this region.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
I don't think so, because eventually you have to get your butt off the couch and move and do something. I think robot butlers will make us very lazy.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
I'm waiting for the completely electric car. I have a hybrid myself, but that's half and half. I'm waiting for the time when cars do not need gasoline any more.

Andreas Deja is a supervising animator on the new Disney film The Princess & The Frog, out today in London and 5 February across the UK.

A day after the launch of the data.gov.uk webstie, the government has ruled out supplying postcode data to developers

Web developers have cried foul after the government appeared to rule out the possibility of a free copy of the Postcode Address File (PAF) which contains geographical data about the locations of every Royal Mail delivery address in the UK being made available to non-profit and community websites.

Coming the day after the launch of data.gov.uk, a website which brings together more than 2,500 datasets from across central government for unrestricted reuse including commercial exploitation disappointed developers have said that the rejection looks like "it's back to government business as normal".

Although Gordon Brown has pushed through a scheme which will make some Ordnance Survey mapping data free from April, postcode data has been harder to come by. The release of that would have to be approved by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, headed by Lord Mandelson.

For now that seems to have been turned down. In a response to a petition lodged with the No.10 website which said that "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to encourage the Royal Mail to offer a free postcode database to non-profit and community websites" the government has passed the buck,, saying that deciding whether a copy of the PAF is provided under such terms is down to the Royal Mail and the postal regulator Postcomm.

"As access to the PAF is governed under a condition of licence, Postcomm monitors its practice. Royal Mail's licence obliges the company to make access to the PAF available on reasonable terms," says No.10. "Postcomm allows the company to make a reasonable specified profit margin and monitors its accounts."

In 2005-06, the latest year for which figures have been made available, sales of PAF generated about 18m and a profit of less than 2m.

The PAF or its simpler version, PostZon, which has geographical details for the UK's 18m are frequently used by web services to provide location-based information about users' surroundings. Last September the PostZon file was leaked on Wikileaks but developers shunned it on the basis that they could be prosecuted for using it without a licence.

Harry Metcalfe, a web developer who attended the launch of data.gov.uk and who has also previously built applications that used data derived from PAF and received a lawyers' letter from the company telling his company to cease and desist said the government's approach to PAF and postcode data was outdated.

On the blog for the ernestmarples site which was sued by RM - he wrote:

"The problem is that the licence was formed to suit industry. To suit people who resell PAF data, and who use it to save money and do business. And that's fine I have no problem with industry, commercialism or using public data to make a profit."

"But this approach belongs to a different age. One where the only people who needed postcode data were insurance and fulfilment companies. Where postcode data was abstruse and obscure. We're not in that age any more."

But there are signs that the PAF's elusive paywall will not last for long. Nigel Shadbolt, professor of computer science at Southampton University who together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee was instrumental in opening up government data for the new data.gov.uk website, tweeted that there is "Still much to do" upon seeing the failure of the petition.

Shadbolt and Berners-Lee have been making the case inside government since June last year that data collected by government-owned bodies has in effect been paid for already by the public - and that releasing it to them enhances the economic benefits and opportunities far more than any monetising by government itself.

The No.10 response to the petition notes that the government is the only shareholder in RM, and notes that it maintains an "arms-length" relationship. But it then recognises the potential usefulness of the PAF:

"The Postcode Address File (PAF) dataset was designed and engineered by Royal Mail and is owned and managed by the company as a commercial asset of the business (containing around 29 million addresses in the UK). Royal Mail developed the PAF with the primary purpose to aid the efficient delivery of mail, though over the years the PAF has come to be used for a number of purposes other than the postal purpose for which it is designed and was established. Indeed, many organisations, including new postal operators, banks, insurance companies and others offering to deliver goods to your door, use the information held on the database. The PAF is also used in other business processes, including mailing list "cleaning", anti-fraud activities and various customer services. "

It adds that

"Royal Mail invests significantly in collating and maintaining the Postcode Address File (PAF) and this cost is recovered through an independently regulated licensing arrangement. It would of course be very time-consuming and costly for anyone to try to replicate the list, so Royal Mail licenses PAF data, for a fee, allowing others to use it. "

However figures for the precise amount of investment made by RM in the maintenance of PAF are notoriously difficult to find.

There is understood to be some resistance within government to Berners-Lee and Shadbolt's manifesto - which mirrors that of the Free Our Data campaign run by Guardian Technology since March 2006, arguing that government-collected datasets including those of government-owned organisations like Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey should be made available for free to all users.

Even with Royal Mail it seems that the PAF's licensing is a problem. As a commenter called Chloe points out in a comment to one of Tom Watson MP's posts about RM and PAF, "I work for royal mail and i know my managers use google to lookup incomplete addresses and not the royal mails own software because it is more accurate and up to date and does not have to be licensed to each computer in their office."

The philosopher seemed to have started tweeting. But the account wasn't all it appeared to be

At 5.38pm on 29 January, the German social theorist and philosopher J rgen Habermas apparently tweeted the following: "It's true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers." At 5.40, he tweeted again: "It also counter balances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as . . ." At 5.41: ". . . it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes . . ." At 5.44: "But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics."

Had the 80-year-old doyen of the Frankfurt School for social research joined the twitterati? Or was twitter.com/ jhabermas just an elaborate cyber-ruse devised by someone who should really stop mucking about and finish their thesis on Habermas's theory of communicative action? Personally, I couldn't bear to consider the latter: even if he was a hoax, Habermas had at least 7,000 more followers than real me, damn him.

Either way the philosophy blogosphere went into a frenzy of speculation about whether Twitter Habermas was authentic. Arguments raged over whether the messages sounded like him, or if his German-langage posts were sufficiently idiomatic.

All good points, but surely a stronger objection to Twitter Habermas's authenticity came from the fact that all the above tweets were from footnote three to his (surprisingly readable) 2006 paper Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? Why would Habermas cut and paste from his own paper? What's more, it's the work of moments to set up a phoney Twitter account to subvert or satirise a celebrity. Cyberspace teems with such shadowy simulacra, real hoaxes and phoney thinkers if only Baudrillard was alive to bear witness. Finally, on 1 February, the blogger Jonathan Stray (jonathanstray.com) revealed that he had contacted the real Habermas at his home, and asked him if he was on Twitter. "No, no, no," he was told. "This is somebody else. This is a misuse of my name."

But, even though Twitter Habermas is not for real, there are lots of other top global thinkers who could show that Twitter is not just for Wossy and his banal ilk. Zizek, Eco, Hobsbawm, Chomsky tweet us your thoughts, in 140 characters or fewer.

Macmillan capitalises on bitter rivalry by forcing through price increase for digital versions of its bestselling titles

In a plot twist worthy of one of its own thrillers, publisher Macmillan has capitalised on the bitter rivalry between two of America's largest technology companies to strike a blow for old media by forcing through a price increase for digital versions of its bestselling titles.

Apple and Amazon are locked in a fight over the future of the book. Both are trying to dominate the market for ebooks, which are expected to become increasingly important to readers in the digital decades ahead.

Amazon made an early play two years ago with its monochrome Kindle ebook reader, but last week Apple's tanks arrived on Amazon's lawn with the launch of its latest invention. Having taken the music market by storm with its iPod and iTunes combination, Apple now hopes to repeat the trick with its new iPad and iBookstore.

Macmillan is one of five publishers the others being Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette that have signed up with Apple to make ebooks available through its online store.

In doing so, they have moved the pricing of ebooks away from the bargain $9.99 ( 6.26) price Amazon has been criticised by publishers for charging in an attempt to lure more people on to the Kindle.

Last weekend, Amazon removed Macmillan books including Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel from its US website in protest at the publisher's demand that Amazon stop discounting its titles and start selling them instead at the $12.99 and $14.99 suggested by Apple.

There was outrage in the publishing industry at Amazon's move, and hours later it was forced into a U-turn.

It is now assumed that Amazon will have to match Apple's price for ebooks on Macmillan titles.

"We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles," Amazon said, before adding ominously: "We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for ebooks."

It may seem like a local tussle between American firms, but it is being closely watched by British publishers. As one editor at a London publishing house put it: "Whatever happens in the US will dictate what happens elsewhere in the world."

Some publishers sensed Amazon gearing up for a legal fight with its use of the word "monopoly" in its response.

"I think they very specifically used that word," said one source, "as a way of pointing out to regulators: 'We wanted to sell ebooks for under $10 but there is a pact between publishers and Apple which has forced the price of ebooks up'."

The deal between Apple and its publishing partners has been likened to the Net Book Agreement, which aimed to keep retail prices high and was eventually declared illegal in the 1990s by the UK's competition authorities.

Under the traditional book-selling model, publishers sell their titles at a wholesale price to retailers, who then decide what price to sell them to readers. On some titles they may decide to make a loss in order to get punters through the door.

Under the Apple mode, however, the Californian company is merely an "agent" for the publishers, taking a commission on sales rather than setting the price itself. Its effect, however, is exactly the same: setting a floor for book prices. Macmillan's new deal with Amazon is also based on this "agency" model, with Macmillan selling its wares as though Amazon were little more than a books version of eBay.

For Apple, its intervention in the books market is partly an act of revenge. A few years ago, some of the music labels teamed up with Amazon to try to break Apple's grip on the online music market by allowing Amazon to sell tracks without so-called digital rights management (DRM) at $0.89 each, undercutting Apple. Apple was forced to give the music companies greater pricing flexibility in return for DRM-free tracks on iTunes.

The fight between Amazon and Macmillan is also typical of a traditional media company trying to get to grips with doing business digitally, according to Duncan Calow, partner at law firm DLA Piper. "The whole publishing industry is predicated on being a paper industry the clauses in writers' contracts that talk about approvals, for instance, still talk about approving bindings and trying to turn it around and into a digital content industry takes time. This kind of debate is not just about short-term pricing but whether the model that we use to distribute on paper should be the model that develops for digital," he said.

The pain of this transition is being felt across the media landscape, with everyone from newspaper and magazine publishers to music companies and film producers struggling with the power of the web. But the book industry has a couple of advantages over businesses in other areas which have seen the internet wipe out their profits.

The companies trying to sell ebook hardware need the involvement of publishers. When Apple launched the iPod, buyers could take their existing CD library and digitise it. Downloading music from the web came later the iTunes store was launched two years after the first iPod appeared.

But readers cannot easily digitise their books for a Kindle or iPad. To sell their devices, the likes of Apple and Amazon need publishing firms to agree to make digital versions of bestselling titles available on the same day as the printed work is published. The technology firms recognise that demand for ebook readers will be limited if readers have to wait months to get the latest books.

Secondly, online piracy is still embryonic in ebooks. While pirate copies of bestsellers such as Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol appeared on the web within hours of their release, the scale of piracy is nothing like it was when Apple opened its music store. Napster, for instance, had been closed down for two years by the time the iTunes music store launched. As a result, publishers are not as desperate to see the launch of legal digital stores as their music counterparts were five years ago. They want a good deal, rather than a deal at any price to stem the flow of piracy.

They also want to see more than one player in the ebook market. And later this year Google will launch its own ebook store, Google Editions. The search engine plans to let publishers set their own prices. There may be another twist to this tail.

Proposed settlement could prove to be one of the most important agreements in digital publishing

British authors are divided over plans by Google to create the world's largest online library and profit from out-of-print titles.

Philip Pullman is among those opting out of the proposed Google book settlement, which critics condemn as a "massive rights grab" and an unacceptable reshaping of the copyright landscape to the detriment of writers.

Helen Oyeyemi is also among those opposed to the settlement, currently being thrashed out in the US courts, which could prove to be one of the most important agreements in digital publishing.

Google Books would carry "substantial extracts" of books that are out of print but still within copyright, with US buyers then paying to download the title in full. Revenue generated would be split, with 63% going to the rights holder and the rest to Google. Although only US consumers will be able to use this service, the titles include works published in Britain, Canada and Australia as well as the US.

But, in a move that has angered critics, writers had to choose to opt out by 28 January. For those who did not, their work would be automatically included.

Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, said: "Many of us have books that are out of print but still receive a little bit of money from them through the PLR [public lending right]. And, jJust because a book is out of print doesn't mean it belongs to Google. It belongs to me. And if I want to sell my rights to anybody, why the hell should I have to go and ask Google first?"

Nick Harkaway, son of John le Carr and author of The Gone-Away World, said opting out was "the only way of saying I do not believe this is appropriate. What is happening here is a massive rights grab. It's reshaping the copyright landscape. I don't think it beneficial to have a private company, de facto, owning the history of the written word.

"People are quite cosy with Google. But, it is not guaranteed this library will remain with Google forever. Imagine your least favourite media conglomerate buying the sole rights to digitally exhibit the history of the printed word, over 10m titles. You start to sound like a nut. But the scale of this is enormous".

American authors, publishing organisations and Google are currently trying to agree the settlement, which has yet to be ratified by a New York court.

Google insists the proposed settlement "is not about acquiring rights to books". "It is about creating a new revenue channel for rights holders, and opening up access to these books," said a spokeswoman.

However, some writers are bemused by its complexity. Kate Mosse, best known for her 2005 novel Labyrinth, said she "never really understood" exactly what it meant, and was relieved when her publisher, Hachette UK originally an objector to the settlement made the decision for her by advising its authors to remain in.

Its chief executive, Tim Hely-Hutchinson, said the company did not think Google should have interfered with other people's copyright, and the proposed settlement was a "weak compromise". But, like other many other publishers such as the Random House Group and Penguin, that argument had to be weighed against the interests of its authors being better served by retaining the ability to control how titles were used by Google.

John Lanchester, whose has just published his fourth novel, Whoops!, said "every writer I know has opted out. It's is a complete violation of the principle of copyright."

The Society of Authors, which has 9,000 members in Britain, agreed that the settlement "runs against the basic principle of copyright in which you get permission every time you use something". But, said its general secretary, Mark Le Fanu, very few members had raised objections, while "the great majority seemed to think it could have potentially significant benefits".

But there remain a few who are completely unmoved by the clamour. "I leave it all to my agent," said Martin Amis. "I just can't get interested."

Macmillan has flexed its muscle with Amazon on ebook prices and Apple has helped

The net book agreement, that price-fixing arrangement that publishers gave up defending in the mid-1990s, lives again. Well, sort of. Macmillan has told Amazon that $9.99 ( 6.25) is just not enough to charge for a bestseller or hardback released in ebook version. It considers $12.99, or even $14.99, to be fair. Amazon is furious but concedes there's nothing it can do. It's a rare victory for the champions of copyright.

It is interesting to note the role of Apple here. The group has indicated that it will give publishers freedom to set prices on its new iBookstore. That move undercuts the negotiating power of Amazon.

Apple's stance looks the smarter. There is something ridiculous about Amazon's bleats about Macmillan having "a monopoly over their own titles". Yes, that's the publishing trade and that's how it seeks to stay in business.