Why did the gaming company waited so long before slamming the user with such a big bill, and allowing him to continue playing the game for over six months? No doubt the company waited for the fruit to ripen before cutting it. Web Coherence warns its readers to be even more cautious as the predators are now actively using legal powers to bail out themselves out of the recession!

I had been asked to give a keynote speech at the prestigious Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas. My topic was uncertainty. I would use an example to show that even if the technology is simple, it becomes highly complex the moment anybody touches it. Any technology, even seemingly benign, can bite.

I had the ideal example. The last wish of a devoted fan of Ella Fitzgerald was for Ella to sing “Every time we say goodbye” at his cremation. The record (The Cole Porter Songbook) was placed on the turntable, the stylus poised over the fourth track – but the wrong side had been chosen. What tune do you think accompanied the casket into the incinerator? “Too darn hot.”

To add that little extra, I would play clips of the songs – a total of 44 seconds. However, Black Hat was going to post the proceedings on the Web, and that meant I needed copyright clearances for images and music. The picture was easy – I found a copyright-free image of Ella very quickly on WikiMedia. But the music? That was trickier.

I faxed ASCAP (three times) – The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers – to get a licence. It took me two months to get a response to my query; it arrived just four days before the conference – did they think I didn’t have a plan B? I was quoted $500 – I could have played two days of wall-to-wall music for the same fee! And this was in a conference that had already paid for the music playing between presentations; in a hotel that had a music license. The fee was calculated as 75 cents for every delegate, with a $78 dollar minimum.

The organizers offered to pay, but my response was “Over my dead body.” I gave the talk, without the music, and announced that because of ASCAP I couldn’t play forty seconds of Ella Fitzgerald. This was received spontaneously with a hall-full of boos and stamping.

Hovering like vultures, ready to pick clean the bones of anyone who strays into the wasteland of Intellectual Property Rights, ASCAP are missing a trick, and actually losing money for artists whose interests they claim to represent. I, like thousands of others operating at the “the bottom of the pyramid,” would happily pay a reasonable sum to include music in lectures, quizzes etc. But not hundreds of dollars, and for a two-day period only. There is a huge pot of money to be had, but only if the pricing regimes are designed to suit small-scale players – at the moment only the big boys can afford to play.

So if you plan to download images/music for presentations, be very careful. Look up, and you’ll see the vultures circling. Play it safe! There is plenty of copyright-free material out there on the Web.