Scottish court convicts woman despite OCD

Scotland has handed down its first conviction related to unlicensed music use, with Anne Muir pleading guilty to one charge. Torrentfreak reports:

On May 10th 2011, it was widely reported that Anne Muir, a 58-year-old woman from Scotland, had pleaded guilty to criminal file-sharing offences. The conviction of Muir, a grandmother from Ayr, represented the first case of its type in the country.
[...]
Today the decision on sentencing was handed down.
[...]
Muir had faced 10 criminal charges but pleaded guilty to only one of sharing music but “not to any extent”.
[...]
“Ms Muir did not make any money. What she did was not commercial,” said the Sheriff. “She is a first offender so imprisonment would not be beneficial.”
[...]
Muir was put on probation for 3 years and ordered to attend mandatory cognitive therapy treatment sessions for her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

So, the court found she had OCD, and decided that even so she had to be given a criminal record as well? If there's an acceptance that she had a mental precondition to hoard, and that this has led her to hoard music (and karaoke tracks), then why is she also being given a criminal record?

There's something else odd about this case:

Muir, an auxiliary nurse, was said to have amassed a collection of media including some 7,493 music files and 24,243 karaoke files which she made available via an unnamed Direct Connect hub. Sources at the BPI and IFPI, who conducted the initial investigation into Muir’s activities, placed a ‘market value’ on her collection of £54,792.

So that's 31,376 tracks with a market value of £1.72 a track. Are there any karaoke tracks which sell online for more than a quid? In fact, on CD, karaoke tracks seem to be worth about 5p a pop. How on earth did the BPI get to a market value of nearly fifty-five grand?

I mean, sure, it must be certain of its figures as it wouldn't be perjuring itself, but that seems a surprising valuation by any stretch.

It was 20 years ago todaythe day after tomorrow

The Daily Record had a nice piece yesterday on the Big Day Out in Glasgow back in 1990.

You have to tip your hat to the organisers - they did get every big name in the nation who were operating at the time:

Wet Wet Wet, Hue And Cry, Texas, Big Country and Deacon Blue were enjoying massive success in the charts.

Okay, however much horror that line-up might strike in our cold hearts now, you've got to be impressed by the sheer heft there, right?

Their blue-eyed Scottish soul, along with chart fodder from the likes of fellow Big Day acts Goodbye Mister McKenzie, Kevin McDermott Orchestra, The Silencers and Love And Money, briefly defined an era in British music history, Scottish culture and even politics.

I'm not sure by any stretch of the imagination the Kevin McDermott Orchestra or the Silencers defined anything, but you know what they mean.

Pat Kane, though, suggests there was more going on than simply the bringing together of Lorraine McIntosh and Paul McGeechan onto the same stage:

"People were thinking, 'This might matter in some way'. It was consciousness-raising, like an alternative media, almost the way Gospel music was used during the Civil Rights movement. I know from one of Tony Blair's former researchers that he didn't want to give Scotland its own parliament in 1997.

"This guy said that if it wasn't for the evidence that Scotland was culturally militant, that they wouldn't have been able to point to anything in support of a Scottish government."

I suspect even Kane would accept he's slightly over-selling this, but perhaps not by much - it was a key part of Glasgow's City Of Culture celebration, and the success of that year helped shift UK-wide perceptions of Scotland. Nobody would give you a government simply because you had the power to deploy former members of Hipsway at a moment's notice, but you can believe it was a step towards something much bigger.

PRS backtracks on singing shop assistant

Damn right that the PRS should be apologising to a shopworker who they hassled for a licence because she was singing while she worked:

She told the BBC news website: "I would start to sing to myself when I was stacking the shelves just to keep me happy because it was very quiet without the radio.

"When I heard that the PRS said I would be prosecuted for not having a performance licence, I thought it was a joke and started laughing.

"I was then told I could be fined thousands of pounds. But I couldn't stop myself singing.

"They would need to put a plaster over my mouth to get me to stop, I can't help it."

The trouble is, the PRS line seems to be in response to the outcry, not because it was capable of seeing this sort of thing as being a result of its central policy, and paying its "inspectors" a bonus if they do well. I guess we should be thankful that at least this time they've backed down rather than grimly pushing ahead (as with the woman who was told she needed a licence to play the radio to her horses).

This organisation, though, is being treated as a serious player in shaping copyright for the 21st century - and it takes a public outcry before it admits that you don't need to pay a licence to hum while you work. Are they really a credible voice?

Gordon in the morning: He went to Glasgow

First, let's just be fair to Gordon Smart: He did actually bother to head off to Glasgow for the Mobos.

And - given how the winners were drawn heavily from the sort of people that Smart plugs his column with when there's nobody interesting to write about - it's no wonder Gordon was thrilled. Thrilled to the point of awkwardness:


But The Sun has been pretty sniffy about the Mobos in the past - how can Gordon save face?

THE MOBO Awards have been rubbish for years.

Bizarre dubbed them the "no goes" a few years back when half the celebrity nominees failed to show up for the bash.

But this year, on my home soil in Scotland, the McMOBOs were finally something to celebrate.

It's unclear if - when writers from the English Sun travel north, they suddenly cease to believe the Tories are a good thing, in line with their newspaper's somewhat odd double-dealing, and sadly Gordon doesn't let on if he suddenly finds Cameron vapid once he's out of Northumberland.

Nor does Gordon seem to have noticed that, yes, the winners did turn up in Glasgow, but that this might be more because the prizes have gone to bands which issue press releases when one of them buys a drink in a bar or has a bad head cold.

Gordon shares an astonishing statistic with us:

It was a brave shout, considering only five per cent of urban sales come from north of Watford.

What? So - generally - people in Manchester, Liverpool and Bradford don't buy music by black artists? Or is a Scottish journalist making the Southern solecism of assuming that "anything outside London" counts as Scotland?

X Factor changes rules, resets Scotland

You'd have thought that if Simon Cowell was the genius everyone pretends he is, he might have had the idea of changing the format of the X Factor before the first set of rehearsals had been filmed. Now, they're going to have to do the Scottish ones all over again.

Await, now, the inevitable person-through-originally-now-not-getting-through story.

In the Gordon Brown interview for Guardian Weekend - the one where he tried to passive-aggressive away his problems by saying 'I could just walk away tomorrow, I could; no, really' - the Prime Minister's love of Cowell and his end-of-the-pier franchises came up:

And Britain's Got Talent - is it his new favourite TV show? "I think Britain's Got Talent is really interesting. What annoyed me when I was at school was that there were lots of people with obvious ability who could've benefited from opportunities and were told, 'It's not for people like you.' And now they've got more open ways of coming forward. Surely the future for our country is more that Britain has got talent than it is that Britain is a broken society."

What about the judges? Simon Cowell is so nasty. "Do you not think the reason people like him is that he's honest about whether they've got a talent or not?"

Soon, when Gordon is an ex-PM, and people start to sift about for what went wrong, that section might become a key text. Surely, by having a programme called 'Britain's Got Talent', and by having open, public auditions for shows like the X Factor, Cowell is doing the very opposite of "being honest": the format claims, falsely, that everyone is in with a chance.

To hold out an offer of hope, and then to crush it away in the coldest, most snide way possible, leaving people with their confidence in tatters, their dreams of a better future ruined, and the sense of having been very publicly humiliated is a horrible thing indeed. And then turning round, after doing that consistently since 1997, and saying that you like Britain's Got Talent as well is unforgivable.

Mobos go North

In what I'm going to be generous and put down to a well-conceived plan to raise the profile of the MOBO awards - the annual music event where prizes are given to people whose music is, in some way, black - has decided to hold its prize-giving in Glasgow this year.

Lemar - for some reason - was given the announcement to make:

"Bringing the MOBO awards here to Glasgow, a city with such a strong and vibrant music scene, is the perfect fit," the singer said. "I love touring in the UK and the welcome I receive when I come to Scotland is incredible."

That'll be why it's Glasgow, then. Because Lemar likes playing in Scotland. Similarly, the locations of the Grammy awards were fixed on using 'where would David Crosby most like to have breakfast the next morning'.

It's not because the event's partners this year are Event Scotland and Glasgow. Oh, no, no. This is nothing to do with chasing subsidy.

There's no reason why a major event should automatically be held in London, although in these straightened economic times, the London-centric music business might be a bit reluctant for people to run up expense bills traveling north for a second division event.

Sent Home(coming) without pay

The slightly provocatively bylined "Scotland's music festival" that was to have been Homecoming is off. And not simply because of T In The Park saying "I'm sorry, what?"

No, money is at the heart of the cancellation, as so often is the case:

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

It is with great regret that organisers of the Homecoming festival have announced that this year’s event has been cancelled.

This is due to new demands from the council requesting 50% of the profits and a £60,000 bond on the land.

All ticket holders will be entitled to a full refund, and arrangements are currently being made to organise new venues and dates for some of the artists that were scheduled to perform at Homecoming 09.

More details will be revealed as soon as possible.

The website still claims that "tickets are selling fast", which suggests there must be a surprising number of people who pursue refunds for fun and entertainment value alone.

The council would be North Ayrshire, who somehow neglected to mention these demands when announcing the licence for the event.

The festival was to be part of the big Homecoming Year being held in Scotland throughout 2009, which is in no way an attempt to persuade American tourists to visit by telling them that they're probably just as entitled to wear tartan as anybody else.

Barbara Dickson hurt not to be asked back

This year, Scotland is holding a huge series of homecoming events, which the Scottish parliament seems to think will underline how talented the nation is, but in effect just points up how many people can't wait to flee as soon as they get a bit of success.

Someone, though, forgot to invite Barbara Dickson:

She said: "Homecoming? I've never been asked to come home. I wasn't invited to participate in anything to do with launching that. I never even got an invitation to the opening of the parliament."

How surprising that they would have even thought of opening a parliament without inviting the woman who did Pearls A Singer. Oh, hang on, that was Elkie, wasn't it?

Dickson also tuts over the state of Scotland's music:

"In Scotland, it's vital that young folk are playing the fiddle and the box and that people sing. It keeps the music alive. The country needs its culture."

Dickson was talking from her home in Lincolnshire.

Rap: It's from Scotland

No, actually it isn't, but Professor Ferenc Szasz suggests that old Caledonian Flyting battles are a little bit like rap battles.

Szasz suggests there is "a clear link" between the two:

According to the theory, Scottish slave owners took the tradition with them to the United States, where it was adopted and developed by slaves, emerging many years later as rap.

He has uncovered a previously overlooked version of Tupac, Where's Your Troosers by Puff Daddy which he insists proves his point.

I was going to finish this by suggesting that it's only at Christmas that the Sunday Telegraph would stoop to publishing this sort of made-up guff, but I'm not confident that's the case any more.

Clash injection

Clash magazine - the music (and apparently fashion) monthly that comes from Dundee - has been given a large chunk of public money, drawing down nearly a quarter of a million quid from the Scottish Parliament to fund its web ambitions:

MD John O’Rourke: “We now have the opportunity to develop the platform with more applications that will captivate our unique community of music tastemakers and help realise our global aspirations. Clash will continue to concentrate on quality in both our content and delivery, streaming many exclusives and adding new channels, all of which shall see the level of growth continue.”

Does Clash really have a unique community of music tastemakes? (For the website of a magazine that currently has Kings Of Leon on the front cover, mark you.) Clearly, it has a community of users, but I'd be very surprised if they claim their readers are in any way unique to them.

I should imagine the NME.com team are even now sending the Clash team cards, generously welcoming competitors funded by the rates.

George heads north

Attracted, we'd imagine, by the idea of less busy roads upon which he can fall asleep, and excited by the idea that in Scotland, there are miles and miles of Heath, George Michael is thinking of moving north.

George, it seems, has always loved Scotland. You know how it's always been "Caledonian this" and "tartan that" with him.

Okay, perhaps not, but he's trying to make up for lost time:

"I've always loved playing there from the Wham! days.

"The Scots have a real spirit and identity the English are afraid of."

Yes. That's why, erm, there's that Hadrians Wall, isn't it?

That's why Mum has gone to Scotland

Kerry Katona has finally organised that big celebrity wedding that she's been trying to get people interested in for months - she's nipping across to Gretna Green for a Valentine's Day wedding.

Yes, yes, we know. Apparently:

“Mark thought Gretna had an air of romance about it.”

This, of course, is a couple who think Iceland's party quiche range has an air of sophistication about it.