It is already quite a week on the web, with the enormous backlash against the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). Very many sites and blogs (mine included) joined the protests, with the view that if the act was passed, it would give the music and film industries enormous power over what everyone else can or can’t do.

Piracy is a nuisance, but it is what happens when people are given access to large amounts of nice stuff and the ability to take it without having to pay.

With information products such as documents or media, everyone knows very well that downloading it doesn’t destroy anyone else’s ability to also share it, so many people don’t think of it as theft. I have some sympathy with that view, but I also understand that for many of us, our information output is our livelihood, and if no one pays, we can’t survive.

I often fall victim to websites copying my material and passing it off as ebooks on their sites. Sometimes they even go further and try to give rights to others to use the material.

So they use my material to get rich or increase their influence. That is certainly theft. Do I care? No, not really. I’ve never lost any time worrying about it. The chances are they wouldn’t have paid anyway, so they might as well have my material free. If they leave my authorship details on, and they usually do, at least I gain a bit from increased influence.

Why should this be different for music or film makers? Film studios can make hundreds of millions from a film, even after piracy takes its share. I don’t accept for a minute that they are existentially challenged by piracy. It is a nuisance but nothing more.

With the music industry, many of us still pay even if others do steal, and again I see no reason to expect that to change. When they stop whingeing about piracy and set up streaming companies like Spotify or Napster, many of us are happy to pay for the convenience.

My sympathy with them is extremely limited mainly because they grossly overstate their losses and take no account of their gains at customer expense. If a million people download a free copy of a music track, you simply can’t equate that to a loss equivalent to the cost of all those people buying the tracks.

In most cases, if they weren’t available to be stolen, they still wouldn’t have paid for them and would simply have done without. They have many competing destinations for that money. Also, if I buy the same track many times via duplication of different albums, I get no refund.

Nor do I get a refund for the huge amount I have paid over the years for stuff that turns out to be rubbish. If you account for those gains, after winding down claimed losses to the losses of sales that likely would have happened, I doubt very much if the loss figures would still be significant. They complain very loudly but they have no case.

Even if they did have a case, there is still no reason why every other user or the web should have their lives made more difficult just to protect the interests of one small industry. The industry itself should do more to protect their works if they care.

They could watermark their content against every purchaser so that they could identify the main culprits and use existing legislation to prosecute them. Giving them the right to have sites closed, or extreme surveillance used against everyone, that is much too far. The protests look like they are achieving their goals. Politicians should listen and learn.

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Some people in the media world are terrified their businesses will be wiped out by new technology such as pads, clouds and augmented reality, but they won’t, not if they take the opportunities it brings.

The sad passing of Steve Jobs has led many to speculate about what will come next. I blogged about the future for Apple a while ago, looking at their alarming new tendency to use the courts to win instead of relying on better design.

Many engineers are Star Trek fans. A lot of technology ideas in Star Trek have influenced real life, but of course the influence goes both ways.

It was predictable that social networking would be used in coordination of the recent riots, and thankfully also the clean-up. Of course it was. People will use whatever tools are available to communicate with each other - notched sticks, smoke signals, clay tablets, or any other medium. You may be able to switch off a network but you can't stop people communicating with each other.

As technology rapidly advances in all fields, convergence is happening between biotech, nanotech, infotech and cognitive technology. In the very long term, many decades away, this will give us almost complete convergence of man and machine.

One of the interesting trends during the recession is that pay for top executives has stormed ahead while that for most people has been held back or reduced.

The recession has provided a good excuse to keep pressure on the remuneration levels for lower staff, and also to restrain their spending, and in many cases this has helped keep profit levels up, for which executives are then rewarded. If the economic difficulties continue, pay differences will increase, but shareholders will gradually start asking questions on the wisdom and necessity of paying such levels to senior staff just as they now are with junior staff.

It is hard not to feel some sympathy with retailers at the moment, but the further future shows some potential for fighting back against the current webification as the recovery takes hold. Certainly there are more tools in the box than just cost reduction and price increases.

The UK recession continues but it is frustrating that we see such narrow journalistic coverage of it. We see figures on overall sales, and overall this or that. A lot of interesting figures are left out.

Back in the days when networks and networking services were designed, built and operated by telcos (telecoms companies to those of you who don't live in IT) there was a great vision of the future, where an information superhighway would connect everyone at high speed to networks and we'd be able to build fantastic new services.

With Google’s project Tungsten recently in the news, I thought I’d dig out a blog I wrote on a similar topic 11 years ago.

The BBC has managed to recover much of the data from their Domesday project in 1986 and put it on the web. Back then, a mere 25 years ago, people were asked to document some aspects of their area and lives, and it was all stored on laserdiscs - we didn't have the web then so it seemed a good idea at the time.

The BBC has usually been pretty good on technology awareness, so it wasn't that they lacked understanding, it is just that technology comes and goes and it isn't always obvious which will survive. At the time, laserdiscs were thought to be a modern storage technique, a large format CD basically, aimed mainly at video storage.

It is an interesting time for the IT industry. After two decades of convergence, we are finally at the point where pretty much all IT companies are realising that they are pretty much in the same markets. With almost full convergence of TV and PCs, and now tablets making the missing link, expanding into books and magazines as well as games, we now have direct and very open competition between players who were in very different markets just a year or two ago.

We are in interesting times. The web is mature, we have fast PCs, reasonable broadband speed and small mobile phones that do lots, 3D TV and pretty realistic computer games. I often envy my 16 year old daughter and wish I was just growing up now.

Each decade brings a new batch of technology. Some is just incremental upgrades, other stuff is brand new. The next decade will be very exciting. There are a number of areas where breakthroughs will change our lives and one blog article is far too short to go into them all. The highlight for me is augmented reality. Just starting now, it has huge potential.