All your vinyl belong us

I've still got a shelf-full of fine vinyl; all the Floyd's early albums, everything by Bowie pre-1990, all the old standards and a good selection of embarrassments (Shakatak?). There's no question in my mind that it's all mine - subject to fair restrictions, of course. It's fair to digitise it so I can listen to it on different machines. It's not fair to sell copies on the interweb, or even to give copies away anonomously. 

I'd be pretty miffed if the record companies wrote to me to say that Oh no, I didn't actually own that music at all; and that to continue to hold onto my vinyl, I must pay an annual license fee or give the records back.

But this is exactly the pricing model that the information industry is now working towards. The first step is 'cloud' computing - moving both programmes and data from your own magnetic memories to their server farms. Then instead of buying a programme you'll pay an annual fee instead to use the latest version - Microsoft has already gone over to this for new Windows versions. When sufficient people have signed up they'll implement a no pay - no access policy - guaranteeing them an enhanced and secure revenue stream.

And they're all at it. Google Chrome's thuggish and crooked efforts to install itself covertly on my machine every time I updated some other programme, or the efforts of some positively repugnant search engine called 'Babylon' to replace Google as my default did neither any favours in my mind. I have become more committed than ever to open-source software running from my own hard drives. You can't trust any of the buggers.