As is generally the case with large industries, the wonderful world of video entertainment software is mainly controlled by gigantic corporate entities. The reason for these companies’ existence is to turn their shareholders’ investment into profit. When this system works well, the companies allocate vast resources to talented auteurs capable of producing superb games that everyone wants to buy. We the consumers are permitted a few hours of distraction from our wretched existence while we enjoy the latest adventures of Commander Shepard or Link the Elf, making rudimentary decisions and passing little tests of skill along the way. The money continues to roll into the corporate coffers and the collapse of capitalism is averted for another quarter. It’s a win-win situation.

But it doesn’t always work that way. Drunk on power, the companies on whom we depend for our our entertainment get greedy. Taking our cash for granted, they look for new revenue streams. In-game advertising monetises the scenery. Outrageous DRM limits our use of the game. Preposterous launcher programs scan our computers, sending our system data, credit card details and contents of our music library to be picked through by giant electronic brains in the name of customer satisfaction. Licence agreements in unreadable legalese allow us to waive our consumer rights with a single click, usually without even having to scroll down to the bottom.

As customers we have available to us only one response to this kind of unethical behaviour. Don’t buy the product. If that sounds simple, it isn’t. Because the zaibatsu have thought of that. The monopolisation of the creative process not being enough for them, they have created a pervasive and deadly virus, the latest vector of which is the Internet, but which has been with us since the Eighties. The name of the virus is Gamer Culture.

Gamer Culture is a broad and all-encompassing term, and it isn’t the purpose of this article to go into the details, or even to understand exactly what it is. There’s a Wikipedia article on it, and whoever wrote that has no clue. If you were to push me to describe its characteristics (and you’d be mistaken, because when I hear the phrase “Gamer Culture” I reach for my M-16 assault rifle) I’d say it was characterised by the discourse and criticism of a small subset of videogames, specifically recently released ones. The very existence of a culture around videogames necessitates buying new videogames if one wants to keep in touch with that culture. It doesn’t matter that if you actually played everything that came out you wouldn’t have time to read or talk about them all, the fact is that the specialist media creates the illusion that everybody is playing Skyrim, or Arkham City, or anything else you want to name, and that nobody is playing Farmville, or Mafia Wars, or the iPad version of Scrabble, because those are “casual” and therefore not part of Gamer Culture.

So once one has a certain degree of investment in Gamer Culture, one cannot merely opt out of playing the latest big title by Activision. It’s acceptable not to have played it yet because you don’t have time, or you can’t afford it and are therefore waiting for a price drop, or you don’t like that kind of game anyway. (As long as you’re don’t mind not getting the joke in that latest Penny Arcade strip everyone is talking about, that is.) But if you just don’t feel like playing it? You’re not part of the Culture any more, sunshine.

None of the above is strictly true, of course. But the corporations want it to be, and they’re happier than anyone to promote the illusion that it is. Because they specialise in creating illusions.

So you have a significant section of the market that buys games not because they want to, but because they feel they have to in order to retain their cultural identity, and a corporate culture that feels entitled to use and abuse this section of the market in order to retain their profit margins. It’s no wonder that occasionally their practices can occasionally appear to cross the line into unethicality. And when this happens, in order to retain their cultural identity without being exploited, potential customers may “boycott” the product. In practice this simply means not buying the product, or sometimes waiting until the price drops.

Virtually every publisher has at some point done something controversial, because it’s impossible to exist in the information ecology without being controversial to someone. In this spirit, I have taken it upon myself to compile a list of potential reasons to boycott publishers in order to opt out of purchasing their products without opting out of the culture of purchasing their products. Some of these controversies have promoted genuine boycotts while others have not. Some of them resulted in falling sales while others resulted in substantial increases in sales. This is a dynamic list which will be updated as new controversies and teacup-storms develop. Please tell me if I’ve missed anything.

Acclaim

• Attempted to buy advertising space on tombstones, allegedly. Seems appropriate now, doesn’t it?

Activision Blizzard

• Acquired and closed Infocom and Sierra, killing the adventure game.
• Activision CEO Bobby Kotick hates videogames. He told the Daily Mail, “The human brain, that most sensitive of organs, is under threat from the modern world.  Unless we wake up to the damage that the gadget-filled, pharmaceutically enhanced 21st century is doing to our brains, we could be sleepwalking towards a future in which neuro-chip technology blurs the line between living and non-living machines, and between our bodies and the outside world… we could be raising a hedonistic generation who live only in the thrill of the computer-generated moment and are in distinct danger of detaching themselves from what the rest of us would consider the real world.”  Unless that was Professor Susan Greenfield.  He runs the website www.godhatesvideogames.com. Unless that is some anonymous loony.
• Activision released the Call of Duty series, popular with racists, misogynists and homophobes. One of them doesn’t support dedicated servers, whatever that is. Another one can be completed without firing a single shot. A third invites the player to gun down tourists in an airport.
• They also caused outrage by sacking the talented lead developers of the popular Call of Duty series.

Loyal Call Of Duty fans hold a candlelit vigil for sacked Infinity Ward staff.

• Diablo III (unreleased) is set to include ludicrous DRM requiring a permanent connection to a central server to stay running.
• Blizzard could be working on an MMO that includes in-game advertising or something.

Atari

• Released the VCS versions of Pac-Man and E.T. (both 1982), two games so bad they brought the entire video game industry to its knees. Beat that.

Atari buried E.T. in the New Mexico desert, to the delight of conspiracy theorists everywhere.

• Boycotting Atari is entirely unnecessary; the brand is already cursed.

Bethesda

• Sold horse armour for Oblivion (2006). Horse armour!
• Won’t allow replacementdocs.com to reproduce their manuals, even for games that they themselves have released as freeware.
• Launched ludicrous legal battle with Mojang over the “Scrolls” trademark.

CD Projekt

• Engaged in speculative lawsuits attempting to obtain unlikely settlement figures from potential pirates, based on IP address tracking. (To be fair, they claim to have stopped when they were asked.)

Electronic Arts

• Acquired and closed Origin, Bullfrog, Maxis and Westwood among others, in a sustained decades-long assault on creativity in game software.
• Hired an irritating twat to say “It’s in the game!” on launching every EA Sports title for a decade at the very least.
• Alleged to have mistreated employees with unpaid overtime and unreasonably long hours.
• Included mandatory online activation and limited-activation DRM on titles including Spore, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 and Mass Effect (all 2008), using Securom, a program which hides in your Windows installation like a poisonous spider in your wellies.
• Corrupted the morals of a generation by including a soft-focus sex scene in Mass Effect (2008).

This is a source of particular annoyance to me personally, since I have just played through Mass Effect and completely failed to get off with anyone (although I reckon I could have had Kaiden had I not left him to die in that explosion. Notably Liara showed absolutely no interest in consoling me.)

• Released Medal of Honor (2010) which was basically an un-American Taliban simulator which trained a generation of jihadists.
• Removed titles including Crysis 2 (2011) and Dragon Age 2 (2011) from Steam for no clearly explained reason.
• Banned people from their Origin accounts (and therefore from both multiplayer and singleplayer games) for breaches of forum etiquette, possibly in a misguided attempt to clear their forums.

Microsoft

• Invented Games For Windows Live, which eats babies. Technically what it eats is savegames, but savegames can be like babies to some people. For example, some of my Football Manager savegames have taken more than 9 months to produce and have had considerably more love and effort put into them than any baby. Also its multiplayer features are not very good, apparently.
• Released rotten Vista-exclusive PC version of Halo 2 (2007).
• Corrupted the morals of a generation by including a soft-focus sex scene in the Xbox 360 version of Mass Effect (2008).
• Promised to release Vista-exclusive PC version of Alan Wake; delayed it so long that everyone had upgraded to Windows 7 anyway, then making it Xbox 360 exclusive instead. Somehow the developers managed to independently release a PC version anyway.
• Generally treating PC gaming as an unwanted stepchild (hair colour unknown.)

Mojang

• Charged money for Minecraft (2011) when it wasn’t even finished.
• Engaged in ludicrous legal battle with Bethesda over the “Scrolls” trademark, and twattishly challenged them to settle it with a bout of Quake 3.

Sega

• The enduring crapitude of Sonic the Hedgehog. Some people claim every Sonic game after 1994 was crap, but God’s honest truth is that everything after the Green Hill Zone in the first game was utter, irrevocable crap. Not to mention the cover of Mario And Sonic At The Olympic Games, which defeats Sonic’s entire raison d’etre by showing him straining to beat a paunchy, dungaree-wearing plumber in a sprint. (And Ameratsu alone knows what the assembled crowd in the stadium think they’re watching.)

Come on, man! You're supposed to be the world's fastest hedgehog! This joker hasn't even changed into his shorts!

Take Two / 2K / Rockstar

• Corrupted the morals of a generation by including an interactive sex scene in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2005); an even stupider version of the same sex scene appeared in Atari’s Fahrenheit (2005).
• Temporarily renamed Irrational Games “2K Boston”, which is as literal an example of the banality of evil as you’ll find.
• Included mandatory online activation and limited-activation DRM on Bioshock (2007), using Securom, a program which wraps itself around your Windows installation and squeezes it like a boa constrictor.
• Grand Theft Auto 4 (2008) required a load of crapware to run, including Games For Windows Live (see Microsoft).
• Duke Nukem Forever (2011) was criticised for misogyny, for mocking the aristocracy and for not being very good.

Duke likes to have his knees sucked.

• Team Bondi, developers of LA Noire (2011) were alleged to have mistreated employees with unpaid overtime and unreasonably long hours.
• XCOM (unreleased) was criticised for failing to retain the spirit of the franchise.

UbiBloodySoft

• Numerous recent PC releases in 2010-11 have included ludicrous DRM requiring a permanent internet connection to a central server to stay running, for no benefit to the consumer. In some cases (From Dust, 2011) they claimed that the DRM definitely wouldn’t be included, before including it.
• Anno 2070 (2011) used limited-activation DRM which used up one of your ungenerous three activations on changing graphics card. When their attention was drawn to it, UbiBloodySoft first announced that this was intentional, then patched it out within the week.

Valve

• Required the installation of Steam crapware to run anything, but especially Half-Life 2 (2004) which was basically a massive phone bill waiting to happen.
• Failed to release, or even announce, another Half-Life game after Episode 2 (2007)
• Released Left 4 Dead 2 (2009) before people had properly finished playing Left 4 Dead (2008).
• Encouraged players to buy games and complete achievements in order to facilitate the early release of Portal 2 (2011), which was released a whole few hours early, and again in order to win games that they might have already owned.

I think that’s it.  No other software publisher has anything I could possibly hold against them… yet.

How can I describe this coldness? Freezing eyes. Leading us on strings. Failures can be overturned but never replaced.

Nothing is risked. Nobody can hear you.

Some have allowed their natures to become different from what was intended. Life becomes sleep punctuated by efforts to regain lost time. Each time the cycle repeats, it’s slightly colder. Each time it takes slightly longer.

Nobody can hear you. Nobody can hear your whining. You have nothing to say.

It requires skill to put together a worldview. You can’t just hammer sentences together and hope to reach a kind of calm. Not if you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror.

You have nothing to say. But that’s all right. It’s morning. You can try again later.

There was a point to this, but it got cut.

It’s one of those stories that turns up on the internet now and again. PR outfit (in this case Paul Christoforo of the oh-so-professionally named Ocean Marketting) displays lousy customer service, picks a fight with the wrong guy (in this case, Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik, aka Gabe), is ridiculed on the internet and ultimately gets fired. This is a particularly amusing example of the form.

But it isn’t enough for crack newshound Joel Johnson of Kotaku, who decided to do a bit of digging. He found that Christoforo had apparently been impersonating his client rival, which isn’t very nice.

Also not very nice was Johnson’s ill advised decision to link to some of Christoforo’s hobbies and forum posts from his personal life (none of which are related to the matter in any way – his hobbies appear to be bodybuilding and keeping tropical fish, neither of which are any of Kotaku’s bloody business, frankly.)

Kotaku has a vast readership of suggestible people who are never knowingly reluctant to launch into flame wars on behalf of their preferred video entertainment system. At the time of writing, this article has 170,565 “likes” on Facebook (and they can’t all be Johnson’s dummy accounts).

The highest rated commenter below is Ocean Marketting’s original disgruntled customer Dave, who states “I’m talking with the guy to try and clear this up, so I would like to urge some holiday restraint.” Let’s see if the other commenters agree with him.

Masterdingo: We are the internet, man. I hope that you get your controllers, I really do. But, in the meantime, we’ll be feasting on the corpse of Paul’s career.

Let’s hope it’s just his career, eh?

GarbageBear: When someone like this is presented to the world. . .such an easy target for everything they hate, you can’t expect people to hold back.
Especially, when relative anonymity is involved. The Legion can know everything about him, but he cannot pick apart the legion.
He brought it on himself.

What the hell does that even mean?

BallisticTomato: nope. no reason to give him a break. i hope he suffers and suffers greatly.. i feel bad for his family.. but his wife should have known better and found a better partner.

Parrotman01: This guy’s life is over. I’m not being melodramatic. This incident brought in so many other skeletons on this guy’s head. He has a newborn and a wife, and he lost his job. And with all this shit out in the open, he won’t find another job. And then the natural progression of losing shit starts.
I’m not defending this guy, you reap what you sow.

Skeletons on his head. Shit out in the open and about to be lost. It doesn’t look good.

Joseph: This complete Piece of Garbage and poor excuse for a Human Being mentioned in his apology email that he had a wife and a newborn. Two things here: 1. Who in their right mind would marry, and be impregnated by, this walking genetic defect? And 2. Someone, if they really care, should get said senseless woman and child away from this guy because, if things continue as they are, this walking ‘roid is going to put a pistol in his mouth possibly *after* he turns it on those closest to him. Not that I’m hoping he does. Far from it, but, well, I’ve seen this kind of train-wreak before. It never ends well.

Let’s here what Paul himself (@oceanstratagy) has to say on the matter?

Please stop calling my house

My family is at risk over controllers

I’m taking time off

So all’s well that ends well. After all, it’s only a person’s life we’re talking about, which, let’s face it, is essentially valueless in comparison to the brief amusement of thousands of incompletely-socialised teenagers and technically-adults.

And as a little coda, here’s Krahulik on bullying. You can decide for yourself whether he’s for or against it. I’m going for “for.”

The Facts

“Pride, then, seems to be a sort of crown of the virtues; for it makes them greater, and it is not found without them.” – Aristotle.

Reading through my original mission statement, it appears that when I started this project I was hopeful of finding a title which would make me finally understand the RPG, or failing that one which would induce me to wash my hands of the genre entirely.

Impressively, Ultima IV manages to do both both. It does this by being as enormous and detailed summary of 1985’s state of the art of RPGs as one could hope for, a Platonic RPG, if you will. It is compulsive and evocative. It simulates a fully realised world with a vast number of theoretical possibilities, none of which amount to anything. It is a complete and unqualified waste of time, and it’s hard to imagine what might induce me ever to play again.

Having consumed Star Wars, Time Bandits and Tron and wrapped them around easy-to-grasp swords ’n’ sorcery quest-structures, Richard “Lord British” Garriott took an unexpected left turn into Essex, sorry, ethics, for Ultima IV. Good for him, I say, although the left turn wasn’t sufficiently steep to conceive a game that wasn’t a third sequel. Still, Ultima IV turned out to be a pretty good idea, since it was raved about in various quarters. Mainly by Americans, who if I remember the 1980s correctly were pretty much the only people who could afford the computing behemoths to play it on. Meanwhile in California, Jay Miner was launching the Amiga, and in Hull I was still playing out in the street with other kids at the time, two years away from owning a machine capable of running Jet Set Willy or Lords of Midnight.

The Cover

“To cease from evil, to do good, and to purify the mind yourself, this is the teaching of all the Buddhas.” – Gautama Buddha

A picture of Jesus, parting the Red Sea with an Ankh. From which we can deduce that the game will have a Messianic feel while at the same time being agreeably non-denominational.

The Lore

“We have just emerged from the darkest period in recorded history. With the vanquishing of the Triad of evil, we need no longer anxiously watch our backs for fear that evil will fall upon us in the first unguarded moment. The stability achieved by the New Age seems to herald a Golden Age of Peace and Prosperity. What kind of people will inherit this New Age? Surely our destiny is not to perpetuall fight as warring tribes throughout all time. Is there not a higher calling – one worthy of our efforts and capabilities?” – Ultima IV manual

In a spectacular break with tradition, the world of Britannia (nee Sosaria) is no longer threatened by an evil mastermind, which rather begs the question of why attacks from wandering groups of monsters, rogues and pirates are if anything more frequent than in Ultima III. “Why doth Evil still stalk the world and can it ever be truly vanquished?” asks the manual, reasonably.

Having forseen the end of history, Lord British summons YOU to Britannia through the debatable margins of reality in order that you can set an example to the morally delinquent populace and thereby become the Avatar.

Despite the Hindu terminology and Euro-Medieval presentation, as seen in-game this presents itself as an essentially Buddhist concept. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to attain Enlightenment in the eight Virtues, those being Honesty, Humility, Spirituality, Sacrifice, Valour, Honour, Justice and Compassion. As you adventure through the world, as well as accumulating companions, attributes, hit points and money, the game monitors your actions and if you behave yourself you will gradually advance in each of these virtues. In the interests of preserving the illusion, the scoring system the game uses remains opaque rather than explicit, a design decision that makes your relationship with the world more analogue and – dare I say it – immersive than certain Bioware games I could mention.

Every time you hit the top score in a virtue you have to go and meditate at a shrine to prove it. Even with that lot out of the way your quest is not yet complete. You also have to explore eight dungeons, retrieving a number of stones, and piece together a series of cryptic clues before descending into the final (presumably bastard hard) dungeon, the Stygian Abyss, to claim the game’s Big Maguffin, the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom.

Oh, and none of this is explained in advance. You’ll only have any idea of what you’re supposed to be doing if you thoroughly explore the absolutely immense world and converse with the various people therein, some of whom have substantially more personality than others.

Character Building

“So too then is it with the Virtues: for by acting in the various relations in which we are thrown with our fellow men, we come to be, some just, some unjust: and by acting in dangerous positions and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we come to be, some brave, others cowards.” – Aristotle

Although your ultimate goal is to excel in all eight of the Virtues, you will probably have priorities. Instead of choosing your character and deciding how strong / charismatic / wise they’re going to be on a scale of one to twenty-four, you are instead asked a series of questions about ethical dilemmas, like so:

Thou hast been sent to secure a needed treaty with a distant Lord. Thy host is agreeable to the proposal but insults thy country at dinner. Dost thou valiantly bear the slurs, or justly rise and demand an apology?

Your character class and starting location will depend on your answers. Hint: don’t choose Humility. It’s all very well being a humble shepherd, but something nasty will probably come along and kill you straight away.

It’s said that Garriott developed Ultima 4’s ethical system after receiving the unwanted attentions of Christian parents who thought the demonic foes and magic spells common to the Ultima and Dungeons and Dragons universes might be encouraging an epidemic of devil worship across Middle America. Ironically the result was a system that (if the thoughts of assorted journalists and bloggers on the internet are anything to go by) had a substantial influence on the developing belief systems of impressionable teens. While Christian parents couldn’t complain about the virtues, there’s an empowerment to Garriott’s Avatar that’s lacking from most interpretations of Christianity. Like a Buddhist, the Avatar seeks to achieve enlightenment through his own actions and thoughts, with no need to involve an external Saviour in the process.

Although you do have to please this rather grumpy seer.

The Buddha taught the middle path between asceticism and indulgence, while Aristotle considered virtue to be the mean between two extremes, and thought humility a vice. By contrast, the direction of Ultima IV compels your character to strive for excellence. By the time I was considered worthy of elevation in the virtue of Sacrifice, for instance, I had given all my worldly goods to beggars and donated so much blood I could barely walk.

Back in Ultimas I to III, of course, you defeated evil by murdering jesters and stealing horses (and, if you’re like me, massacring priests as well). In order to justify that sort of behaviour, you’d have to roleplay those games as a kind of Nietzschian “noble man” from a line stretching back through Conan to Odysseus, levelling up through the “will to power” and using the population as stepping stones on the road to greatness. You might describe such a hero as beyond good and evil.

Conversely the in-game Lord British qualifies as Aristotle’s “proud” or “great-souled” man, of whom it is said “He is the sort of man to confer benefits, but he is ashamed of receiving them, for one is the mark of a superior, the other of an inferior. And he is apt to confer greater benefits in return, for thus the original benefactor besides being repaid will incur a debt to him.” The backstory says that Lord British won his kingdom after defeating one of the earlier villains, who nonetheless returned, but no matter how many times the Avatar returns to Britannia to defeat evil, he or she never gets so much as a single jester. As the ruler of the kingdom, Lord British is in no position to provide a moral example to his population, but he does choose a fellow American (implicitly) to come and do it for him.

Lord British is attempting to kick-start the struggling economy by investing in the public sector. This year alone has seen him employ two guards, two jesters, a bard and an outreach co-ordinator.

The Game

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” – Friedrich Nietzche

In terms of what you actually do when you’re “playing” Ultima 4, it’s largely the same as its immediate predecessor. You’re a little man in a big world. You map, fight monsters and, with any luck, hijack a boat. When you’re strong enough you head down into the first-person dungeons and collect items. Talking to characters results in meaningless babble, direct instructions or cryptic hints, and if you want to finish the game you’re going to have to follow up every single one of them.

The graphics have been upgraded to spangly EGA but not substantially redesigned. The big change is the size of the world, which has increased exponentially since Ultima III.

This, of course, was a selling point when there was nowt else to play, so it’s hardly fair to pick on Ultima 4 for it now. For the average gamer in 1985, who’s paid top dollar for a boxed set and is not generally tempted by a multitude of other shiny things to play instead, this is wonderful news. In the absence of online FAQs, this game could probably have kept you occupied for years of your life.

Verdict

He enters a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers already inherent in the very act of living, not the least of which is the fact that no one with eyes will see how and where he gets lost and lonely and is torn limb from limb by some cave-Minotaur of conscience. And assuming a man like this is destroyed, it is an event so far from human comprehension that people do not feel it or feel for him: — and he cannot go back again! He cannot go back to their pity again! – Friedrich Nietzche

One of the hideous abominations of nature that awaits in the dungeons.

So yeah. This might be the last Man vs Genre for a while.

In these enlightened modern times, it can seem as though guiding your little man around the world and its dungeons, intermittently fighting orcs, is the very epitome of pointless tedium, going on as it does for bloody ever. This game is much too much too long, and it resorts to every little trick to slow you down. Combat takes hours, especially when your party swells to eight members, all of whom want the chance to bash a monster over the head if they’re to level up. My Ultima IV time so far is around the fifty-hour mark and although I’m sorted for virtues, if I went back to it I’d have to do the whole dungeon thing, and frankly I’m going to need to give it a few months to get it out of my system before I even think of going back.

Our lower-quality newspapers are have been responsible for some fairly ludicrous articles, and Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail has produced a classic of the genre. Of course, dissecting a Daily Mail article for one’s own entertainment is like shooting fish in a barrel, and frankly you could go through almost every article on the website looking for ridiculous assertions, but we all have our simple pleasures. This is a lo-o-ong article, and it’s not going to be possible to enumerate every single mistake, logical flaw and fabrication, but luckily enough of them leap out at you.

Let’s start with the title. “Google threatens to destroy not only pop sensation Adele, but Britain’s film and music industries. So why is No.10 in thrall to this parasitic monster?” A winning headline that combines celebrity, politics and evil corporations. All it needs is a serial killer.

You have to be fairly alarmed that Google has apparently threatened to destroy a perfectly good pop star. I’d be a bit worried if I was her. Are they sending her hate mail? Making silent phone calls? And why do they want to destroy her anyway? Don’t bother reading the article to find out. Nothing in it so much as implies that anyone from Google has threatened to destroy anybody.

The article begins “The music and books retailer HMV and the music giant EMI are two of the grand old dames of Britain’s music industry.”

This is basically an anthromorphic and cuddly way of saying that they are very large companies that have been around for a long time. If Wikipedia is accurate, HMV shops first appeared in 1921, owned by the Gramophone Company. EMI was founded in 1931 when the Gramophone Company merged with Columbia Gramophone Company, and HMV became a separate company in 1998, the same year Google was founded. Brummer’s “Grand Old Dames” have been around for 80 years and 13 years respectively.

And they’re not really “Dames,” whatever in God’s name that means, they’re businesses, which is why EMI sold the “His Master’s Voice” trademark to HMV in 2003 when the latter was floated on the stock market.

“But the future of both of these historic enterprises,” continues Brummer, “with a pedigree of recording talent going back almost a century, is in doubt.”

It’s impossible to disagree with the “in doubt” part – the phrase “no shit, Sherlock” springs to mind, but I’m not quite sure what he means by “a pedigree of recording talent going back almost a century.” HMV is a shop, so its unsurprising that they should sell records (and films) that were originally made a long time ago. I just took my first-ever trip to HMV.com and was able to find more recordings from 1911 than I had ever expected, much more quickly than I could have expected. There’s “American Yodeling: 1911-1946”, “Yikhes: Early Klezmer Recordings 1911-1939” and “The Story Of Vocal Jazz 1911-1940” (a 10 CD set). So well done, HMV. Although I’m not sure what Brummer’s point is, because I could open a record shop tomorrow and it would still have a “pedigree of recording talent going back almost a century.” It would specialise in yodelling and klezmer.

“Together with other UK-based creative champions such as Warner Music as well as a host of imaginative, independent record producers, they are in danger of extinction – as is this country’s extraordinarily successful music business.”

The only way “imaginative, independent record producers” are in danger of extinction is if there is an asteroid impact or nuclear war. Warner Music is based in New York. (I’m sure it has offices in the UK. I do not believe the Daily Mail’s editorial policy is that every company with offices in the UK should be described as UK-based). If every record label went out of business tomorrow, the “music business” would still exist, although you couldn’t in all conscience describe it as “extraordinarily successful.” Then again I think it would be fair to say that if the music industry was “extraordinarily successful” it wouldn’t be in trouble.

“From Dame Vera Lynn to Tom Jones and the Beatles, Britain has long had the knack of producing music superstars capable of conquering the world.”

Google are threatening Dame Vera Lynn? Now that’s a different matter. We ought to declare war on them. It surprised me, but Vera Lynn had a nine-week Number One in America, so I’ll give him that one.

“Indeed, we are still the world’s second largest exporter of music.”

This claim, with the US in first place and Sweden in third, seems to be received wisdom, but I can’t find a reliable source for it anywhere.

“Blah blah blah creative industries banking crisis bloated public sector blah blah.”

There now follows a few tedious paragraphs about the anonymous representatives of the creative industries moaning that the Government is not investing enough in pop music and computer games and is making insufficient cuts to the bloated public sector (you know, schools, hospitals, prisons). But don’t fall asleep, or you might fail to spot that Adele went to the same school as Leona Lewis, not to mention Amy Winehouse, Imogen Heap, Jessie J, Katy B, Kate Nash, Katie Melua, the Noisettes, The Feeling, The Kooks, Athlete and Dane Bowers – a situation analogous to the number of political leaders to have emerged from Eton. You might almost forget that the creative arm of the music industry reflects the public face of government in that it runs on contacts and favours. This may or may not be a healthy situation.

“So why is Cameron so fascinated by Google, its wealth, trendiness, innovation and glamour?”

Note the answering of Brummer’s own question, a la “So what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” Note also that Brummer has failed to demonstrate that David Cameron is indeed fascinated by Google’s wealth, trendiness, innovation and glamour. Of course, to judge from the article, Brummer is above all that, being instead fascinated with the wealth, trendiness, innovation and glamour of the music industry.

“Could it be down to his media and strategy advisor Steve Hilton, the man described as the Prime Minister’s ‘best political friend’?”

I don’t know. Could it be down to the Daily Mail’s City Editor Alex Brummer, the man described as the Daily Mail’s ‘biggest idiot’?

“After all, Mr Hilton, who often wears t-shirts, pads around shoeless in No.10 and is described as a genius by admirers – has a direct line into the company”.

He wears t-shirts? I was so astonished I almost spilt my tea down the front of my t-shirt.

A few paragraphs down, we’re told that Hilton “returned to Downing Street in September 2009.” Presumably it didn’t take him long to realise he’d gone to the wrong address and to go to wherever David Cameron was at the time instead.

“The fact is that Google was encouraging Britain to throw away decades if not centuries of intellectual copyright while at the same time lobbying governments all over the world in a bid to drive a coach and horses through the laws.”

Good luck with that.

“The reason is simple. The company wants to plunder intellectual property – songs by Adele and other British singers – so that it can disseminate it free to anyone who logs onto Google anywhere in the world. The more people who log on to Google, the more the company will receive in advertising revenue. And who isn’t going to log on if all their favourite pop songs are offered for free?”

So that’s their business plan. Imagine if you could just type “Adele” into Google and listen to songs by Adele, for free. I imagine her record label XL Recordings (yes, Brummer’s poster-girl for major-label British recording industry success is signed to an independent label) would be devastated. Unless they’d uploaded her videos to Youtube for anyone to watch whenever they want for free. Why would they do a thing like that? Perhaps it’s some kind of promotional strategy. Perhaps they’ve got the misguided idea that the more people hear it, the more people will want to buy it. It’ll never work. You’d never get an album to spend 11 weeks at Number One with that kind of shoddy planning, unless you JUST DID.

And I don’t know if Brummer is aware of this, but you don’t actually need to log on (or in) to Google to use their search engine, so the answer to the question “who isn’t going to log on” is “most people, unless they want to check their email or something.”

“The Prime Minister, cocooned in his Downing Street bubble with his Google cheerleaders, seems blissfully unaware that, far from being an influence for good on the world wide web, Google has become a global predator ruthlessly gobbling up potential rivals such as YouTube and ‘stealing’ the creative work of writers, film makers and the music industry.”

Oh, where do we start with this? We could start with the idea of “good.” Brummer is unclear about his ethical system, and there certainly isn’t enough information to deduce it from the article. Just about all we know is that the music industry is “good” but Google is bad, even though both are multinational corporations which lobby governments, grow by acquisitions (ruthlessly gobbling up potential rivals such as Zavvi) and profit from the creative work of others. Thinking about it too much makes my brain hurt.

I’m not sure what those quotes around ‘stealing’ are supposed to imply. Is Brummer alleging that Google steals the creative work of others? Is he reporting that one of his unnamed contacts in the music industry has alleged this?

There follows a classic piece of doublethink where Brunner concludes that the US is “more aware of the huge cultural dangers” of Google, based on the recent court ruling against its plans to make digitized books available online, despite reporting David Cameron’s comments about Google’s view on the British copyright system versus the American one. He later mentions that the European Commission and Federal Trade Commission are both investigating Google’s alleged anticompetitive behaviour. The apparent contradiction is not resolved.

(Incidentally, if you type “search engine” into Google, the number one result is dogpile.com. Everyone uses Dogpile nowadays, right? If you type in “web browser”, the highest non-sponsored, non-Wikipedia result is Opera, while the sponsored links are, in order, Google Chrome, Lunascape and Internet Explorer 9.)

“The irony is that Google is alien to much that Britain holds dear.”

I have no idea what this means but I was amused to read it in the Daily Mail, which is alien to much that I personally hold dear.

“Our Englishman’s Castle has been turned into public property by Google Earth — which offers aerial views — and Street View, created when an army of Google cars travelled the length and breadth of the country taking pictures of our streets and our homes to put on the internet.”

The source of Brummer’s confusion could be that like the creative industries he seems to admire, he has confused being able to look at something with owning it.

What else? Outrageous fabrications about “piracy sites” and “internet buccaneers”. Assertions about what you get when you google Adele that have been shown to be wrong.

“The Government seems to believe the Internet should be free and open to everyone,” he fumes. This is probably true unless King Canute was voted back in when nobody was looking.

Then Brummer closes on an ominous note.

So the question is this: will the Government only be satisfied when every last independent book publisher and specialist music store has been closed, our recording industry hollowed out and investment in brilliant new artists — capable of taking on the world — has been eliminated.

No. Erm, yes. No, I mean no. Maybe.