From about 1995, the major newspapers in Australia began storing everything they published in electronic form.
The Canberra Times began electronic storage in late 1996. The electronic databases can be accessed (for a fee) via Ausinet and Reuters Business Briefing and other database companies.
Storing newspapers is nothing new. Every copy of The Canberra Times going back to 1926 is in the National Library. Every copy of The Sydney Morning Herald going back 150 years is in the Mitchell Library. The libraries of these newspapers have clippings sorting into subject matters going back decades. Storing information is not new.
But storing electronically makes a huge difference, as events this week have revealed.
The paper clippings in The Canberra Times library are pasted on coloured A4 paper and put under subject headings in a compactus. Some of the headings are: Armed Robbery, Arson, Rape, Drink Driving and so on.
For me to find in that file the name of someone – Bill Bloggs — convicted of one of those offences would require a tedious search and detailed reading of pages and pages of clippings.
With an electronic database, however, I do not have to wade through the clippings. I can search for “”Bill Bloggs” or “”Bloggs” and up pop the articles. Convicted of drink driving in 1998. Acquitted of armed robbery in 1999. Nominated by to the Canberrans for a Free Floriade Committee in 1998 and so on.
The value of these databases has been seized upon by a service called Crimenet (www.crimenet.com.au). It has put a huge amount of information about people convicted of crimes in Australia on its internet site which was launched this week. Much of it was obtained from electronic newspaper files and verified against court records. All of the information is in the public domain. The significant difference is, though, you do not have to trawl through endless newspapers and court records. Instead, you can sit at your computer and get in minutes what used to take weeks to find. Part of the results on a search for Alan Bond are illustrated on this page.
Crimenet does not tell us how many entries its has, but it is likely to be a huge number. It is unlikely to be a complete record of every criminal offence recorded in Australia, so even if your search draws a blank in may not mean that the person whose details you are searching is squeaky clean. The more recent the offence, though, the more likely it is to be recorded.
Anyone with internet access – that is more than 20 per cent of population and growing – can log on to the site and search for a name. If there is an entry, the site replies saying that details are available on payment of $6 via credit card. Key your credit card number into the secured fields and the results will pop up. Further, searches cost a further $2 each. The credit card transaction is secure. Your numbers go encrypted to your card’s bank with an instruction to give Crimenet $6. Crimenet does not get your full credit-card details. It is as secure, or perhaps more secure, than any other credit-card transaction.
Developments like this tend to frighten people. Several other internet developments in the past few weeks have been equally frightening. Hundreds of thousands of people have been caught using the internet to pull down MP3 files that other people have posted on music internet sites. Originally, the idea was that amateurs could put their music on the internet for all the world to access so they could get exposure without being at the whim and mercy of multi-national record company. A good development, you might think. But then some cheeky teenagers started posting recordings of big commercially successful bands, in particular the popular American band Metallica. Others could then download the files. Moreover, they can cut these files to a CD and play them on an ordinary CD player. The music is a perfect copy because the file comprises a series of 1s and 0s which copy exactly.
Now, people have been copying music from radio and records since the first consumer tape recorders were developed in the 1950s. The difference with the new development is that it can been done more cheaply, with better quality and the practice is more widespread. Bear in mind, too, that CD burners now cost about $700, compared to $30,000 10 years ago. So the days of the $30 CD may be numbered. To stay in the market, the CD will have to be cheap enough to make it more attractive than downloading the MP3 music files from an internet site and burning them on to a CD. There will still be a living, but maybe the days of the overpaid pop star are numbered. Maybe we will need more direct public funding for artists, writers etc if the electronic age makes their works impossible to protect from copying.
Metallica searched the net and found the names of the 317,000 people who were using a conduit site, Napster, and presented them to court with demands that Napster stop providing the wherewithal for the copying. Metallica will win this battle, but musicians cannot win the war. It requires too much expensive legal legwork.
It is similar with Crimenet. It is not a new activity, it is a new way of doing something which used to be done a different way. But the new method is so profoundly superior, cheaper and more widespread than the old method that it poses a challenge to existing social and economic structures.
It is the same as gambling and pornography on the internet. It is the same activity done in a different way. You can play the pokies at home. You do not have to tear the plastic off a magazine from the newsagency.
There’s more.
The Government is struggling over broadcast policy and cross-media ownership. At present people are not allowed to own both a broadcast (TV or radio) licence and a newspaper. But the television and radio stations have the equivalent of newspapers on the internet. It is just a new way of doing an existing activity – making words and images available to the public. The cross-media-ownership laws are a farcical anachronism.
But the new method of doing old things is so profoundly superior that it is causing a revolution. The new way is to convert things – words and images – to digital strings of 1s and 0s and to post them in files accessible through the internet to anyone, either free or for payment via credit card. And it is very difficult to destroy these files because they are so easy to copy to another computer. It is very hard to prevent their dissemination for the same reason. It means controls, whether cross-media-ownership restrictions, copyright law, privacy and structures long in place are being grossly eroded.
With Crimenet, it means that before long, everyone’s criminal record will be available to everyone else. Moreover, other information about people will similarly be available. In the US this week a court ruled that internet service providers are not liable for defamatory things that pass through their servers. The court said they were like the owners of telephone and telegraph wires: carriers not publishers. English and Australian courts might take a different view because they have no freedom-of-speech tradition, but it will not stop the practice of having huge amounts of information about people available electronically. As with Metallica and Napster, someone will win a defamation or privacy battle but the legal costs are too high to win the war in the long run, especially as theinformation can be stored in the Bahamas and accessed at the speed of light.
Better to accept that the information, music, gambling sites are there.
In the case of information, it would be better to play on the providers’ commercial desire to provide accurate information and to set up quick, cheap and effective means of correcting information. But as for preventing the dissemination of the information, forget it.
Bear in mind that while last week Crimenet and Metallica were causing consternation, hundreds of thousands of students were looking up material for homework assignments. Hundreds of thousands of people were looking up information on the internet sites of respected university medical centres to get important information to equip them to have a better dialogue with their doctors to make them more comfortable with treatment options. Millions of hobbyists were exchanging information on aphids, goldfish, eucalypts, surf boards and the million and one other good things which engage the human body and mind. Just a new, cheaper, faster and better way of doing old things – research and exchange.
And like last week’s spam-scam where people misused the internet by putting out false information on e-mails to push share prices higher, people will use the internet for fraud and the million and one bad things which engage the human mind.