Barry Fox

Heaven protect us from people who promote technology that they do not understand. As sure as night follows day, and just as predicted in this column last year, London's congestion charging scheme has run into trouble.

Mayor Ken Livingstone's Transport for London (TfL) is giving Capita, the company that runs the scheme, £31m to improve the technology - and so catch more drivers without room for appeal.

It's probably money wasted because, as anyone who has ever used a scanner and optical character recognition (OCR) software knows, number plate capture will always make mistakes.

You can get a fix on how much TfL understands about technology just by emailing TfL a plain text question. I asked how to change credit card details on TfL's computer records. The reply was a plain text email telling me to download an HTML attachment, which contained the answer.

I pretended to be a punter who didn't know how to handle an attachment. TfL's customer services suggested I download Acrobat from Adobe's website, adding that I may not be able to open an attachment if a virus checker is set too high.

HTML attachments instead of plain text? Download Acrobat to read HTML? Little things like this make it easier to understand how TfL came to scorn the traffic-checking system used in Singapore - with smart cards in cars read by gantries and cameras only used to snap cars without valid cards - and rely entirely on flakey OCR.

Recently the National Gallery in London announced a plan to earn revenue by printing while-you-wait copies of all the paintings on show. At the launch party, both the National Gallery and project partner Hewlett Packard proudly proclaimed that they wanted to model the future of fine arts on the music industry.

Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of HP's Imaging and Printing Group, announced: "The music industry has gone digital, end-to-end. Distribution can be on the internet. We want to see the same process in the world of Fine Arts. This is the first baby step to becoming just like the music industry. A whole new revolution has happened."

Is this really wise, we asked? Just look at what happened in the music industry! At a recent anti-piracy meeting held in London, Jay Berman, the chairman of the IFPI (a global recording industry trade body), blamed poor security in CD technology for making one in three music CDs a pirate copy, with pirate sales at a billion dollars a year, losing the legitimate industry $4.6bn a year.

Berman stated: "If we had ever envisaged CD-R, we would have pressed for greater protection in the CD system. We tried to talk to the computer industry about copy control. No way, they said. Nothing. We were desperate, but there was no level of co-operation."

What he didn't say was that it was the record industry's blissful ignorance of technology that created the original problem. Back in June 1989 at a meeting in Athens, the RIAA agreed to the Serial Copy Management System (SCMS). This stops a digital recorder making a copy of a digital copy, but it lets it go on making as many digital copies of the original as the user wants.

So SCMS offers only token protection. But it bamboozled the music industry people round the table. The rest is history, and making copies of music CDs is now a way of life.

The National Gallery has been working with HP for eight years on a scheme to digitise all its 2,300 paintings. The images were captured with a digital camera that steps backwards and forwards over a painting to achieve a resolution of 100megapixels - that's 20 times better than the best consumer camera.

A six-colour printer in the Gallery's shop prints out high-quality copies on demand, in just five minutes.

You'd think the National Gallery might be worried about people buying and scanning one of the its high-quality prints for posting on the internet or selling prints in street markets and fine art shops. Not so.

So I contacted Michael Kuhn, who was at the sharp end of Polygram when the music company was working with Philips on launching CD technology 20 years ago. Kuhn then went on to run Polygram Filmed Entertainment, which made a stack of hits such as Four Weddings and a Funeral. He has recently been trying to warn the film industry that it will soon be suffering what the record industry suffers.

I asked him what he thought about the National Gallery plan. "Looking back," he told me, "top management at record companies should have spent 9am to noon every day thinking about piracy and the internet and nothing else. Film studio brass should be doing that now. So, too, should the fine arts bosses."

The audio, video and film industries now routinely use watermarks to identify the original source of recorded material. But I discovered the National Gallery system uses no watermark in its prints, either visible or invisible.

Does this worry them? Hardly. A National Gallery spokesperson assured me: "We own the paintings and the copyright in the digital scans."

Oh well, that's all right then.

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