Apple used to promote their products with the slogan ‘It just works’; except for thousands of owners of Apple’s latest laptops, it doesn’t work at all. Excited buyers of Apple’s latest MacBook and MacBook Pro computers have been complaining that if they plug their laptops into existing monitors – including Apple’s own CinemaDisplay range, they see an error when trying to play high definition movies.

PowerBook.
[image by gomi, some rights reserved]

Mac users were bitten by High Definition Content Protection (HDCP); an industry-standard Digital Rights Management (DRM) system designed to prevent the piracy of high definition movies. Under HDCP, the player of a movie scrambles the content before transmitting it down the cable to the television set or monitor. At the other end, the display device unscrambles the signal so that it can be displayed correctly. HDCP requires that both the player and the display contain specialised circuitry perform the complex encryption / decryption process, and this is where the new Macs have had problems. Although the latest Macs all contain HDCP chips, none of Apple’s monitors (with one exception introduced last month) have them.

Apple’s solution is for users to replace almost-new monitors with those coming with HDCP. At the same time, Apple is publicising just how green the company is with low-emission displays, less packaging and reduced pollution. Clearly something doesn’t add up. HDCP is becoming increasingly common on computers; so many more people are going to be affected by this problem in the near future. Consumers are going to have to either accept restrictions on their use of their computers or pay out for even more hardware.

HDCP only exists because of something I’ve mentioned a couple of times before; copyright. To briefly recap; copyright is an 18th Century legal concept that protects an inventor or artist by giving them the exclusive right to reproduce their work for a limited period of time. At the end of the copyright period, the work passes into the public domain where it can be reproduced by anyone. Copyright was designed to balance the interests of creators and consumers alike; the creator benefits by being the only person authorised to sell their creation, society benefits because works in the public domain can be used by anyone no matter how rich or poor.

The 1710 UK law that created the concept of copyright dictated that works would be protected for 14 years from the date of publication; after which the author could apply for a copyright extension for a further 14 years. However, in no circumstances could the copyright term extend beyond 28 years. Since then, there has been an almost inexorable increase in the length of copyright. Copyright terms in the United Kingdom are almost uniquely complicated. Rather than adopt a single period of copyright, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) lays down a series of copyright terms for different media, depending on the type of media, the date of publication and the country of origin. Broadly, they are as follows:

• for printed materials, the term is 25 years from the date of publication;
• broadcast material (such as television or radio programmes) created in the UK are protected for 50 years from the date of first broadcast;
• audio materials are copyright for 50 years from the time they were first recorded;
• copyright for the composition of dramatic works such as movies, novels, music, literature, art or plays lasts for 70 years after the death of the author or director. If more than one person was responsible, the 70 year period extends from the time of the death of the last creator.

However, copyright terms outside the UK may differ; some works that are still under copyright in the UK are no longer copyright in the United States. This produces some interesting legal questions; Project Gutenberg is an endeavour to release out-of-copyright books in electronic formats. Based in the United States it includes many titles that are still copyright in the UK – but which can be downloaded for free by British users!

Conversely, one area where the United States has much longer copyright terms is in the field of sound and vision – reflecting American predominance of music, television and video. The most recent change in American copyright was the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 which gave corporations the ability to protect their works for 120 years after the date they were created or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier. The law is known to its opponents as The Mickey Mouse Protection Act because it is the second time American law has changed just as the first cartoons featuring Disney’s most famous character were about to become public property.

Mickey Mouse was made public in 1928 (although the cartoonist Hugh Harman drew some sketches as far back as 1925) and originally protected by a 56 year copyright period. In 1976, a few years before the term on these early animations expired, a new copyright act was introduced, increasing American corporate copyright to 75 years – effectively pushing Mickey’s protection into the 21st Century. Then, just as Mickey’s extended term was about to expire, the CTEA was passed ensuring the original Mickey Mouse cartoons would not enter the public domain before 2020 at the very earliest.

Mickey Mouse is almost unique in copyright history in that the character is still a significant revenue earner for Disney. The vast majority of copyrighted works make almost all of their income in the first few years after publication. However, we should not be misled into thinking that it is only copyright that protects Mickey Mouse; Disney have registered their mascot as a trademark, a legal concept which lasts forever provided it is used. Even if the early Mickey Mouse cartoons were to enter the public domain, the character itself is protected – no one apart from Disney would be able to create new Mickey Mouse cartoons.

The same applies to music; much of the pressure for copyright extension in the UK has come from artists such as Cliff Richard and Sir Paul McCartney whose biggest hits were in the 1950s and 1960s. The copyright that is about to expire on these artists is the recording copyright; not the copyright they hold as the creator of a particular piece of music. Sir Paul McCartney will hold the rights to his composition up to and beyond his death and he and his estate will continue to benefit from 'Yellow Submarine' for decades to come. It’s very hard to see any benefits for consumers in the extension of copyright; but it is clear that large publishing companies can make considerable amounts of money by protecting relatively ancient works; if only to stifle competition.

Sadly there is now pressure inside the UK to follow the American copyright extension and increase the copyright term on sound recordings. This is something of a reversal for the British government. Between 2005 and 2006, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, commissioned Sir Andrew Gowers to review the state of copyright in the United Kingdom. Somewhat against expectations, the so-called Gowers Report proved to be extremely radical. As well as proposing that British consumers should have a legal right to make recordings of purchased music (such as ripping an MP3 from a CD).

Firstly, it reported that the lower copyright term in the UK compared to that in the US did not appear to disadvantage British artists. Almost without exception, the vast majority of a title’s income was made in the first years after publication; revenues quickly tailed off into insignificance, and in time, might actually be worth less than a company spent protecting its rights. The Gowers Report estimated that the average CD makes two-thirds of its income in the first six years of its life – well within the existing term;

Secondly, the Gower’s report argued that copyright should not be altered retrospectively – that is, if copyright were to be extended, the new term should only apply to works created after the date the new law took effect.

The day after the Gowers Report was published, the music industry protested vigorously in a Financial Times advertisement signed by 4,000 performers – or at least apparently signed by 4,000 performers; several of the signatories, including Lonnie Donegan and Freddie Garrity had inconveniently died long before the Gowers report was commissioned, let alone published.

Sadly, it appears the government is back-peddling on the enlightened view of the Gowers Report and favours a future much more beneficial to the music and video industry. In part this is because of pressure from the European Union to harmonise copyright terms across the Union and in line with the American term of 95 years. The EU proposals are being opposed by some consumer groups and online advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Open Rights Group who are arguing that any further extension of copyright will affect consumers' rights and all of our rights to freedom of expression. A pan-European petition and lobbying process is targetting Members of the European Parliament in the hope of persuading them to block any increase in EU copyright terms. But even if that battle is won, it looks almost certain that the British government will try to increase copyright in this country. In a recent speech, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham told an audience of music professionals:

'There is a moral case for performers benefiting from their work throughout their entire lifetime.

'That is why I have been working with John Denham, my opposite number in the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, to consider the arguments for an extension of copyright term for performers from the current 50 years.  An extension to match more closely a performer’s expected lifetime, perhaps something like 70 years, for example, given that most people make their best work in their 20s and 30s.'

Andrew Gowers replied in an acid column in the Financial Times: 'As political speeches go, this is pretty silly. A moral case? You might just as well say sportspeople have a moral case to a pension at 30.'

It seems clear that the government has already decided that British law must be made to accommodate the views of the music industry. Certainly people in the business were delighted by Burnham’s speech. The head of UK Music, Feargal Sharkey said, ‘At this critical time of change, the creative industries have never been more vital to this nation's future prosperity. Today's announcement regarding term extension is a clear sign that Government, like everyone in our industry, is committed to ensuring that UK music retains its status as the very best in the world.’

The head of the British Phonographic Institute, Geoff Taylor said: 'Copyright is the lifeblood of our creative economy and we are delighted that the government is recognising this by supporting an extension of copyright term for British musicians and labels. Copyright stimulates investment in musical talent and encourages innovation. Thousands of recording artists, hundreds of music companies and all British music fans will benefit from fairer copyright term'.

The use of the word ‘fairer’ is very interesting. There is no way that extending copyright is fair to the customer. When pressed about copyright extension, one music industry executive said that any increase in length of protection would be matched by the companies opening up their archives and reissuing old material. It sounds good, until you realize that if copyright was left unchanged the companies would be forced to release it into the public domain where it would be free for everyone!

Mr. Taylor seems to have forgotten that copyright is a balance between the rights of the individual and wider society. Consumers can reasonably be expected to obey copyright law provided they see it as fair; but when users are faced with high prices, limited distribution, platform lock-in and crippling DRM software, who can honestly be surprised when they turn to piracy?

More from Open2

Listen to Ethics Bites on the rights and wrongs of copyright

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

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Breaking Science

The Breaking Science team come to BBC Radio Five Live to break open this week's science stories.

One of our ancestors, Homo erectus, appeared in Africa about 1.9 million years ago. Generally fossil specimens of extinct species of humans are skulls and teeth. Other skeletal remains are very rare. In 1984 an almost complete skeleton of Homo erectus was found which, when reconstructed, showed a young male who was perhaps around 6ft tall and slim. He is known as the Nariokotome boy.

Reasoning from the shape of his pelvis suggested that the female would have had a small birth canal which would have limited the brain size of an infant. The brain size - and hence head size - of modern humans is only just narrower than the birth canal, so it is a reasonable assumption that pelvis size and brain development are linked: one can't increase without the other.

What is so interesting about this new find is that on the basis of the cup into which the head of the femur fits, this female was short but the birth canal is large and the whole pelvis is slightly wider than that of a modern female, so she was also broad-hipped. In fact, she could have given birth to at least some modern human babies.

This picture of a short, broad individual isn't the one we would expect from the appearance of the Nariokotome boy and reminds us that variation between individuals occurs in fossil species just as it does in humans. We know that the brain increased in size as Homo erectus evolved. This new find shows us that the pelvis changed too.

Find out more this fossil find in episode 9 of Breaking Science

No don't worry, I haven't gone all classical on you. The title of this article is from the Roman poet Juvenal and can be translated as 'Who Watches the Watchmen?' It's not even a plug for a 1980s comic book - soon to be a movie. Instead I want to talk about the role of censorship on the Internet; after all, it's not just in China where a huge chunk of the Internet can be censored by an unelected body. The same has just happened in Britain.

The controversy is centred on a Wikipedia page for The Scorpions, a German group from the 1980s. The article was illustrated with a picture of the album cover of Virgin Killers; featuring a photograph of a naked prepubescent girl, in what may be described as a provocative pose. The same cover art has been on the album for over twenty years and the music has been openly sold by major retailers, both on the high street and online. Until now the album had languished in uneventful obscurity. However, following a complaint by a user to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a quasi-legal UK censor, most British Internet users were barred from accessing the Scorpion’s page, and unregistered users of Wikipedia were no longer able to make edits to the encyclopedia. Days later, large retailers began removing pictures of the Scorpions albums from their websites and there was even media chatter of blocking access to the Amazon site. Had the world gone mad?

Not quite.

Those of you who've been reading these postings for some time – first of all, thank-you; secondly – you will remember that your computer's connection to the Internet is anything other than direct. When you request a page from a web site, your computer does not immediately drag data from the remote server, instead a whole series of computers owned by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) are involved. Some of these machines are devoted to turning human-readable addresses  (URLs) into unique machine readable addresses (IP numbers), others are dedicated to storing copies of frequently-requested pages; but yet more computers are devoted to filtering web pages based on content – and these computers exist to protect ISPs from legal action.

Although many long-term users of the Internet like to think of it as a place where 'anything goes', it is bound by national and international laws. ISPs were given a wakeup call in 1999 when Demon Internet (now part of Thus) were found guilty of libel after they failed to remove defamatory material from their news service. Crucially, although Demon did not publish the original article, they were found guilty of redistributing it to their users. It was clear that the days of the Internet as an unregulated frontier were numbered.

The law that directly affects the Wikipedia situation is the Protection of Children Act 1978 which was enacted following the discovery of a child pornography ring in the United States. The law has been amended a number of times since 1978 to reflect changing circumstances and technological developments. Amongst other offences, the CPA makes it an offence to manufacture, distribute and, crucially, possess material that is considered obscene.

Possession not only includes owning physical documents such as books, magazines and photographs, but also possessing computer files. The PCA is a relatively unusual law in that it places so-called 'strict liability' on anyone who is found to possess obscene material – that is they have to demonstrate there is a good reason for them to own the material, otherwise they are considered to be guilty of an offence. So, it is theoretically possible to be in breach of the CPA simply by visiting a web page containing obscene content.

With the best intent in the World, the British government has tried to limit the distribution of child pornography in the UK, but they are faced by a very real problem. The Internet poses a real problem for national law; it is supranational and constantly changing. What is considered obscene in one country may be unremarkable in another or even protected under laws guaranteeing free expression. If material cannot be removed at source, there may be another solution.

As Home Office Minister Vernon Croaker wrote in a Parliamentary answer:

Recently, it has become technically feasible for ISPs to block home users’ access to websites irrespective of where in the world they are hosted. It is clear from the various meetings that Ministers have had with the ISPs, that the industry has the will to implement solutions to block these websites. Currently, all the 3G mobile network operators block their mobile customers from accessing these sites and the biggest ISPs (who between them provide over 90 per cent. of domestic broadband connections) are either currently blocking or have plans to by the end of 2006.

We recognise the progress that has been made as a result of the industry’s commitment and investment so far. However, 90 per cent. of connections is not enough and we are setting a target that by the end of 2007, all ISPs offering broadband internet connectivity to the UK general public put in place technical measures that prevent their customers accessing websites containing illegal images of child abuse identified by the IWF. For new ISPs or services, we would expect them to put in place measures within nine months of offering the service to the public.

The government was originally interested in methods of identifying and blocking child pornography, but has continually pressured ISPs into removing equally provocative material such as adult pornography, religious extremism and terrorism. The Home Office has stated:

At present, the government does not propose to require UK ISPs to block content and our policy is to pursue a self-regulatory approach wherever possible. However, our legislation as drafted provides the flexibility to accommodate a change in Government policy should the need ever arise.

Leading ISPs agreed to set up the IWF as a charitable body with a remit to produce a constantly updated list of web sites and individual pages containing information that may breach one or more UK laws including the CPA. The process of identifying unsuitable content is not automated, instead individual Internet users can make a complaint to the IWF through their website. A single complaint is enough to ensure that an employee of the IWF will screen the material. The IWF employs four police-trained specialists who must make a quite rapid decision over whether a page should be blocked or its content removed.

The IWF has the power to demand that a page hosted on a computer in the UK is removed from the Internet, but it cannot make these demands when the image is held overseas. In these cases, although the data cannot be removed from the Internet, it can be blocked by adding its URL to BT’s CleanFeed database. As well as adding individual pages to CleanFeed, the IP number of the site hosting that page is also placed on to the database. CleanFeed is used by the six largest British ISPs (BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse) who between them are responsible for about 95% of all domestic Internet connections. Similar technology is used by the remaining ISPs. When Cleanfeed was introduced in 2004 it was reputedly blocking some 11,000 accesses to blacklisted pages every day. By 2006 this had grown to 35,000 every day. At the same time the number of complaints about suspicious images grew from about 3,500 during 2004 to more than 11,000 in 2006; the most recent information from the IWF is that they have received complaints about some 35,000 suspect pages in the last year.

If we now return to how the Internet works. When you request a page, the IP number of that page is first of all examined by a so-called ‘core router’. If the page belongs to a site listed in the CleanFeed database, it is sent to another router for further examination. If the page does not belong to a suspect site, the request is processed as normal and the page returned.

Suppose the requested page belongs to a suspect site. In that case, the page’s address is examined to see if it appears in the database as containing potentially illegal material. If the page is not found, the request for the page is granted and the data will be sent to the user. However, if the page is listed as containing illegal material, the system does not tell the user, rather their browser returns the error 404 – the page cannot be found. This misleading error, not a censor's message, greeted most British internet users when they tried to visit the Scorpions' page on Wikipedia.

The CleanFeed system  led to further problems for people attempting to edit Wikipedia pages. As you probably know, with a very few exceptions, any page on Wikipedia can be edited by any user. This makes Wikipedia a tempting target for vandalism; especially by spammers who want to put advertising on the site’s pages. Such spammers would use a computer to make many edits to hundreds of pages in a very short time. Wikipedia can detect such vandalism; because of the edits would appear to come from the same computer; and blocks the changes.

As soon as the Scorpion’s page and the Wikipedia site appeared on the CleanFeed database, all traffic to Wikipedia was being routed through one of a very small number of proxy computers. All of a sudden, almost every Wikipedia editor in Britain (which accounts for almost 25% of all Wikipedia authors), appeared to be using the same computer. Wikipedia’s own computers considered they were under attack and prevented these proxy computers from making edits – instantly blocking the vast majority of edits originating in the UK. Instead of seeing the editing page, they were greeted by:

Wikipedia has been added to a Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, this also makes it impossible for us to differentiate between different users, and block those abusing the site without blocking other innocent people as well.

What began the weekend as a technology story of interest to a few computer users had gathered into a potent storm by the beginning of the following week; even being discussed on primetime news programmes. After a couple of days, the IWF agreed to uncensor the image; and within a few hours the Wikipedia site was working normally for British users. However, before we all celebrate a return to commonsense, it is worth pointing out exactly what the IWF has decided. It has not decided the image is perfectly innocent, the IWF still considers the item "is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978.” Which, if you remember, means you could be prosecuted for owning a copy of the image. The IWF statement then goes on to say,

However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list.

If you’re confused, you’re not alone – the censor is saying the image is potentially illegal, but it is not stopping you from accessing it!

The Wikipedia controversy is already history, but it has raised a number of serious questions that must be answered, if not now, in the very near future. How these issues will be resolved is a very difficult question and we cannot leave it solely to government to make a decision on our behalf. Like almost all governments, the British administration has shown itself to need very simple solutions to extremely complex problems – and these almost never work.

The most obvious point to make is that censorship does not deter criminals. Like similar schemes in China, the CleanFeed block can be circumvented in minutes. Anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge could access the blocked page simply by substituting some characters in the URL or by using Wikipedia’s less-well-known secure address. CleanFeed defeats casual users, it cannot prevent paedophiles and terrorists from sharing distressing and illegal materials when the data is encrypted or transmitted by Internet technologies other than the World Wide Web. John Gilmore, a civil libertarian and the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation which fights for freedom of speech on the Internet once said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

In this case, censorship actually achieved the opposite to that intended. At the height of the controversy, the number of hits on The Scorpion’s Wikipedia page rocketed from a few thousand every day to nearly one million! The image was copied and redistributed around the Internet and huge numbers of people who had never heard of the band were intrigued enough to try and find out more about what they were not allowed to see. This is a fine example of ‘The Streisand Effect’ named after Barbra Streisand who sued a photography company for millions of dollars after finding out her house was visible on commercial photographs of the California coastline. As well as losing the case, Streisand found out that the photographs were more popular than ever before. The IWF has admitted their actions had backfired:

The IWF's overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect.

So what can we learn from this fiasco?

Firstly, the IWF is not necessarily malicious, it was set up to try and fight a real horror. Its employees work with the best of intentions, but their remit is unclear and the organization is not sufficiently open. The IWF must be put under some form of external scrutiny, possibly on a statutory basis. At the moment the organization can act without any real constraints and acts as judge and jury. We are likely to see further high-profile cases in the near future as the IWF’s remit expands further. In January 2009 the British government will outlaw so-called ‘extreme pornography’ – a term which has confused the public, lawmakers and the police. At the moment, the Ministry of Justice’s official advice on what constitutes ‘extreme pornography’ is to refer the material to the IWF for their assessment.

Unlike the list of banned movies compiled by the British Board of Film Classification; the IWF’s database of blocked sites is not publically available for scrutiny. It should be – if we are going to be forced to live under censorship, then Internet users must have confidence in the IWF process. We must not only know what is on the list, but why it is there and who made the decision to add it to the CleanFeed list.

Similarly, when the IWF identifies material that may be in breach of UK legislation, it must be obligated to inform the owner of that data. At the moment, the IWF makes no attempt to do so. If material is blocked, the IWF should tell the creator what legislation it falls foul of and of their right to appeal against the decision.

There is a grave cause to worry about the power of the IWF. The Wikipedia case showed that the vast majority of Internet users could be deprived of access to information in a very short period of time with no clear explanation of what was going on. In this case it was nothing more than a half-forgotten group, but is it paranoid to worry about similar techniques being used to block more important, inconvenient information. The rise of the Internet was supposed to bring a time of unconstrained access to information, but quietly, almost without debate, Britain has developed an all-encompassing censorship system that would not look out of place in a totalitarian state. Coincidentally, the government of Australia is attempting to introduce a similar system in that country. Unlike Britain, there has been a vociferous campaign against the introduction of content filtering with thousands of people and even ISPs protesting at the scheme.

But before I sign off; a word of warning to New Labour ministers intent on imposing net censorship; current filtering technology often blocks the word ‘socialism’ because it contains the phrase ‘Cialis’, the name of an anti-impotence drug often used in spam messages. But that’s the problem with censorship, it always has unintended consequences.

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

Subscribe to Mike Richards's posts

 

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Breaking Science

The Breaking Science team come to BBC Radio Five Live to break open this week's science stories.

You might be familiar with the use of CT and MRI scanners in hospitals to allow doctors to “see” inside the human body. This is very helpful detecting diseases such as cancer since the doctor can see where the tumours are. We cannot directly see the X-Rays and radio waves these instruments use to look through tissues and organs within the body and we need computers to create an image we can see.

Visible light, like X-Rays and radio waves, can also travel through tissue and unlike X-Rays you can actually see it. Try holding your finger or hand up against a torch and the light passing through your skin makes the edges of your finger take on a reddish glow. Unlike X-rays, visible light doesn’t travel through the body very well – it’s readily scattered or absorbed, and only the red part of the visible spectrum is able to pass through. In some respects it’s just as well, otherwise we’d be able to see right through everyone we met and see all their insides!

However there are molecules that can emit light we can see, through a process called fluorescence. We can use these molecules as tags or labels (like a flare or a beacon) to light up and show where a tumour might be growing. Fluorescent tags aren’t limited to lighting up cancerous cells. We can use light emitting molecules to help us detect the onset of any sort of illness, if we know the target we are trying to hit with it.

Visible light is versatile since we can use it in different ways – we can measure the time it takes to pass through different tissues and so build up a picture. Even more simply, we can use visible light of different colours to label different tissues under different conditions, to provide an accurate picture of what might be happening inside us. It’s almost like dying your clothes to make you stand out from the crowd.

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry this year was shared by three scientists who discovered a natural fluorescent molecule called green fluorescent protein. It quite literally blazed a trail for using light to highlight what is going on inside living cells.

One of the winners no longer practices science. It just goes to show, like a beacon, a scientist’s work might shine briefly but it shows the way for the future researchers to follow.

Find out more

• Episode 10 of Breaking Science
• Taking photos of the brain – how FMRI works

About the author

James Bruce is a scientist and a chemist at the Open University who likes taking a multidisciplinary approach to solving problems. His current research interests include molecular recognition, chemical sensing and molecular devices.

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How and why does a scientist like me study the gas methane? The 'why' part of the question is often easier to answer than the 'how' part so I'll answer that first.

Methane, like carbon dioxide, is an important greenhouse gas but it differs from the more widely reported CO₂ in a couple of important ways.

Firstly, methane is more powerful at trapping the suns rays. As a greenhouse gas it is actually more than 20 times as powerful as CO₂.

Vince collecting samples.

[photo © copyright Vince Gauci]

The second important difference relates to its lifetime in the atmosphere: methane lasts around 10 years in the atmosphere where as CO₂ can stay in the atmosphere more than 10 times as long.

The relatively short lifetime of methane means that atmospheric concentrations of the gas, and therefore its contribution to the greenhouse effect, is sensitive to short-term changes in sources and sinks of the gas. These sources include natural wetlands, rice paddies, land fill and cow burps.

The other key reason for studying methane is that over the past century, the concentration of the gas has been increasing - although in the past decade the pace of this change has been decreasing and, until a very recent rise was reported, had almost halted.

The reasons behind this pattern of growth are important to understand so that we can improve predictions of climate into the future.

Collecting methane samples in Flitwick.

[photo © copyright Vince Gauci]

I am interested in the controls on the emission of methane from the largest individual source: wetlands. Natural and artificial wetland ecosystems such at peat bogs and rice paddies produce methane as a consequence of anaerobic decomposition in saturated soils.

My work chiefly deals with chemical controls over the production of methane in these ecosystems and pathways the gas takes in making the transition from the soil to the atmosphere. Much of my work has examined the effect of sulfur pollution in acid rain on the emission of methane from wetlands and rice paddies.

This is important because methane emitting wetland areas receive sulfur pollution via long-range transport of pollution. They also get sulfur from a natural form of pollution – volcanic eruptions.

The sulfate component of acid rain pollution is thought to stimulate one set of microbes that then out-compete methane-producing microbes for food. The result is a reduction in methane emission, and this seems to be sufficient to offset the growth in wetland methane emissions that would be expected to result from global warming.

We've also investigated the effects of a large Icelandic volcanic eruption that deposited sulfate over a wide area of the northern hemisphere in 1783 and 1784 and found that changes in atmospheric methane concentration at the time, as recorded in ice-cores, are consistent with our understanding of how sulfur pollution affects the wetland methane source.

My other interest is in novel pathways for anaerobically produced methane to leave saturated soils and get into the atmosphere. Until recently, methane was thought to leave soils through diffusion, bubbling or through the hollow vessels of wetland adapted herbaceous plants like sedges and rushes.

In recent studies we've found that wetland trees contain some of the same adaptations as sedges that enable them to survive in sodden soils and this enables mature trees to emit methane from their trunks – an important finding given that many of Earth's wetlands are forested.

Together with a team of PhD students, we shall be going to the Kalimantan peat swamp forests of Borneo in early 2009 to investigate whether tropical wetland trees in Borneo are also functioning in the same way.

Find out more

Stephen Self explains why the 1783 Icelandic eruptions affected the whole of Europe.

Discover the routes into studying science with the Open University.

Explore more Open University research with BBC Radio 4's The Material World.

About the author

Vince Gauci was appointed Open University lecturer in Earth Systems and Ecosystem Science in November 2004. He is a member of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science Biogeochemistry group, which in turn is part of the cross departmental and cross faculty Ecosystems Research Group.
Browse a list of Vince Gauci's published research.

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