Subscribe to this blog in Radio:
Didn't find what you were looking for?
E-mail this blog's author, Bruce Umbaugh:  |
|
 |
Monday, March 20, 2006 |
Darknets, MPAA, and SXSW: irritation, perhaps; flame, perhaps not.
Derek Powazek and Cory Doctorow post about the Darknet panel I asked J.D. Lasica to put together for the Digital Convergence Initiative's track at SXSW Interactive this year, and they seem to imply that the session was an angry shouting match between audience members and the MPAA's PR person Kori Bernards, who gamely fielded questions and complaints about the MPAA's technology-breaking restrictions. In fact everyone was civil. It's worthwhile to listen to the mp3 that SXSW posted – the session went very well though it was more about piracy, copyright and new technologies than about darknets per se. Kori said that the MPAA's antipiracy work is threefold... 1) working with law enforcement and governments around the world to stop Internet piracy, 2) attempting to educate consumers about copyright, and what you can and can't do, and 3) working to harness new technologies in ways that consumers will dig. She says they're trying to protect artists and prevent the abuse of new technology to steal copyright material. I.e. she said what you would expect, the MPAA party line, without reference to constraints that break technology and prevent fair use.
Kevin Smokler mentioned Paco Underhill's theory that, if retail spaces are used in unintended ways by consumers, it could be there's a problem in the way the public space is presented. He extends that to say that, if large numbers of people are downloading movies and infringing copyrights, that may not suggest that the public is looking to stick it to the man and break the law. Rather, the way we currently distribute content is not working. If the MPAA and its members can't do it fast enough, that's not necessarily the moviegoers' problem. Instead of saying those who download movies are criminals who want to violate copyright, perhaps the MPAA should provide a way to download movies and do so quickly, and legally. Kori: "I think that Hollywood hears your point. I think it's clear that you're the consumer of the future... everybody gets that people want what they want when they want. We also have to protect copyrights..." then she goes on to note that it's an exciting time in Hollywood ("may you live in exciting times"), that Hollywood wants to be accommodating. Hmmm.
Then David Thomas brought up mashups ("an entire industry to be made from people who want to do mashups"). People will pay for the right to create new works from samples. Ian Clarke: how do you determine who gets what revenue from a mashup?
Polycot's Maida Barbour noted that the MPAA (and RIAA) are not necessarily protecting artists. The very basis of representation has to change. Artists have to understand that their rights are not necessarily being protected in the way the machine is working right now. They have to understand what the ramifications are when they sell their works to the status quo vs having control over where their rights and permissions go. How can we better present the reality to artists, disseminate that information so that they will understand just what their rights are...
Oh, hey, I didn't mean to write a whole transcription... my point was that this was a civil exchange, rumors of flame and dangnation are hype-o-fied.
[Weblogsky]
11:04:57 PM 
|
|
Push back on my take: Gates Dismissive of $100 Laptop [1] …..
Gates Dismissive of $100 Laptop [1] ….:
My take is that it may be both a publicity stunt and also a good project. Because, of course, the support issues wouldn’t go away if every child were given a $1000 laptop, would they? Nor would anyone sit there cranking the $1000 laptop; they’d stare at it as it rested inert for want of a power outlet. The whole plan is that it isn’t a gadget but a readily adaptable network node.
—–
Readily adaptable network node… but without any support network, educational infrastructure or else, what we basically end up with is a commodity and as someone said to me at wsis… You can burn it to keep warm or you can take the plastic to make a roof for your hut, or you can disassemble it for parts for your neighbors, but if you don’t know how to use it, you aren’t going to be computing with it.
[Too many topics, too little time.]
I got the support issues the first time. Yes. But it's not as though those are issues for and only for the $100-laptop crowd. Those are issues for bringing most of the world into network society -- or allowing for the creation of network societies for most of the world (since the process need not be one of assimilation or hegemony). Anyone who thinks it would be good for very many kids in the developing world to have access to computing technology, and anyone who thinks it would be good for very many kids in the developing world to have access to the Net, faces those support issues.
So, if the support issues counter-argue, as it were, it can't be that they counter-argue just the $100-laptop project. The thrust of the objection might be one of these:
- it's a mistake to design hardware; the $100-laptop crowd should design support, or education, or
- kids in the developing world shouldn't have computing devices, or
- kids in the developing world shouldn't have a place in the Net.
But does TMTTLT advocate any of those? Surely not the latter two. Maybe the first? But that you need both hardware and education doesn't argue for the priority of the two or any particular division of labor.
Hence, my take: it may be both a publicity stunt and a good idea.
6:07:38 AM
|
|
Grow Your Own Oil, U.S.. Vaporizing sawdust and corn stalks yields a versatile petroleum stand-in called bio-oil. The product could help sate the world's dependence on black gold. By Seán Captain. [Wired News: Top Stories]
6:07:26 AM
|
|
Digital Rights Management - The coming collateral damage.
Property owners have every right to do whatever they think is necessary to protect their property. Homeowners can build walls and add security. Content owners can add copy protection schemes to their digital content.
Unfortunately for content owners, digital rights/copy protection schemes have always proven crackable. No matter how smart the good guys think their programmers are, the bad guys have programmers that are just as smart. More importantly, the good guys have to build the perfect protection scheme, impenatrable by any of infinite number of possible attacks. The bad guys only have to find out where the good guys screwed up. Its a lot easier to be the bad guys and crack the copy protection. Which is exactly why every effort to fully protect digital content has failed.
Its an ever escalating war. Every time the bad guys crack the code, the good guys come up with a new way to try to protect their content.
Over time, the protect schemes evolve and mutate. Every few years, the good guys come up with a completely new approach. A different way of trying to solve the problem.
Call it Digital Rights Management Evolution
But this creates a problem.
As DRM evolves, the playback software and devices will change to enable encoding and playback of content using the latest and greatest versions of DRM.
So whats the problem ?
Many of us are not going to take the time to re encode the content we already own to make sure it continues to be compatible with the new playback devices we are buying. Most of us wont even know that we need to as we go through different media playback environments over the next years.
All we are going to know , is that we have files on our hard drives that we cant play back.
My advice ? Any and all digital content that you purchase and OWN, with any sort of copy protection, crack it, and make a backup copy for your own personal storage.
[Blog Maverick]
The punch line, in case it blew by you: Mark Cuban says: My advice ? Any and all digital content that you purchase and OWN, with any sort of copy protection, crack it, and make a backup copy for your own personal storage.
6:07:17 AM
|
|
Twelve books that changed the world.
The British critic and novelist, Melvyn Bragg, has chosen twelve works that changed the world for an upcoming book and TV program. Nice to see a good representation of scientific works:
- Principia Mathematica (1687) by Isaac Newton
- On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin
- Experimental Researches in Electricity (three volumes, 1839, 1844, 1855) by Michael Faraday
- Patent Specification for Arkwright's Spinning Machine (1769) by Richard Arkwright
- Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
- Magna Carta (1215) by members of the English ruling classes
- Book of Rules of Association Football (1863) by a group of former English public-school men
- On the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1789) by William Wilberforce
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft
- The King James Bible (1611)
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) by Adam Smith
- The First Folio (1623) by William Shakespeare
You can read this article for Bragg's justification of his choices. He does, by the way, note that he ended up focussing on British works, so I guess that is why nothing by Bill "Issac Newton of Information Theory" Dembski makes the list. Yes, that must be the reason.
Read the entire post | Read the comments on this post [Stranger Fruit]
Where are they on the Big List of Popular Library Holdings blinked last week?
6:06:59 AM
|
|
|
