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The e-reader wars have begun. Apples iBook/iPad combo is the media darling, but the rest of the world is rapidly comoditizing in response.. B&N’s nook, Amazon’s Kindle, and Sony’s ‘something’ have all had prices slashed lately. (I would say the name of Sony’s reader except they’d probably require a royalty on the intellectual property.) B&N [...]
Here’s a great article about the problems we’re having in copyright. It’s something I’ve written on in the past, and we’re just now starting to see how truly destructive our copyright policies are. They give their own summary, but the basic gist is this. A long time ago copyright was simple: Give the people who [...]
Ray Bradbury has this to say about the internet: “The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles … “It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.” Funny thing is, you’d think the man who wrote Fahrenheit 451 would be [...]
We’re always hearing how copyright fosters creativity and innovation. But we should re-think the right to control content vs the right to profit from it. Case in point: Amazon’s new kindle reader was supposed to have the ability to read e-books to you. This would be pretty handy if you’re blind. Or maybe you just [...]
At long last Apple has finally dropped DRM in it’s iTunes music store. This is huge, although it was barely noticed because Steve Jobs wasn’t at Macworld. Anyway, DRM is a silly strategy that only hurts the people who buy music. It doesn’t stop piracy. It breaks. It can make all your songs not work [...]
Our fam saw Wall-E last weekend…great movie. Go see it. But the poor lil’ fella seems to be upsetting quite a few people. Social conservatives think it’s leftist propaganda. Once again these great communicators make it sound like pollution, improper/inadequate waste disposal, and corporate-consumerism-as-diety are conservative ideals. Thanks guys! Meanwhile, the movie negatively portrays fat [...]
A couple Christian groups are giving away music. There’s NewSong, and a group called Kutless. It’s not full creative commons downloads yet, but it’s a start. HT to Scott and K.C. for pointing these out!
So now you can get all the episodes of South Park for free. Online. Downloadable. And unlike the cable versions, un-censored. All the offensive, profanity filled stuff you can handle….for free. But if you want to watch a Bible study video…have your Amex handy. Because “it’s a business” to talk about Jesus. And it’s “stealing” [...]
I love how this new “honor system” of music has completely befuddled music monopolists. They are so used to ubiquitous control that they think it just exists. The business model created by the old technology is some sort of morality. Case in point. McGuinness argued that the recent Radiohead release of a downloaded album priced [...]
What, the music industry illegally conspiring to fix prices?!?!?! That’s impossible! Just to recap: – Hundreds of years ago, Copyright created as a way for individuals to benefit from their work via a temporary monopoly. – More recently, companies and related individuals control production, distribution, and marketing due to the one-to-many media model required by [...]
Folks in Norway get to download favorite TV shows for free. What makes this notable is that they are using the much maligned Bittorrent protocol….which media types insist is purely for pirating movies, music, and software. That’s because we must all be pirates. Arrrr. Turns out it’s a great way to push out content on [...]
Another guy who is giving away his work, this time in book form. Then he becomes a best seller. And no, it’s not a Christian book, it’s a book of fiction with New Age Oprah-isms. I must re-iterate that this form of selling seems to be far, FAR more New Testament than the current form [...]
Amazonmp3 is slowly and quietly becoming a potential competitor to iTunes. They’re even starting to act like iTunes. Looks like they just got Song for Our Life up there too.
Radiohead made big waves when they decided to let fans name their price to download their latest album, “In Rainbows”. The result was that half of the “purchasers” decided to pay nothing and downloaded the album for free. But the rest paid enough that the band made far more profit than if they’d released the [...]
As I’ve mentioned before, “Intellectual property” (I.P.) is a recent concept that has had a very unique implementation over the last 50 years. It is derived from the ancestral concept of copyright, which worked out so well for some people that they wanted to extend full property concepts to it. These folks will talk about [...]
More from the definers of theft…. The RIAA says that transferring a CD to your iPod is unauthorized. This echos a prior statement by a Sony exec (referred in the article) who says making a copy for yourself “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy”. This shows just how crazy the RIAA really [...]
Old, unsupportable business model? That’s easy! Just legislate it away! From the article, the requirements that this will place on a university: 1) Have “a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property” and This is code for “You are required to purchase access to music via some lame system [...]
Hmmmm….let’s see….all these media industries built on a limited bandwidth, high cost of entry, controlled access, one-to-many business model are having problems. Radio. Newspapers. Network television. Music…. Of course the convenient target for music has been piracy. We all know they lose trillions because of piracy. But wait! No, it’s not piracy! It’s legal, purchased [...]
With the Radiohead thing and the Madonna thing etc….it’s pretty clear that the traditional music labels are dead. Along those lines, Apple is pretty much doing whatever they want at this point. That’s right, the premier online music store is expanding the iTunes plus program. These DRM-free, higher-bitrate (better sounding) versions of the songs will [...]
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