Audio recording
I almost insulted the guy thinking he was american (sorry again cory). No no no mister Doctorow (who’s going to save the world) is canadian and took us through an amazing presentation on digital rights management. Before his talk I was absolutely unaware that there is a huge fight going on between content producers (i.e. cinema studios and tvs) and the people on how the law will allow us to live with media in the future. There are huge things at stake and it was kind of a wake up call.
Now on to cory’s talks:
Copyright seems to be a no brainer, protect what people produce. But when you reflect on history a bit it actually can undermine a business much more than it can help it develop. Cory compare the CD and the DVD. CDs are open, you simply need to read the freely available explanations from Philips to produce a CD reader. DVD are locked, you need to pay a fee to some hollywood studios to use the standard in a product. The consequence is that the use of DVD has not evolved over time where CDs has evolved to many different uses: CDs used to store mp3s, karaoke, video, ringtones, etc… A more obvious examples: databases that are closed in europe and open in the US (to some extent you can’t own a database in the US). The european market is moribond and taken over by american companies. Conclusion: copyright can be bad for business.
Cory talked about the history of the music industry. At first imagining a performer owning his work was as stupid as “a piano demanding money for his play”. Value were in composer who played pieces reproduced by “monkey” performers. I remember reading a story a long time ago about how the guy who did the first ever record had a hard way to make people understand why it would be useful to record music as it was an evolving construction: every time you played it you would change something, so why record?
Cory then illustrated with some quite bright examples how industries will spend more on restricting usage of a product rather than promoting the product. He also explained why, in pretending that it’s for the sake of tranquility that we’re beginning to have our phones seized at the cinema’s entrance it’s in fact under pressure from the studios looking to accustom us to not have our phone in cinemas. So we’re all “ready” when phones with videos recording capacity come to market.
so his presentation was mainly about the current talks (happening in geneva btw) about the broadcast flag, a technology that will make the TV market even less open and badly violate consumers rights. Studios and TVs want to close the possibility to record and redistribute certain things. In doing this they obviously violate our rights (I get a DVD recorder, the day I buy it I can record stuff then 6 months later a flag prevents me from copying certain programs) but these people are probably shooting themselves in the foot. Some entire industries starter on “view source” (I’m talking about the web, precision for the normal people out there).
Some closing comments, random quote: – hollywood is trying to take control of our media consumption. – hollywood is an insignificant industry, smaller than video games, phones, etc… – don’t go to bed with these guys, their business model is dead!
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on Tuesday, June 14th, 2005 at 11:25 am and is filed under reboot.
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