Saturday, October 26, 2013

Another Time Like Now (+playlist)

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Web Piracy: The Worm is Turning and Getting Teeth

I follow The Trichordist blog (www.trichordist.com) to keep up with issues of web piracy.  I recommend it for those in or out of the entertainment industry because David Lowery and his crew fight the good fight.   After decades of hearing nothing can be done, it is good to see some doing something.

This fight is going better.  More a-listers are speaking out and there is (looking at an earlier post) finally a focus on transactional models that bring to the discussion what is necessary;  standards for tracking and reporting based on computer science concepts that can be implemented and reported.  Excellent.  I recently noted a blog from a colleague lamenting timbl explaining that drm standards as much as so many of the digerati hate them are necessary.   That is good news for the creative industry over all.  It is not possible to stop piracy on the internet.   There is every possibility to improve the situation such that it is a reasonable business.  

The revelations about privacy, government snooping etc. even the problems with the obamacare website are bursting the myth of the web bubble: that it is an irrresistable juggernaut of technology innovation, resistance is futile, yadda yadda.   The web isn't going away and no one believes the creative industries can be turned back in time,  But there is finally a sober conversation that technology serves human needs and not the other way around, that technologists are not the moral arbiters of social progress and in fact in too many cases have been social morons.

Until we have transactional standards for transparent auditing and models for transactional pricing we won't be there, but at long last the conversation is realistic and those who say "it can't be done" are being held in the same regard as the tea party for the same reasons:  fools for the pirates of the economy are still fools.

Que bueno.

They may want to write some articles about developments in digital fingerprinting and tracking for media files.   Laws without teeth are games for monopoly money.  This has to be real and it has to have consequences both good and bad.

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