The US is currently considering an internet copyright law which is so out of touch with reality that I can’t quite believe it. Watch the video to find out about the ludicrous new proposals.
Then consider this: digital media is fundamentally incompatible with selling content. It’s a matter of physics.
US media corporations want to change the internet and copyright to avoid changing outmoded business models from the analog era! The business models from the mass media age are the result of exploiting analog noise. This meant that every time you made a copy of anything, the quality went down. In the mass media age, copying was not an option for most people. And copies of copies degraded very quickly. And since it was analog, the machine you use to play the media was completely different from the machines used to make and publish the media.
This business model of selling content is fundamentally incompatible with 21st century telecommunications technology. Today everyone has the means of production and global distribution in their laps. Now we have computers and networks, ie. digital media. Computers work by copying. Perfectly. Everything a computer does is based on copying. Opening a file copies it to RAM. Saving a file copies it to a disk. Copy copies. Cut copies to RAM so you can Paste a perfect copy somewhere else. Publishing is copying. Sharing is copying. Even viewing is copying. Everything is copying. Perfectly. There is no noise. Every copy is an exact clone of the original.
And of this digital world we share, Hollywood demands only one thing: no copying!!
So how does the ‘selling content’ business model adapt? Apple developed one small innovation: for the user, buying has to be more convenient than getting it free. It’s a tiny change in emphasis, but it’s also the very first suggestion of a digital business model for selling content.
But not content with the idea of innovating, the mass media corporations instead now demand lordship of the internet, the engine of the economy, by bribe and decree. WTF?
