Doc Searls has written an excellent rant against the-bill-formerly-known-as SSSCA. In it, he excerpts some of Senator Hollings' comments about the dearth of content on the internet, and how broadband won't take off until there is a wealth of premium content available for customers to pay for. Until then, the few of us who are on the net will continue to be theiving pirates interested only in stealing "Academy Award winning movies, Platinum-selling Albums" and other such bits.
What utter nonsense.
Most of the people I know on the net have been on the net for around a decade. None of them use the net as a vehicle for pirating material. To the best of my knowledge, most of my friends who are heavy MP3 users acquire MP3s the way I do -- by buying CDs and ripping the MP3s ourselves (and not making them available over any file sharing network).
Through a twisty, turny playbook of tangled aliances, Intel executive Les Vadasz is one of the good guys. Here, he puts the entire quandry into perspective:
The IT industry is all about innovation; we embrace and champion technological progress. The content community, by contrast, has historically feared technology -- from the advent of sound recording, to the development of the VCR, the DVD, the PC and other digital devices. Yet every advancement in technology has proven to be a major growth catalyst for the studios. Videocassette rental and sales totaled about 11 billion dollars last year, exceeding box office receipts by some 2+ billion dollars. This is the device once referred to by Jack Valenti as the "Boston Strangler" of the film industry. Other "attackers" of the film industry include the DVD, which added another 5.9 billion to studio receipts in the last year.
Oh, to live in an alternate reality where entertainment execs understand that technological progress leads to increasing revenues for them. I know I'm not particularly looking forward to the day when the new DVD format gets out, and one entire season of The Twilight Zone fits on a single disc (with extra special features that are not available today).
Along with writing Congress to tell them exactly how dumb this entertainment-industry funded horror is, I suggest that we all start sending Michael Eisner tshirts from ThinkGeek.
For an added touch of irony, perhaps we should CSS scramble those designs...
