When Elephants Dance

One Michael Fraase has written an excellent piece on the battle between the entertainment industry and everyone else titled "When Elephants Dance." Well worth reading, and bookmarking, and referring newbies to in order to get them up to speed in the digital content wars. His solution is right on, too, IMHO.

Comments

Copyright Act of 1790 provided for 14+14 years

[yerricde]

The demand to restrict the copyright to 14 years is pretty naive.

The Copyright Act of 1790 provided for a 14-year copyright term, renewable for 14 additional years. I remember reading that life expectancy for five-year-olds (a statistic that ignores infant mortality but does include child prodigies) has not increased significantly in the 200-odd years since that act was passed.

Re:The Solution

[Raetsel]

• "when two elephants fight, and the outcome is important to you, get your ass in there and start pounding on the enemy elephant!"

BAD idea. They make elephant guns for a reason! Getting "in there" gets you squashed, as the article points out. We're supposed to be smarter than that -- we need to be encouraging lawyers (EFF, etc.), buying our own legislators, and educating other voters!!

I did this experiment: I talked to some other customers in Best Buy once -- we were in front of the HDTVs.

• "Do you know they're still fighting over the broadcast standard?"
• "Do you know the broadcasters want to be able to stop you from recording HDTV programs?"
• "Do you know where you can get HDTV content?"

  "Nope"
  "Nope"

  And...

  "I think our cable system carries it."

It turned out the person I'd chosen was the vice-president of the local (about 300 person) Cigna office. Lawyer by education, manager by profession. Neither her, nor her husband, had heard a thing about the battles we flame about on a daily basis!

Ouch.