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Sony: Case of Right vs Left Hand
Masem writes "Wired has an interesting article that explains the problem facing several of the megacorporations that have both content and technology divisions, as specifically in the case of Sony. The tech divisons want to offer the consumer all the possible options, while the media divisions are very concerned on DRM. While the two groups are trying to meet somewhere in the middle, they are still at odds about it, and also finding that that middle is becoming rapidly populated by other competitors (including Microsoft) in just how to empower consumers without sacrificing their copyrighted materials. Both divisions are trying to adopt to just changes in the landscape and hoping to find something that will work."
I was a little disturbed when this article stated that "Major acts like Radiohead have flatly refused to make their music available online." This was very much contrary to everything I knew about Radiohead. I decided to pay their web site a visit just to check. Sure enough, while their site does not contain MP3s of actual album songs, they have several music videos and dozens of bootleg mp3s. I've always thought of Radiohead of the kind of band that thinks it's really cool when they do a show and the audience already knows the words to their unreleased songs. Everything I've read suggests that they are one of the few bands that have fully embraced the online music trading trend.
> Corporations are not people
Umm, the Supreme Court thinks differently:
Back in 1886 the US Supreme Court ruled during in a railbed dispute titled Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. The ruling held that a private corporation was a "natural person" entitled to all the rights and privileges of a human being.
Imagine say..... TimeWarner buying PowerMacs, installing a lot of great production software and building quality, low-cost "studios" for artists they sign. That'd be a hell of a lot less expensive than plunking down $250K-$1M for studio time. All they'd have to do is get the band's best cut, send it to the techs to clean it up and press it. They could probably save as much as $800K per record or maybe even more doing that.
The problem with this idea is that, under the current system, the recording costs come out of the band's share of income from the record. In fact, all expenses do, including marketing. Thus, the label has no incentive to save money, since their cut is unchanged.
Actually, there were seven people in black robes who in 1886 wholly disagreed with you. In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, The US Supreme Court ruled that corporations do actually have the same rights as "natural persons". That case was specifically about California taxing corps differently than people, but it set the precedent that corporations are people too. blech...
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
For support for elimitating copyrights or greatly reducing their terms, see Richard Stallman, especially here:g e&NodeID=650
http://www.memes.net/index.php3?request=displaypa
and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)i l03.html
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/
You can also see lots of ongoing discussion on Lawrence Lessig's blog http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ which I have been posting at specifically in this Doc's diagnosis topic comments section here: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.