Tim O'Reilly Interview

s4 news machine writes "The UK webcaster stage4 has published a lengthy interview with Tim O'Reilly in which he talks about why DRM will fail, Macromedia Central and the rise of webservices, and that Microsoft should have been broken up."

Comments

Macromedia and Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I've just joined the Macromedia board of directors, so that may tell you something about the importance I place on Macromedia. It's important for Flash to become more open and more standard

Try getting to the dreamweaver exchange with opera or without flash installed on IE. Just because I bought dreamweaver doesn't mean I'm with the flash program. Seems Macromedia are going that Microsoft route trying to jam flash down my throat as a requirement for support. Macromedia seems more and more willing to play proprietary.

P.S. Dreamweaver improved much more as a cold fusion target, than any of the other languages.

So right on some points...

[botzi]

But as soon as Uunet, the best connected site on the usenet, started to offer higher quality commercial connectivity, the free uucpnet vanished in a matter of months. And of course, once Uunet switched to offering TCP/IP networking, the commercial internet was born.

It's so plainly correct.
The moment the music industry(and even Hollywood) realize that _YES_ they should provide a legitime way to gather entertaiment content from the web, but _NO_, DRM should not be a part of it(at least not in the way they intend to do it at the moment) the next step will be made.
I'm a poor student, but I *will* pay some fee(consider that it should be significantly lower than the price of a DVD for example) as long as there's no even a slightest notion of DRM protection in what I get.
Anyway, I also think that he IS right, but to conclude: NEVER gonna happen. He forgets that in his example both: corporations and consumers have had the same interest, and DRM looks like the first time when that's not the case....

Excellent link in the interview

[The Masked Fruitcake]

In my opinion, as good as (or even better than) the interview itself was an article by Tim O'Reilly that he linked to in one of his answers: Piracy is Progressive Taxation". He has some excellent insights into piracy, and makes several very good points and some interesting comparisons. One of his main points is that free services have been historically replaced by higher quality paid services (ISPs being a prime example). Well worth the read.

DRM won't fail completely

[semanticgap]

We haven't seen them yet, but I bet pretty soon we'll see PC's for sale that can only run Windows (this will be enforced by hardware) - don't know how that will affect the music business, but I am sure this is a card that Microsoft is waiting to play at the right time to make even more money.

P.S. In one of the questions in the article it says "should of" - isn't that, like, really bad English...?

Personally,

[Phoenix666]

I hope the content companies don't thrive online. I look forward to seeing them die off. Four years ago I thought that if they switched to something like what iTunes is now that they would make wads more cash, and music fans would be far better off. But they've done too much wrong for there to be any way out.

However, the end of the content companies will not be the end of art or music. There will always be art and music as long as people want to create and be entertained. But instead of content companies that own you the artist body and soul, they will be publicists and advertisement companies that work for you. They will also be much smaller with no monopoly power.

Artists will eventually realize that through a system like iTunes they can cut out the RIAA and take the lion's share of the price of a download themselves. Services like Kazaa will help fans who are too risk averse find out about new music for free, and a number of them will probably opt to spend the money they would once have spent on CDs on concert tickets and merchandise instead. So that too will benefit artists.

And without a cartel brainwashing the public into thinking Britney Spears is good music, there will be a lot more diversity and a lot more creativity out there. I believe that if we can beat back the RIAA and their employees in Congress there's a new cultural golden age out there waiting for us.

My answer to DRM on audio publishing

[CoyoteGuy]

I will create an add-in box that captures audio output from a PC or a DRM enabled device, and redirect it back to my pc's audio encoding system as .mp3 and burn the fricken cd.