Slashdot Mirror
Industry Threatened by Innovation at the 'Edge'?
penciling_in writes "In an article on CircleID, Bob Frankston, best known as the co-developer of the legendary VisiCalc and Lotus Express, shares his concern regarding industries desperate effort to control 'the edge' -- VoIP, P2P, Video on Demand... 'The commoditization of the transport is making it increasingly difficult to make money just because you own the pipe. The cable industries have a long history of owning the content and demanding a share in companies whose signals they deign to carry. As gatekeepers they have the ability to command a high fee for passage. The problem is that the scarcity is going away and with the shift to narrowcasting (as in Video on Demand) there is no scarcity. Instead they must own the content themselves if they are to retain any advantage.
The Comcast/Disney issue (see: Comcast Family Protects Power) is portrayed as a media consolidation and convergence but that doesn't make sense. With transport becoming increasingly abundant it is easier for new players to enter the market and we should see increasing divergence once millions of people can experiment with new ideas.'"
The Internet is designed such that any single network node can be obliterated and the network will continue to function by rerouting itself around the problem. Whole networks can be destroyed or otherwise cut off from the main network and the main network will still continue to function (as well, the cut off network will continue to function within itself).
This is basically his premise of how technology adjusts itself around attacks against it by industries that seek to limit it. However, what I think he fails to take into consideration is that given enough time, enough laws can be enacted that any technology that would work its way around a company's defenses would be illegal to possess or at the very least execute. We are already seeing this type of legislation coming into effect with such things as the DMCA.
I have been pwned because my
Content-delivery ain't what it used to be. Joe Bob Basement Studio can put his mp3's in the same pipeline that Mega-Record Pimp Corp can.
.mp3 track these days, far and wide, to all and sundry, and it can be done very, very, effectively.
...
The difference is, whether people will pay attention to you or not - not whether they -can- through whatever means are available, but whether they will.
At ampfea.org we've been gathering together, as a crew of Artists, to present a united front and stable base of operations for use by our individual members to use for promoting their artistic efforts.
This is the future. There's no -need- any more for media giants banded together to share/consume resources for promotion, there is now the need for Content Producers to cut through the dreck and get good material online, and deliverable. It costs nothing to promote an
I see the day when those 80's Golden Dreams of media control in the hands of the people is actually feasible. Lets hope we avoid some of those other predictions
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Communication will increasingly become cheaper/free. What is communicated matters more than how you communicate. So, in near future we will see a flat rate for communicating using Landline telephones, mobiles, broadband. Iam talking about convergence as people use a variety of devices to communicate and a variety of modes of communication (wired, wireless, IR, etc). The industry will fracture so fast that Verizon will be flat-footed before it can say cheese. Traditional companies can hope to survive only if they change into content providers soon.
-------- Cluster bombing from B-52s is very, very accurate -- the bombs always hit the ground.
If you look at the songwriters' attempt to shut down radio stations back in the first half of the twentieth century, there's a great deal of similarity with the current file-sharing situation. BMI, ASCAP and other licensing schemes grew out of this (and the EFF has just proposed a similar licensing scenario which would place a great deal of the (fairly light) burden on broadband ISPs, who could then offset that by raising costs slightly. Not a bad idea -- but at the same time, it's one of a very small number of times that something like this has been proposed in the last century. The old model is still perceived as viable simply because so many people see it as viable; sadly, the only thing that will finally put it to rest is time and boring effort.
Social progress, much like scientific progress, often moves forward one funeral at a time.
Dance like nobody's watching. Sing like you're in the shower. Fuck like you're being filmed.
My attitude on this matter so far has always been the same.
Free Market.
Face it. The music industry in its current form is dead. The only reason that they're getting away with suing people is because the government is letting them with crap like the DMCA, something I personally think was entirely developped to stunt the inevitable change of the global market.
CDs are obsolete as a distribution form. The internet is cheaper, quicker, easier. CDs used to be a marketable product: People wanted music in a decent high-quality format and CDs were the best thing available for it.
But now that's changed. CDs are no longer worth the same money that we pay for it because it has less value. So why are the governments bending over for the music industry and outright saying "I don't care what they're worth now. They were worth $20 20 years ago, they should be so now too."
When Henry Ford invented the assembly line, cars dropped radically in price. We're looking at the new economic revolution, and it's digital. An exceptionally cheap means of distibuting any digital media, be it software, music, videos or anything along the way. But the fact that it's not patentable or marketable has a lot of these now obsolete industries going crazy. Granted, the software industry always had to cope with this, and Microsoft did a great job at it by basically cramming their product down everybody's throats to the point of dependency. But the fact of the matter is that these distributors of software and data are becoming more and more obsolete the more accessible stuff is becoming through digital media.
And of course, lobbying seems to have forced the government's hand to agree with them, and so technology as we know it isn't being given the breathing room it needs to flourish, and so these companies are refusing to adapt, with disasterous results: Suing 12 year old girls, awful mediocre music giving us outright reason to stop listening to radios and stop buying CDs, buggy software with no less than 3 major worms in the last year hitting a bunch of people and making everybody pissed off with their computers (honestly. Your computer didn't do anything wrong. It did exactly what it was supposed to in that situation. Maybe next time you'll think twice before you shell out $150 to those boys in Redmond).
But of course, in this so called "Capitalist" society we're going to completely refuse the concept of the Open Market because it seems now that people will actually have to play the game of supply and demand instead of venture into Count-Zero like mafia-war tactics of Big Business. And of course we can't let that happen because... well... I can't think of any reason other than to let the rich get richer. 1984 here we come!
This is why I support open software. This is why I download my music. This is why I waste hours on the internet trying to learn as much as possible about computers. Because I ultimately want to help this world progress into something better than it is now, rather than let it perpetuate itself into staleness.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Imagine purchasing your shows direct from the producing company. One new copy made available per week. Mine to download and then view when I felt like it. No 'channels' or 'networks' in the traditional sense.
No adds.
Or another scenario; I live in a large city ( > 4 million). Only the very largest of companies can afford to advertise. With narrowcasting a sort of advertising model could be supported where a small business might only choose to advertise in a 2km radius - or maybe only to profiled recieptients.
Dunnno.... but things have got to get better.
AC
You might not know but the inventor of print, Gutenberg did not want to print large volumes of books - he wanted to print books that would look similar to the hand-copied ones (hence fancy font and illuminations) - see the Gutenberg bible - these were the incunabuli
He wanted to make much money. Were it not for his followers that stole his invention and started mass production of books (very similar to those we now nowadays - set up in antiqua typeface) that cheap books started to exist and made wide dissemination of knowledge possible.
If there were patents in Medieval Times, surely Gutenberg would obtain a one, and no print as we know it would be possible.
You can defy gravity... for a short time
...what he is saying is not new. In past eras it was the rush to vertically integrate all soup to nuts related items (and some not related items) into a single conglomerate that supposedly trumpeted the 'efficiency' of a larger player, when in fact all it really amounted to was a stock inflation that eventually sank and resulting in spinning off or eradication of units that were formerly productive entities on their own.
While written long before the issues brought up in this article, a great read about similar behavior and how it pertains to public policy is Corporations and Political Accountability by Mark V. Nadel. Personally, I like the Comcast/Disney deal, because chances are Comcast will not know how to run it and the gelatinous radioactive mess that results will cause Disney to become a footnote in entertainment history.
Of Course You have.
And it surely is as well for the masses of people that have the Operating System "Word" at work and the Operating System "Internet Explorer" at home.
These kind of people may be able to understand CNN.com ( TV news), eBay ( flea market) and amazon ( mail order retail).
But I seriously doubt, if they ever understand the idea behind sites like slashdot or groklaw. And I suspect they thoroughly misunderstand P2P filesharing services.
Evidence: When BMG bought Napster, I thought they'll made it a subscription service for small money and just count (on the central servers) how often which song was downloaded and then routed the income accordingly to musicians and their expenses.
But no, it was killed off.
Which lead to decentralized filesharing systems.
Seems like EFF is a little late? Or are Record Labels already distressed enough?
chess
While some may settle for, let's say, 10Mb/s bandwidth they get from sharing their "neighborhood" wireless connections the physical wires directly to the cable/phone/ISP will be faster due to their really expensive hardware and fiberoptics which they own. We all will have a tough time putting Cisco routers in our houses.
All of us here seem to have this otaku for wireless and free internet service so we can download our free content and free music which will all be produced for free of course.
We will find a way to live in a globalised world with more competition and commodities and a balance will be found around the monopolies we see today.
One could make the argument (easily) that our country (the US)is a monopoly and soon, if not already, we will be experiencing serious and unexpected competition which will drive many of our standards of living downward or sideways at least. It will make these industries that are threatened by the edge actually threatened more frequently and more rapidly.
I see one problem with a completely free network. This creates a limited resource ( by the number of nodes, ... ) that can be used by anybody as much as they want without charge. This is very much like Air. If there were no environmental regulations, every factory would blow out any dirt they can because it is a little bit cheaper for them.
In a shared wireless network there would be leechers that modify their access points to use all the bandwith of their neighbours making the network useless for others.
You certainly do not need a so-called Internet Service Provider.
So, what would it take to create your own access point?
No. Capitalism is about making money. To make money you have something someone wants. You maximise making money by being the sole supplier of that "something". In it's raw state, *any* means of making that money is seen as legitimate.
The pop-Darwinian overlay you put on it is simplistic: competition itself leads to "monopolies", even if that of species. The drive to survive will include the drive to exclude *all others* from their food-sources. In other words, winners monopolise.
In fact, monopolies abound in capitalism - in the patent market, for example. Other include the monopolies granted by King James I. A more recent example would be the shipment of ice from Connecticut to the West Indies and India in the last century. The entrepreneur involved got himself into a monopoly and made a lot of money.
I agree that the RIAA et al should not be allowed to use legislation to consolidate their position, but this is a moral view which is probably unpopular with said legislators and with the organisations - the drive to monopolise being seen as a legitimate business strategy. IMV,the role of the legislator is to ensure that the winner-takes-all Darwinian situation *does not* arise, thus avoiding the catastrophe of an industry collapsing under it's age. But that requires foresight and common-sense, and looks almost like a Planned Political economy which is probably something you hate as well.
h
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
You mean in the same way that ANY copyright holder controls the way we use their product after the legally obtain the right to use it?
:-)
The FSF attempts to control the way I can use the source code of GPL programs I obtain in the same way that the RIAA attempts to control their artists copyrighted materials.
If you don't like the licensing - then don't use the product. No one forced you to buy that Spice Girls CD!
I have been involved in a wireless ISP providing high speed Internet access to people in rural areas who can't get DSL. As innovative as our product is, as we use Motorola Canopy to get to the customers the phone company didn't want to spend the money on, our backend is still provided by...that same phone company. The phone company makes about 18,000-plus a year just on its T1 line to us. We get more customers and need another T1 or to go to a T3. The phone company makes even more off of us.
So the moral of the story is, don't discount owning the pipes. Some people may find a way around part of your business, but you can still stick it to your remaining customers for quite some time and get away with it!
Transporter
I'm going to be wearing a hockey mask when I go off on everyone...