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Sony CEO Proposes "Guardrails For the Internet"
testadicazzo writes "Micheal Lynton, the guy who said 'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.' has posted an editorial at the Huffington Post titled Guardrails for the Internet, in which he defends his comment, and suggests that just as the interstate system needs guardrails, so too does the information superhighway. The following is pretty indicative of the article: 'Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it, and those of us in the entertainment business want to meet that kind of demand as efficiently and effectively as possible. But what has happened online is that if it is 'beyond store hours' and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want. Freedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don't figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.'"
After this and his other comment, I have decided to not buy anything Sony from now on. A healthy, vibrant culture comes from having low barriers of entry to public discourse, not from having a monopoly on the public discourse held by the rich. Why can't these elitist motherfuckers just die already?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
"Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it"
Not at all like rich CEOs, no.
If you can't provide what we want, someone else will. Capitalism fills these niches.
Wolverine was leaked. Maybe it did reduce its potential sales, but it certainly didn't make it impossible to sell tickets for it. The movie industry seems to be able to survive pretty well. Hell, Amazon seems to be doing okay with its mp3 store, even though it's easy to get everything they sell for free.
I'm happy for regulation to exist that enables you to have a profitable business providing things that consumers need. But I'm only willing to allow that much. We have no obligation to maximise your potential profits.
Great example of why sony hasn't been doing well. As opposed to changing or modifying their business model to meet the demand "after store hours" the customer should change for sony, not sony for the customer.
Not only has that horse bolted from the stable already, but it is now married with 10-year old kids. Trying to stop it now will work about as well as prohibition did back in the 20's, which was ill-founded for the same reason: EVERYONE was already doing the thing you're wanting to make illegal!
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The RIAA and MPAA, who smash our home windows and front doors to come and riffle through our things looking for evidence that we're all bandits out to rob them blind so they can sue us for hundreds of thousands the moment they find a single downloaded song. Oh, the irony.
He published in the huffandpuffington post. Are you all that surprised it, like everything else on that site, is just mindless garbage?
I mean, seriously. I have seen not ONE good article there except the stuff they plagiarize. It seems to be a site that exists solely to push stupidity.
For example:
And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.
Obviously what he really means is that the Internet is stopping the gatekeepers from controlling who can get published. There are more people publishing their own books independently - rather than having to go through, say, Del Rey - than ever before. The comic pages of the newspaper have been replaced by webcomics but that's not necessarily a bad thing either - either you adapt, like Scott Adams, or you don't and you perish.
The Internet has brought people with no regard for the intellectual property of others together with a technology that allows them to easily steal that property and sell or give it away to everyone, with little fear of being caught or prosecuted.
He doesn't give a shit about "theft." He hates the idea of the Internet because it removes the need to keep his dumb ass as the distribution "gatekeeper" and skim money off of the hard work of others.
Prior to bittorrent, there was Samba sharing as enabled by several crawler-search setups. Prior to those, there was Napster. Prior to those, there were a zillion sites running FTP (ratio or otherwise). Prior to "the internet", there were BBS'es all over. Prior to that, there was sneakernet.
Go back ~100 years, and dumbshits like this Sony retard were "protesting" and trying to lobby Congress to forbid municipalities from keeping lending libraries (you know, the public library system we all have the right to use for free) because it would "impede sales if people could simply borrow the book instead."
Culture is much more than what you can sell.
That's it exactly. Did Michelangelo lock the doors to the Sistine Chapel and stand outside charging $20 a head (sorry, no cameras or sketchpads allowed) to come in and see his masterpiece? No.
Did Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart charge each symphony that wanted to play his pieces a separate fee for each concert they performed? No.
Did Leonardo Da Vinci hide digital watermarks in Mona Lisa so he could make sure no one was stealing his work? No.
Does Sony think The Fugees are in the same caliber as any one of the above artists in terms of culture?
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I don't understand this guy, he's complaining that people are making it really really obvious what they'd like to buy. If I were running a company, I would quit complaining and sell it already!
People don't want DVDs with copy protection notices, and DRM and region coding? Don't sell them! Sell DRM free downloads for a sensible price - that is after all what people are saying they want!
We were here first, dammit.
(And your track record precedes you, thief.)
I can see the fnords!
Have a little empathy. What we have is a group of rich, powerful and intelligent people who imagine a changed future in which their personal fortunes may not grow as fast as they do currently. Realizing that an argument like "The Internet is bad because I may not be as wealthy as I'm used to" is not a very persuasive they modify the argument to be: ""The Internet is bad because it means the END of CIVILIZATION as we know it" or something similar.
As far as I can tell there is fortunately hardly any correlation between creativity and monetary rewards. Great works of art, literature, music etc are far more often created by the impecunious than the wealthy.
Ok, let's keep the car-analogy meme going here...it seems that this joker's viewpoint is a little more like this:
You can have this car in any color you want, as long as it's black. Oh, and paint, brushes, spray guns and air compressors are now illegal, and if we suspect you may be inclined to change your car's color, we can preemptively search for and seize afrementioned equipment which surely is only useful for committing unauthorised car recoloring.
Or something...
"On what basis does he claim that newspapers have been harmed"
Its the same thinking as Rupert Murdoch, i.e. "News Corp will charge for newspaper websites, says Rupert Murdoch"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/07/rupert-murdoch-charging-websites
Rupert Murdoch and this Sony CEO are the same type of person. People like them don't get to become high up in corporations without being power seeking control freaks. Their ruthless arrogant self serving behavior provides them with a competitive advantage which allows them to fight their way high up the corporate hierarchical power tree structures to gain power over others. This is why their kind of personality type feature so prominently in very competitive environments like business and politics.
So its no wonder the people at the top of these corporations think in terms of how to apply pressure to control others. They do that in their jobs to stay at the top so its no surprise they apply that same kind of thinking to the Internet.
For so many decades these control freak kind of people ruled over the old school media to control what people could see and when they could see it and for how much. These control freaks can't cope with a new open world where people can choose what they want to see and when they want to see it and even see it for free. Its an alien world to the control freaks. They want to be in power, to control others, they don't want open sharing of information.
The new and media companies are not going to die. Its simply evolving into media outlets that provide content that attract like minded people around open information that appeals to this group of people. The companies that work like this will gain advertising and other incomes like in some cases merchandising and cross promotional incomes etc.. while the old control freak media companies will die out as they fail to control what people can see and do.
The sooner the better.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
+1 Insightful.
You've hit it spot-on. The rich aren't going to be getting richer quite as fast as they used to, and they're upset about it. And of course you know the golden rule, "he who has the gold, makes the rules."
Re: The Bible, you can see such a scaminario right now.
Just look at the two most recent large-scale cults in existence: Latter-Day Saints and Scientology.
LDS gives away their book. For free. To ANYONE who wants one, two, three, whatever. Yeah, they're kooks and irrepressibly gullible, but once you get past that, they are actually usually pretty good people - strong morality, strong family bonds, strong ethical sense, hyper-polite. If I were looking for a sales force I'd hire them in a heartbeat. Yeah, their men spend 2-3 years on "mission" trying to peddle their religion to others - but if you can walk away from a job like that, from KNOWING you will have doors slammed in your face or worse, you can sell anything. Yes, when you get closer to their central enclave in Utah, they get downright clannish and antisocial towards anyone who won't be converted after repeat attempts. Yes, I would describe their system as ultimately a "Cult." But they're a cult I can put up with and they don't spend their time trying to hide their doctrine, as opposed to our next exhibit...
The Cult of Scientology. What you have here is essentially a giant ponzi scheme that rolled a cross in the door and put collars on the "clergy" (whoops that's "auditors") in order to dodge the law. Scientology is famous for charging you into intense debt just to learn the "religious doctrine", and launching lawsuits and worse at anyone who exposes them. Hell, they even have an official policy for ordering a murder. Be very careful if you ever hear one of them mention R2-45: that's their newspeak for "murder someone", coming from the idea of shooting someone twice (R2) with a .45-caliber gun.
If you're in the Cult, the only way you keep your skin intact is either to (a) become a high ranking member (top level of the ponzi scheme), (b) an indentured slave of the Cult, or (c) be a rich celebrity (Tom Cruise, Greta Van Susteren, etc) who functions as a "recruiter" for the Cult and gets the "services" of the Cult for free.
The point is exactly right. Does anyone honestly believe XKCD would be published in any major newspaper? Yet look at how far it's going as a webcomic.
And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.
It's right there. There's the proof. Which is first on his list? The *IAAs, not the creators. Then to solidify Moryath's point, he goes on and lists newspapers. Newspapers are not being hurt by piracy. Newspapers lost the battle in the 90's when they couldn't get their act together, just like how the *IAAs are suffering now because of clowns like this CEO.
The creators can do just fine without the businesses. Are you telling me you actually think XKCD or Penny Arcade could exist without the internet? Or that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah becomes an international success without it (I can go to a karaoke place in BFE Japan and sing their songs and I can count the number of westerners on one hand there)? Or that the Simpsons are parodying OK Go - Here It Goes Again without the internet? Does Serenity get made without the internet? Creators will be perfectly ok with the internet, the monkeys on their back, however, are up shit creek without a canoe.
Copyright is a temporary ceding of our right to our culture to be an incentive to encourage people to produce. The businesses, afraid of losing their free money, panicked and extended it to outrageous lengths and the people rightly revolted. The problem with intellectual property is that it's also our culture. It's who were are, it's how we talk to each other. But with the stranglehold that these leaches have on it, we're losing it.
And I can't beat you with that, I'll fall back on, "the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
I think the most interesting thing is that he doesn't actually comprehend what he himself is saying:
Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it, and those of us in the entertainment business want to meet that kind of demand as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Okay so far...
But what has happened online is that if it is 'beyond store hours' and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want.
Yes, what you are saying there is "we realize that to compete on the Internet where there is a lot of choice available to potential customers we need to meet their expectations for service, pricing, experience, and so forth. If we don't they may end up going elsewhere, and that's a huge problem for us!".
Perhaps if all the big players had spent as much time investing in the internet as they had fighting it in past they would be in less of a predicament.
I want service on my terms at a reasonable price without abuse of our relationship through the likes of DRM. If you can't even come close to my terms then we don't do business. It works that way in the real world, why do you think it should work differently online? Too often studios are so threatened by piracy that they impose such abhorrent terms on potential customers that nobody wants to be an actual customer. It's a self fulfilling prophecy perpetuated by the studios themselves.
Why can't I download FLAC from the majority of online stores for the same price I can download an MP3, or even at all? Why can't I download a movie in high quality without DRM? We both know it's technically possible, we both already know I can get the content elsewhere, and so far as the studios refuse to cater to what I'm looking for at a reasonable price realistically they can't expect anything other than what they're seeing.
Please... as someone that grew up in a "Soviet state" I perfectly know what Communism should have been... and what we had was not Communism. A part from this (old, re-hashed, western propaganda/ignorance) mistake, I agree with what you said. But please drop the "Communism = Soviet Dictatorship" examples... really.