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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.'"
Who doesn't see anything good having come from Sony
Just saying.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"Guard Rails" sounds like "Insurance for Commerce". Culture is much more than what you can sell.
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
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?
the cat's out the bag dude. you're either too late, or your business model is fucked.
move along, nothing to see here...
"Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it"
Not at all like rich CEOs, no.
Hitler...
Ok, done. Now can we just stop giving this dipshit publicity?
I am not stubborn. I am right!
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.
reedom 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.
As a scholar, I attest that this is absolutely true (boldface mine). If we put our scholarship up for free, the following will happen:
So, to hell with this unrestricted Internet thing.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
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.
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.
This is the equivalent of a shock statement followed by "Now that I have your attention ..." and is only appropriate when trying to address an auditorium full of teenagers.
I respect you no more than I would respect someone saying
The entire world is burning. Everyone is going to die soon. Period.
Now that I have your attention, I would like to discuss the occasional forest fires that threaten many homes in my state.
Piracy is a problem but it's your problem, not mine. And it's not on the scale you make of it. I am in no way a party to it so I don't want to hear you bashing the greatest communications tool to date nor do I want to hear suggestions of curbing the freedom I enjoy daily on said communications tool.
... yeah, I think we've been down this road.
You had to pack up your home DVD stores in South Korea? Do you think that your supposed "guard rails" will be readily implemented world wide and embraced? I'm sorry, go ahead and sue the whole country or pressure the government to crack down on it or stop releasing Korean dubbed movies or--horrors of all horrors--lower your prices to something people are willing to pay? You effectively prevent me from owning any of your DVDs when the technology to digitally duplicate them is readily available and dirt cheap. That's your choice and you're free to opt for that.
Your comparison to the Interstate Highway System is laughable. Please, do me one favor. In the future, when you draw comparisons of physical theft and huge undertakings like the Interstate Highway System to file sharing and "the Internet" do not confuse physical materials with information! There are major differences--for example: information can be freely replicated with no transfer of resources between the two parties involved! You draw a poor analogy and then *wave of the hands* we need protections like this. What "guard rails" do you suggest for the internet? I mean specifically, what do you have in mind? Have you thought this out at all? I'm sure you don't know but your engineers could suggest a small program from Sony that every internet user has to install on their computer to access the internet that has access to kernel space and
My work here is dung.
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!
stuff |
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.
Isn't this the company that is losing billions of dollars, that is notorious for cheating their customers, installing rootkits, running their MMORPG's in an unethical manner? This is a company that for 15 years has been living off their name and the fact that it used to make rock solid quality products.
Yeah, I as a consumer SO need to be lectured on ethics by a stuffed shirt from Sony.
Corporatism != Free Market
This request for censorship comes from the guys that sold malware infected CDs to unsuspecting customers. (And passed the blame to someone else.) I wonder how they avoided criminal prosecution...
extern warranty;
main()
{
(void)warranty;
}
metal bars for entertainment CEOs
In the very clever book "Virus of the Mind", the author defines an "association meme" as a social idea about how one thing goes with another. Examples of association memes include: "Cereal is for breakfast", "Muffins are for breakfast", and "Chocolate cake is not for breakfast". Merchants wishing to sell chocolate cake for breakfast (including Starbucks) must work within these memes, which is why they bake their product into a muffin shape. Quite a clever little manipulation.
Turning now to the summary:
To extend "Virus of the Mind"'s ideas, guardrails are an association meme. We associate them with benevolence, with keeping us safe, and with an obvious danger. Lynton is invoking that meme, muffin style, to manipulate us into accepting something we otherwise would reject. The chocolate cake he is selling for breakfast should properly invoke the meme of a school principle, but if it did, nobody would accept it.
I will contribute a dollar to any charity raising money to put Lynton onto a ship and dump him onto a deserted island, never to return. Let's see how he, a professional influencer who, in influencing the movements of billions of dollars, has never produced so much as a grain of wheat, fares alone.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
I think he's actually right. One time, when my Cat6 cable had too tight of a bend, I had packets breaking through and slamming against the wiring closet wall. It was... terrible.
The guy does have a point.
However, I have seen precious little from the entertainment business to meet this demand. Shopping for music online has become somewhat better, with reasonable prices, good selection and less DRM. But online movies? There's few choices there, if any. And the focus is still very much on DRM and/or streaming (the Pay-per-view model that they love so much), as evidenced by recently emerged standards such as HDMI and Bluray.
Many consumers are willing to pay for content. Especially if they get a better product by paying: encoding and compression rate to order, and no DRM. I want to select the quality, easily download the file, and then be able to play it on any of my PCs, my iPhone, and on my TV using a media streaming device. Guess what? Pirates are offering the better product, as things stand today. AllofMP3 let me select encoding and compression, and movies are generally available in various levels of quality, if you take the time to look for them. The movies provided by pirates can be played anywhere, anytime. Pirated movie downloads offer more convenience even than physical Blurays; perhaps Michael should start to understand why that is, and think about ways to offer a competitive product.
My advice: open an online store for movies, offer various download types (for starters: DVD, 720p and 1080p HD, perhaps also lowres files for PSP or iPhone), encode in formats that are generally accepted as the standard (just use what the pirates use), do not require any special players or software (so that the files can be viewed on any device), and do not add any DRM.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
No. Freedom without restraint means there's nothing stopping you from murdering me. By the same token, it means there is nothing to stop me from murdering you. Since you consider being murdered a bad outcome, the steps you'll take to reduce the likelihood of it would restrict your freedom - a lot more than having cops who'll arrest you if you murder me.
It's illegal to break into Sony's Web site. It's illegal to copy their material. But I don't recall any law giving potential theft victims a pre-emptive right to search vehicles for stolen goods. If Sony's CEO wants that, he's allowed to wish for it.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it
Natural effect of Capitalism. If Sony's CEO would rather live in a Communist economy, I heard Cuba is still accepting immigrants. He might have to take a cut in salary and status, though.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
If one, for the sake of discussion, were to accept the bad analogies in this message: don't forget that Sony are the ones who shipped CDs with that caused "severe tire damage" to people who didn't even touch them... without so much as a warning that they were going to install a rootkit on your computer. If Sony's proposing guard rails, be sure they'll be electrified to 270 kVA with spinning tungsten-carbide blades and proximity-fused claymores.
If you sent this guy back to 1999 with all the knowledge of the last 10 years at his disposal - I think he still screws it up and history repeats itself in terms of how the market plays out. This is a guy who cannot and will not change. The industry could have OWNED online distribution but instead decided to put its head and the sand now it deals with its gatekeeper and arbiter, Apple. Good job there sparky.
I like that metaphor. Especially because of the ultimate fate of such overtly greedy monarchies has been well documented throughout history :)
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
"That word, you keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means."
Labels, studios, newspapers, and book publishers are not "creators of content".
The creators of the content are actors, artists, composers, directors, writers, journalists... not the companies that distribute that content. The Internet makes distribution easier and cheaper, so of course it's going to cut into the business of less efficient distributors. That's going to happen no matter what guard-rails you put on the information superhighway.
A craftsman makes 4 wooden masks. Someone takes one without paying for it. The craftsman now has 3 and someone has stolen 1. This is theft.
A craftsman makes 4 wooden masks. Someone makes an identical mask. The craftsman still has 4 masks. This is not theft as the craftsman didn't lose anything.
I don't care how hard they try, you cannot redefine theft. As a wise man once said, "I DO NOT BELIEVE IN IMAGINARY PROPERTY."
The Internet exposed a simple fact is all. Information is not a product. So laws that for centuries relied on the concept of phsyical assets are scrambling to catch up. industries built on that are trying to catch up.
The whole concept of copyright law was built, for centuries, that copying something had an implied labor cost, it took some measure of effort to copy. Now with the digital age, the Internet has exposed a series of seriously flawed assumptions on how fast information ages.
Dear Sony, we do not need safty rails on the Internet. It is like space (hence we call it cyberspace) in which it is nearly an infinite space with no center, up, or down. You can't "fall off" the edge. Like it or not, this is now the 21st Century and the last 30,000 years of recorded history is not much use in charting a course into the 21st century.
Relgion must adapt
Science must adapt
Business must adapt
Government must adapt
Cultures must adapt
People must adapt
Litigating a false nostalgia of how thigs "should be" based on how "things were" is irrelivant.
The 21st century is now and we need to move forward. The Internet is not a series of tubes, it is what it is, the Internet. It is not analagous to a phone network, a highway system, or a giant Rube Golberg machine. It a a complex collection of communication protocols and presentation layers most easly conceptualized by the phrase:
"Please Do Not Tip Strippers Poorly Again"
(P)hysical = The hardware that connects stuff
(D)ata Link = How do get stuff from hardware A to B
(N)etwork = Logical segmenting of 1 network from another
(T)ransport = How do we get stuff reliably from A to B, especially across more then 1 network
(S)ession = how can we tell we are working with A and B
(P)resentation = how do we move data from A to B
(A)pplication = What tools do we use to move data from A to B
While the descriptions are simplistic they should be sufficent in understanding what the "Internet" is, a very larger interconnected network of computers that operates largly based on that model listed above.
The Internet is PING, ARP, TCP, UDP, HTTP, XML, XVID, GIF, PNG, AVI, FLAC, FLASH, IRC, NTP, and so on and so on interoperating with one another to present information from A to B.
If I must dumb it down, then I offer this:
"To describe the Internet I can offer this: it is the canvas by which people communicate with, not only wth a wide variety of paints, but all the colors each paint makes available." - Ken P.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I got into an argument with an IFPI (our version of the RIAA) representative about the same thing. The topic was anime and the fact that it's near impossible to get them in any kind of timely manner (read: within 3 years of release in Japan) in Europe. No matter what you'd be willing to pay.
Their reply "Well, you want a TV with a built in toaster, but it doesn't exist".
No, sorry. It does exist. If it doesn't exist, why don't you build it, your customer wants it. Last time I checked, what drives the free market economy idea is that the supplier builds what the customer wants and those that don't will perish while those that do will prosper. But it does already exist. You just refuse to sell me that TV with a built in toaster. Me and a lot other people would gladly go and buy it from you. You don't offer it. Others do. Yes, they buy it from some backyard hack that just slapped together a TV and a toaster and sold it as a new gadget (I'm not kidding here, people, the discussion got to this inane level), but what if the customer just doesn't effing care?
The customer wants what he wants. Sell it to him or he'll find a way to get it. Period.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
GTFOMP.
Get The Fuck Off My Poland ?
Yeah, but we're not talking about murder here. He's complaining that consumers want the products on fair terms, and this guy is basically complaining, "the free market is a chaos which doesn't allow us to guarantee that we get to sell whatever products we want on the terms we want them."
The restraint we're talking about here isn't like, "You can say whatever you want, just so long as you don't kill me." It's more like, "You can have the car in any color you like, just so long as you like black."
he really ought to stop comparing the internet to a highway with guardrails and dangerous vehicles on it. i mean, the internet isn't a big truck.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
We were here first, dammit.
(And your track record precedes you, thief.)
I can see the fnords!
Oh how I wish that this could be read by Mr. Lynton, but unfortunately even if he read it, he JUST WOULDN'T GET IT anyway.
.Lynton, sold an inferior product to your customers around the world and in your paranoia over piracy made sure that they could not buy a superior product from region 1 and watch it on their TVs at home. And to top it all off, while you and your Hollywood buddies have slit your own throats you are convinced that someone else has done you wrong. What's really sad is that doing things like having region codes to begin with and convincing Samsung and others to stop making consumer friendly DVD players has caused those customers to look for alternatives - "free" copies of your DVDs that don't have region codes in them so they can play them at home. So no, I don't feel sorry for you because you did this to yourself and what you and your buddies in Hollywood think that consumers want is not what they want at all. If you want to fix this, put out better product overseas and start encouraging those same DVD player manufacturers to make region free DVD players because until you give up on region coding and finally understand how much we, your potential consumers, hate it, you're basically grasping at sand and not understanding why it's running through your fingers.
Lynton refers to how Sony has essentially closed shop in South Korea because those sneaky Koreans can download his DVDs too fast, so they have no incentive to buy them. Well, I'll tell you why people in South Korea and elsewhere are bypassing Sony. It's your fault. And I'm going to explain why it's your fault and I'm not even going to go down the path of telling you that American movies mostly suck. While that's certainly true, that's not why South Koreans and others aren't buying from your stores.
Hollywood, which includes you Mr. Lynton, is its own worst enemy. Let's take a look at what you release to foreign markets. There's a huge demand for region 1 (USA/Canada) DVDs around the world. Know why? It's because region 1 DVDs mean quality. Region 1 DVDs typically use progressive video and high quality audio (DTS for example). Region 1 DVDs often have extras and while personally I'm not real fond of extras most of the time, the marketplace here seems to want it. Let's look at what you give to people in South Korea, which is region 3 for those keeping score. Well, you often release a film with zero extras. You sometimes give them interlaced video and lower quality audio choices (AC3 only and at low bit rates). I have no idea if the subtitles you give them are any good or are as bad as some of those bad English subtitles we used to get on Hong Kong movies in the past. And here's the best part of all - you and your cabal have "persuaded" almost every single DVD manufacturer to stop making DVD players that can have the region settings changed. So now Samsung, a very large company in, hmmm, South Korea, simply does not make a DVD player anywhere in the world now that can be made region free. They are not alone in this. I participate in a large video forum and you know what one of our most popular questions from new members is? How can I make my DVD player region free? You know what the answer is? Often it is "You can't". So you, Mr.
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.
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.