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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
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.
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.
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
Also 'Store times'? Who's time? From what time zone? Sheesh. This guy is stuck in the 1890's.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
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.
This is a very good point. Sony squandered the moral highground a long time ago.
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?
My blog
GTFOMP.
Get The Fuck Off My Poland ?
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.
Woo-hoo! Cake!
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.