Music, photos and film/video footage gain value the more they're heard or seen; they can't be diluted or depleted like physical property. Ultimately artists who approve sharing and sampling of their work will sell more music. Free downloading has worked well for us, a historical film archive, and led to more business. See http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php.
Nextel's poor behavior as a spectrum-sharer has worried many public-safety-communications officials whose ability to redesign their systems is subject to politics and shrinking budgets. Their proposal puts the public sector at a real disadvantage, no matter how much money they propose to throw at the problem.
Public safety agencies started to move up to 800 MHz frequencies in the early 1980s. In some cases, these moves were promped by spectrum scarcity, but in many more instances it was equipment manufacturers (especially Motorola and Ericsson) who convinced local agencies to buy complicated and failure-prone trunked radio systems. These systems were often (though not always) solutions in search of problems, and their performance has often been questioned. It's clear that advanced communications technology doesn't necessarily guarantee the safety of personnel; quite the opposite is true, in fact. (Try Googling "trunked radio system problems" for more on this.)
Since 9/11, loud voices have been calling for "interoperability" in public safety communications, in order that different agencies might better be able to speak with one another. New 800 MHz (and now 700 MHz) systems have been touted as a solution. Unfortunately, competing and contentious departments (like the NYPD and NYFD) won't talk with one another regardless of how much money is spent on systems to connect them. New York City had an interagency 800 MHz system working on 9/11 (the DoITT system, for those familar with NYC comms), and it saw very little use. Interoperability is most often a social and cultural issue, not a technical issue.
Nextel plays a problematic role in public safety comms in another way. Many agencies, especially those engaging in undercover ops and including key Federal law enforcement agencies, prefer to let their own expensive radio systems gather dust and use Nextel handsets instead. Nextel offers comparative privacy (citizens can't monitor iDEN transmissions), group call, and cheap equipment. Tto the problem is that no proprietary system is as robust and reliable as many dedicated public safety radio systems. I'd hate to have to rely on a Nextel handset if I was doing risky undercover work -- I'd be competing for bandwidth with SMS spam and teenagers (Nextel markets to youth under the name Boost Mobile).
Anyway, as most of us know, there are other ways to address communications issues than to lock up spectrum in the name of a few large corps.
In 2001 my film archives and stock footage company partnered with the Internet Archive to put 1001 (ultimately 1800) of our most popular films online (http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php) for free downloading and reuse. Until then we'd been extremely protective of these images. Since starting to give footage away, our stock footage sales are way up, our income increased, and people stop me on Valencia Street to thank me for making the archives available. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of producers have made cool and interesting work that would have been hard to make without free footage. Most don't have any money to spend, so they wouldn't have paid anyway. Others doing higher-profile work need written license agreements, so they can and do pay.
I'm convinced that the gift economy can generate returns. Cory is right.
Large media companies (such as the unstable AOL Time Warner) own or contractually control many hundreds of thousands of copyrights. But has anyone ever actually analyzed the market value of the older copyrights whose protection is prolonged by this decision? As in the rest of life, it's winner-take-all. Sure, there is Mickey, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Fitzgerald, and a very few movies from the 1920s and 1930s that are generating revenue. But the vast majority of older works don't bring in any money. I'd venture to say that one less-publicized reason for aggressive protection of ALL copyrights, including those protecting lost and/or abandoned works, is to prop up the book value of media companies. Something for stockholders to look into...
Everything has been converted to MPEG-4 files (.1 the size of MPEG-2). Some are up already (you have to check directory, as I have not yet updated website); the rest will follow as additional movies are put up. I expect 800-850 titles to be there within next month.
Slashdot Mirror
Music, photos and film/video footage gain value the more they're heard or seen; they can't be diluted or depleted like physical property. Ultimately artists who approve sharing and sampling of their work will sell more music. Free downloading has worked well for us, a historical film archive, and led to more business. See http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php.
Nextel's poor behavior as a spectrum-sharer has worried many public-safety-communications officials whose ability to redesign their systems is subject to politics and shrinking budgets. Their proposal puts the public sector at a real disadvantage, no matter how much money they propose to throw at the problem.
Public safety agencies started to move up to 800 MHz frequencies in the early 1980s. In some cases, these moves were promped by spectrum scarcity, but in many more instances it was equipment manufacturers (especially Motorola and Ericsson) who convinced local agencies to buy complicated and failure-prone trunked radio systems. These systems were often (though not always) solutions in search of problems, and their performance has often been questioned. It's clear that advanced communications technology doesn't necessarily guarantee the safety of personnel; quite the opposite is true, in fact. (Try Googling "trunked radio system problems" for more on this.)
Since 9/11, loud voices have been calling for "interoperability" in public safety communications, in order that different agencies might better be able to speak with one another. New 800 MHz (and now 700 MHz) systems have been touted as a solution. Unfortunately, competing and contentious departments (like the NYPD and NYFD) won't talk with one another regardless of how much money is spent on systems to connect them. New York City had an interagency 800 MHz system working on 9/11 (the DoITT system, for those familar with NYC comms), and it saw very little use. Interoperability is most often a social and cultural issue, not a technical issue.
Nextel plays a problematic role in public safety comms in another way. Many agencies, especially those engaging in undercover ops and including key Federal law enforcement agencies, prefer to let their own expensive radio systems gather dust and use Nextel handsets instead. Nextel offers comparative privacy (citizens can't monitor iDEN transmissions), group call, and cheap equipment. Tto the problem is that no proprietary system is as robust and reliable as many dedicated public safety radio systems. I'd hate to have to rely on a Nextel handset if I was doing risky undercover work -- I'd be competing for bandwidth with SMS spam and teenagers (Nextel markets to youth under the name Boost Mobile).
Anyway, as most of us know, there are other ways to address communications issues than to lock up spectrum in the name of a few large corps.
In 2001 my film archives and stock footage company partnered with the Internet Archive to put 1001 (ultimately 1800) of our most popular films online (http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php) for free downloading and reuse. Until then we'd been extremely protective of these images. Since starting to give footage away, our stock footage sales are way up, our income increased, and people stop me on Valencia Street to thank me for making the archives available. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of producers have made cool and interesting work that would have been hard to make without free footage. Most don't have any money to spend, so they wouldn't have paid anyway. Others doing higher-profile work need written license agreements, so they can and do pay.
I'm convinced that the gift economy can generate returns. Cory is right.
Terms of use for the Prelinger movie collection are much more permissive -- see its link above.
Large media companies (such as the unstable AOL Time Warner) own or contractually control many hundreds of thousands of copyrights. But has anyone ever actually analyzed the market value of the older copyrights whose protection is prolonged by this decision? As in the rest of life, it's winner-take-all. Sure, there is Mickey, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Fitzgerald, and a very few movies from the 1920s and 1930s that are generating revenue. But the vast majority of older works don't bring in any money. I'd venture to say that one less-publicized reason for aggressive protection of ALL copyrights, including those protecting lost and/or abandoned works, is to prop up the book value of media companies. Something for stockholders to look into...
Everything has been converted to MPEG-4 files (.1 the size of MPEG-2). Some are up already (you have to check directory, as I have not yet updated website); the rest will follow as additional movies are put up. I expect 800-850 titles to be there within next month.
Rick