I once read that the year before the transistor *completely* replaced the vacuum tube, more vacuum tubes were sold than in any other year of their existence. I'm awful with details, so I'll accept that I may not have this little fact completely correct, but the essential meaning of it keeps me from getting too discouraged when the technology wars get really nasty, as they seem to be getting right now with content owners stepping up the pressure on just about everyone to accept their version of (and control of how we get to) the future.
Cory Doctorow annotated in red, the University of Southern California's notice to students about copyright compliance: USC Copyright Compliant letter, annotated by Cory Doctorow, for example. The notice is from last summer, but seems nicely suited to the current drive to more deeply engage ISPs, including universities, in RIAA's war on p2p file sharing.
Viacom filed suit against YouTube and Google today (press release). Negotiations weren't going well from Viacom's perspective, and since content owners have monopolies granted by the federal government, they can play hardball in what might otherwise be simple, healthy creative destruction (a la Schumpeter and a host of others).
All this added to my observations last week about MS DRM, Rubin's speech blasting Google... it all looks like the building of one of those "waves of the century" about to hit the beach in Hawaii. So is it the last year of the vacuum tube, or is it just another day in the life and death struggle of adaptation to a networked world?
Comments (1)
Yes, the analogy I often use is the one of the early railroad systems, when so many companies were trying to create monopolies that everyone tried to use their own particular size rails, none of which actually met up. Your analogy may be more apt, though. I think the problem comes down to this: we have entered what everyone seems to call, and rightly so “the information age.” We have created technology that gives us almost instantaneous access to almost infinite amounts of information. The system, in other words, is designed to generate and retrieve information. But technology doesn’t make distinctions about what kind of information it gets for us. It is designed to get it quickly, and it performs that function. The problem is companies like Viacom want to make the technology work for them in such a way that they can deliver product quickly, but only on their terms. Technology isn’t interested in that – it has no moral sense. Thus no matter what they try to do, the technology will always manage to evolve to get around it, because that’s its function.
Posted by rzrsej@aol.com | July 11, 2007 12:53 AM
Posted on July 11, 2007 00:53