Bringing together a few somewhat disparate threads from the blogosphere (my favorite pasttime!), I'm going to remix them all into today's question for you. As the Grokster case looms large and broadcast content creation companies seek to morph the internet into a one-way street more like TV, folks are being forced to define more precisely why this is an inherently bad idea. Techdirt reports on one individual who has just grokked this: he already has a TV, so doesn't really want more TV content via his broadband connection. What he really wants to do is use that internet connection to communicate with friends and family, which means precisely creating his own content and sharing it with others. However, as Clay Shirky discovered recently, locking up content with ever-more complex DRM protection schemes works directly against sharing and distributing one's own created content just as effectively as it prevents "piracy" of content prepared by broadcast media outlets. So, then, my question is this: are DRM and social media directly at odds? Copy "protection" isn't about to make communication any easier, and it makes media that wants to be social that much less valuable, because it can't be (easily) shared or discussed. Going further: does a social component have the potential to add value to all media? What's your take?
1. Just Say No To DRM.
My current bete noire is region coding on DVD players. It's easy to find multi-region DVD players to go under the TV. It seems to be hard to impossible to find multi-region DVD players for the PC, laptop, car or mobiles DVD players. This stinks.
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Julian Bond