Category: Copyright

Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV

Mindjack – Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV
Very interesting and thorough article about recent trends in downloading television programming.

From the article:
Now we have a paradox: the invention of an incredibly powerful mechanism for the global distribution of television programming brings with it a fundamental challenge to the business model which pays for the creation of the programs themselves. This is not at all BitTorrent’s fault: the technology could have come along a decade ago, and if it had, we’d have stumbled across this paradox in the 1990s. This is a failure of the value chain to adapt to a changing technological landscape — a technological desynchronization between producer and audience. Once again, there’s no need to find fault: things have changed so much, and so quickly, I doubt that anyone could have kept up. But the future is now here, and everyone in the creative value chain from producer to audience must adapt to it.

New Senate Broadcast Flag Bill Would Freeze Fair Use

EFF: DeepLinks
From the article:
Draft legislation making the rounds in the U.S. Senate gives us a preview of the MPAA and RIAA’s next target: your television and radio. (Please write your Senator about this!)

You say you want the power to time-shift and space-shift TV and radio? You say you want tomorrow’s innovators to invent new TV and radio gizmos you haven’t thought of yet, the same way the pioneers behind the VCR, TiVo, and the iPod did?

Well, that’s not what the entertainment industry has in mind. According to them, here’s all tomorrow’s innovators should be allowed to offer you:

“customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law.”

Had that been the law in 1970, there would never have been a VCR. Had it been the law in 1990, no TiVo. In 2000, no iPod.

Reinventing TV

Release 1.0 / Publication / Reinventing TV: Network TV Signs Off. Networked TV Logs On.
Scott Kirsner write in an older Release 1.0 about Networked TV. It is a good article, too bad it costs so much.

From the abstract:
Television, because of its high production and distribution costs and FCC regulation, has always been the most massive of all the mass media. It seeks the middle ground, and usually finds it. The ads that accompany today’s shows are made with a similar shotgun mentality: There’s no such thing as one-to-one marketing on the tube. Any niche-oriented programming that does exist tends to be available only to small audiences, on obscure satellite channels or community cable access stations.
That will change over the next decade, as a growing number of television sets, PCs and mobile devices are connected to what Jeremy Allaire, the founder of Brightcove, has dubbed “the Internet of video.” Plugging TV into IP rather than into a terrestrial cable system or a fleet of geosynchronous satellites, could redeem – or at least reinvigorate – the medium. The hermetically sealed world of television is about to be cracked open and rewired, transformed into an open publishing platform as a variety of new devices and services emerge to make independent video content easier – and perhaps even profitable – to produce and distribute to smaller subsets of the population.

The Future of Independent Media

GBN: The Future of Independent Media
I thought I linked to this a while ago but I couldn’t find it recently when recommending it to a student.

Andrew Blau writes a great essay contemplating Independent Media in the face of the quickly changing technological landscape. A very good read:

From the text:
The technologies that enable us to make and consume motion media are becoming better, cheaper, and more widely available—and with blistering speed. As a consequence, patterns of media production and consumption are changing just as rapidly. The Internet continues to create new opportunities to connect with audiences. Video games are becoming a platform for critique and education. A new generation of media makers and viewers is emerging, which only increases the likelihood of profound change. Images, ideas, news, and points of view are traveling along countless new routes to an ever-growing number of places where they can be seen and absorbed. It is no understatement to say that the way we make and experience motion media will be transformed as thoroughly in the next decade as the world of print was reshaped in the last.

stay free, article roundup

Stay Free! Daily: This Month in New York City Critical Mass OR How Much Does It Cost the City to Run One of Those Police Copters All Night? – Story of what Critical Mass has become. Bikers vs. Police. Messed up!

Stay Free! Daily: Sucking on the tit of McDonald’s – McD’s, marketing to kids? I wouldn’t say that this image is evidence but there is no doubt.

Stay Free! Daily: Hiking through Manhattan – The highline!

Stay Free! Daily: Radio Free Clear Channel – Clear Channel doing pirate radio. Quick someone get the FCC on them.

Stay Free! Daily: How did Mad Hot Ballroom survive the copyright cartel? – I have always had issue with this. You can video tape a public space with visual private property in that space, but you can not have the sounds of that space if it includes music. Documentaries are greatly suffering because of this.

Content for P2P about P2P (almost)

THE.SCENE
From the FAQ:
Q: What is “The Scene” in real life?

A: The Scene is the piracy underground where 99% of pirated movies, songs, video games, etc start out. There, thousands of pirates upload, download, and trade files (often illegally) using FTP sites. From there, the files make their way onto the peer-to-peer networks, that so many know and love.