Re: <nettime> WSJ: Can Copyright Be Saved?

[Carl Guderian <carlg@vermilion-sands.com>]

Wired would have loved this: Say Goodbye to Write-Once, Read Many Media

Had e-books been allowed to flower as a technology instead of being
cruelly cut down by market apathy, they might have gone this way, like
William Gibson's "Agrippa: The Book of the Dead," a limited-edition e-book
that could only be played once. It was a technology only an art dealer
could love, but my Japanese virtual popstar girlfriend and I agree Gibson
was on to something, so don't write it off yet.

But why stop with electronic media such as CDs, DVDs, and (remaining)
e-books? Vinyl junkies can benefit from the grand pay-per-view scheme too,
with new smart turntables that acoustically "fingerprint" records and
refuse to play them more than once unless paid; it's a home jukebox with a
direct line to the RIAA and marketers. You could even devote memory to
push technology and your turntable would download radio-style commercials
and run them into your stereo.

Books present more of a problem, but maybe Homeland Security, during
Bush's second term of course, can hire firemen like in Fahrenheit 451.
Books only cause trouble and take up way too much space anyway. They're
only holding us back.

Sorry about the tone, but I'm sick of businesses that invoke the free
market when someone derides a corporate strategy, then invoke the
government when the free market rejects it as well. Ramming it down our
collective throats isn't marketing, it's megalomania (see "Tails, dogs
wagging").

Sometimes people want to have stuff and other times they only want to use
it; dictating when they can do either (for free or not) is a stupid idea,
no matter how many interested people, like stockholders, believe in it.

Carl

I actually do like william Gibson's later novels

Heiko Recktenwald wrote:
> 
> Well, to correct myself, things are complicated ;-)
> As much as I hate DRM, yesterday, I saw something in the german "Bild
> Zeitung", well, thats what many people read, an interesting piece of shit
> or literature, something to read, food for the eyes, not really a
> newspaper, something else, and they announced a pay per view solution of
> cinema, developped by german telecom. "Why not?" I asked myself. There is
> no privat copying possible, but if you go into a cinema, you would not copy
> the movie too. You have no right to do so too.

<...>


-- 
Games are very educational. Scrabble teaches us vocabulary, Monopoly 
teaches us cash-flow management, and D&D teaches us to loot the bodies. 
-- Steve Jackson


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