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Not Consumers, but Customers
Last week, Ars Technica and Gawker Media realized that the role played by so-called “consumers” has been changing. The simplistic web advertising models they rely on worked great when visitors had no choice but to consume the advertising “impressions” loaded on every page. As people take back the power to be customers instead, even normally…
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Remember Pyrrhus? Yeah, This is Kind of Like Him
Yesterday people both on- and offline were crowing about how Pink Floyd “won” a legal battle with their record label, EMI. At last, the band can force their fans to buy digital versions of their songs as full albums, rather than individual tracks. Wait, what? This was worth fighting over? Amidst an industry segment in…
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Whoopsie
Remember Ubisoft’s amazing new DRM scheme? The one that would stop all those nefarious “pirates” by forcing legitimate purchasers of Ubisoft games to be constantly online? Yeah, well, it got cracked. Mere hours after the release, at that. I know it’s a bit of a potshot, but I just couldn’t resist. It didn’t take a…
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Missing the Point
It looks like a few suits over at Penguin publishing decided to “connect with this whole internet thingy” by turning their eBooks into applications. Because what’s missing when you read a book is a little self-contained social network / entertainment platform. This is the kind of mistake that stems directly from the mistaken idea that…
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Conventional Foolery
Ever since Ubisoft decided that forcing users to constantly “phone home” over the internet was a great way to stop unauthorized sharing of their games, the tired old DRM debate has been experiencing yet another flareup. I was rather disappointed with the treatment the issue got by a few of the webcomics I follow: While…
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Silly Joss, Networks are for Talentless Hacks
I finished watching Dollhouse this weekend, further convincing me that somebody like Joss Whedon is perfectly positioned to lead his contemporaries into the wonderful world of 21st century business models, a la Trent Reznor in music. Careful, spoilers inside. With an army of rabidly loyal fans at his command and a good number of people…
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Bennet Lincoff’s Proposal Has a Familiar Stink
The Bennet Lincoff proposal has been getting a decent bit of play from the “copyright compromise” crowd, and advocates replacing copyright with a renamed “digital transmission right” that covers how digital files are used online. It’s voluntary, but the unspoken part is of course that if you don’t pay for a license, you’re operating illegally…
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The Misunderstanding of IP Isn’t New
A friend linked me to this post over the holidays, and the similarities stunned me. I highly recommend reading the article, but the gist of it is that we’ve essentially been through the whole “property” debate before, with slavery (Ah! The S-word). People saying some of the exact same things to defend and protect intellectual…
Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.