In the whole history of industry, no industry has ever been put out of business because it recognized the rights of authors. 1Statement of Sydney M. Kaye, BMI, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights of the Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate, Pursuant to S. Res. 201 on S. 1006, pg. 151 (1966).
What the heck is “net neutrality” anyway — Net neutrality is a bit out of my wheelhouse, but with the recent DC court decision striking down net neutrality rules, the issue has been discussed seemingly everywhere. Richard Bennett provides an informative primer on the topic.
Norms and Values in Digital Media: Rethinking Intellectual Property in the Digital Age — The World Economic Forum released this week the result of deep discussions on the “shared goals developed by leaders in industry, government, civil society as well as individual creators.” Among the results are this set of principles: “Foster and reward creativity”, “Build an ecosystem for innovation”, “Expand access to content”, “Inform users about ownership rights”, “Give creators and rights owners control and choice”, “Enable people to be creators”, and “Strengthen global cooperation.” Not bad.
The 2 Teenagers Who Run the Wildly Popular Twitter Feed @HistoryInPics — “The audiences that Di Petta and Cameron have built are created with the work of photographers who they don’t pay or even credit. They don’t provide sources for the photographs or the captions that accompany them. Sometimes they get stuff wrong and/or post copyrighted photographs. They are playing by rules that “old media” and most new media do not. To one way of thinking, they are cheating at the media game, and that’s why they’re winning. (Which they are.)”
The purloined picture: Visual artists confront piracy on the Web — For a few months last fall, Hannah Price was famous. More precisely, she was Internet famous. In October, the website the Morning News posted a feature on “City of Brotherly Love,” a series of photographs Price, 27, had taken of men who catcalled her after she moved to Philadelphia in 2009. Only the site displayed Price’s ambiguously titled works under a more pointed, but click-catching, headline: “My Harassers.” Online news outlets from Slate to Jezebel to Buzzfeed took the bait. More than 15,000 articles and blog posts followed. And what came out of all that attention for Price? Gallery invitations? Photo sales? Commissions? “Nothing, really,” she said. “It kind of stayed on the Internet.”
Google patents ad-powered taxi service that would offer free rides to shoppers — “Advertisers would pay for your transportation in the hope that you buy something.” Turns out the car mostly drives you to fake storefronts owned by spammers.
References
| ↑1 | Statement of Sydney M. Kaye, BMI, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights of the Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate, Pursuant to S. Res. 201 on S. 1006, pg. 151 (1966). |
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The people making money of that History in Pics on Twitter, is Twitter (and the shareholders), and quite frankly that is 18 USC § 2320 (facilitating the counterfeiting of goods and services), not a couple of teenage brats that can just scoop up, create a Twitter account, and infringe the world, jobs, hardware, residuals, royalties in a few minutes.
I say, throw Jack Dorsey right off Disney’s board. Immediate dismissal. Why should people suffer and struggle so that a pair of punks get known and Twitter profits, but then everyone focuses on the two kids. The focus is on the company that ENABLES the theft. Period.
“To one way of thinking, they are cheating at the media game, and that’s why they’re winning.”
Which is how most of these modern Internet businesses work. Cheat like hell, and when people start kicking, you scream about “protectionist government” and “legacy dinosaur” and “stifling innovation”.
Uber hasn’t invented some magic awesome method of linking drivers with riders. They’re just ignoring the laws that govern how taxis operate. I’m pretty sure that taxi drivers would be happy to just pick people up from wherever, and charge them whatever the driver and the passenger work out, but that’s AGAINST THE LAW.