This Week In Techdirt History: February 7th - 13th
from the when-will-they-learn dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2011, we saw some great stuff. David Guetta suggested "beating" piracy by embracing free music; Neil Gaiman explained how he went from fearing piracy to believing it's incredibly good; the Khan Academy was moving to leverage the power of BitTorrent; and a study from the Japanese government showed that anime piracy might be boosting sales.
But, on the flipside, we saw even more awful stuff. One rapper sued multiple companies for giving him lots of free promotion; the MPAA was lobbing all sorts of threats at Google over file sharing and suing Hotfile; a report from the IP Czar sounded like it was largely written by pro-copyright lobbyists; and Sony was going nuts over the PS3 jailbreak video, demanding the identity of anyone who watched it even while being tricked into tweeting the critical jailbreak code itself.
Ten Years Ago
Five extra years doesn't seem to change much. This week in 2006, even while some artists were realizing you could make money giving away free music and the evidence was showing that movie piracy doesn't reduce sales, plenty of people were still trying to fight this imagined enemy with restrictive licensing terms that kill the value of the product and set-top movie boxes that cost a fortune despite not offering much.
Newsweek, for some reason, was praising Rupert Murdoch as a digital visionary based largely on News Corp's acquisition of MySpace (which went wonderfully, right?) One look at MTV's efforts to compete was enough of a reminder that old media really struggles to "get" new media.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2001, Napster was in limbo. It was unclear when its paid, licensed offerings would be arriving, while some were still arguing that it should remain free. Then the word came down that the final ruling on Napster from the 9th Circuit would be arriving the following Monday (so we'll check in on that next week, naturally).
Wi-Fi was on the rise, but still had some security-related kinks to work out, and mobile innovation was orbiting the still-unborn iPhone with ersatz mashups of PDAs and phones. E-books were starting to make their mark, online shopping seemed due for its true rise, and home networks remained less common than anticipated.
Also, in one of the first instances of a point we'd go on to make many times, we pointed out that content isn't necessarily king, and connectivity matters a lot.
One-Hundred And Eighteen Years Ago
The justice system, the government, the national security apparatus, the media, the public, espionage, free speech, libel — they are all intersecting topics of interest here at Techdirt, and perhaps no incident in history brings them all together in as sharp a focus as France's Dreyfus Affair. The details of this infamous miscarriage of justice are far too numerous and intricate to recount here, but one of the most important aspects of the whole thing was J'Accuse, an essay published by Émile Zola as a direct attack on the government, which landed him on trial for defamation starting on February 7th, 1898.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
The Internet Was Never About Content
Consider what online services were available in the early days of the Internet: anybody remember Compuserve, Prodigy, (the original) AOL, BIX? Each one’s selling point was its own exclusive content, not available anywhere else. The Internet had none of that. Yet it swept all before it, to the point where all those proprietary names are now just history.
Why? Because the Internet quickly became the easiest way for people to find each other online. Connectivity won out over content, to the point where the content now has to come to the Internet, not the other way round.
I think the reason why the Internet is so different from other communication media is that it is decentralized. Traditional mass media (radio, TV, print publications) are centrally controlled, so their content is an important part of their sales pitch. The same is true of the (now extinct) proprietary online services. The Internet is the first mass communication medium invented by humans that has no centralized control. That’s why it has been so disruptive.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: The Internet Was Never About Content
“Content Is Not King”, by Andrew Odlyzko, First Monday, 5 February 2001
(Bonus link— just in case you're unfamiliar with Professor Odlyzko's work.)
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: The Internet Was Never About Content
Mike's Feb 6, 2001 Techdirt post links to the then-current issue of First Monday, and that link is now 404. The link I just posted should go to the same article as the original target.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: “since it is e-mail that is still the true "killer app"”
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: The Internet Was Never About Content
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: The Internet Was Never About Content
So... no.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
The Internet Was Never About Content
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: The Internet Was Never About Content
You are almost right, but its main difference from other communications media in that is has the uncontrolled and interactive nature of one to one systems like phones and letters, while providing the reach of selected content broadcast systems like books, papers, radio and television. This power is unlocked by global non curated search engines like Google.
[ link to this | view in thread ]