UGC is content generated on a site by it's users. If you are an amature film maker who makes films for a youtube channel then you are both. It's a fuzzy mess I agree but that's largely because it is a fuzzy mess. Platform has just become important in a way it wasn't before it's an added aspect and in this case the relevant one.
In other words all that UGC is produce by either an amature or even a professional but not all amateurs and professionals producing content are producing it in a UG manner... or something... I might just be talking out my ass at this point.
You missed the point. There isn't some magical "real" price for the product those companies produce that is independent of what the market willing pay for it. They can enforce the price they chose on retailers if they want but that price isn't a reflection of any core 'value' or 'nature' of what they sell. It's based on what the market is willing to pay, if the market isn't willing to pay the price the price changes or they lose sales. If it means they have to cut profit or costs they do that and if they can't cut costs then they go out of business.
A book is worth what the buyer is willing to pay, you can think that a books true price is £10,000, and maybe you can even force a retailer to have to sell it at that price but unless some one buys it then the price is totally meaningless.
Is the fact we will be forced, in and out, to route through this 3rd party. Evening having a VPN (which I'm actually going to invest in come pay day) this could mean major, national, level issues.
EZTV is being blocked in the UK now. I was talking to someone who claimed "well aren't streaming services enough for you?" and my response was as follows.
EZTV provides a service that gives me quick, high quality, DRM free downloads of TV shows that I can play on any my devices. They are available soon after they have aired, in a easy to understand format and there is no region locked windowing.
That is a better service than anyone else offers simply for being able to sidestep the ridiculous policies of the big content producers that have nothing to do with the actual economic realities. This results in me, who wants to makes sure the people who produce content are paid for me, having to use platforms that are simply worse for the consumer.
Which are all things that have nothing to do with one platform giving me content for free and the other being paid for. I would happily pay far more for a service like EZTV than I do for netflix because it's such a vastly better service.
And that changes nothing about the idea that their e-mail systems could be a outdated junk box setup decades ago by a half arsed contractor.
Now if you mean that they could find those e-mails by going through what they collected on the address they were being sent to? Sure, they could, but that's slightly above the paygrade of whatever poor sap is likely dealing with freedom of information requests.
As much as I agree that they wouldn't even if they could it really wouldn't surprise me if they can't. This kind of disparity between parts of the same organisation shouldn't be surprising even in actual companies let alone when it comes to government interstcutere. I mean Valve recently admitted that the process to put games on steam still uses faxes.
Yes but my point is that it's clearly been obvious that "in the name of freedom" has largely meant "in the name of our security". They are may be sacrificing to different name but the goal, as ever, remains the same.
No, not really, notice how freeing people from dictatorships only seems to matter when those dictatorships aren't friendly or useful.
For example the US government are dancing around like mancies to avoid calling what has happened in Egypt a coup because a lot of the bribes... sorry I mean aid... can't legally be sent if it is.
The life lost was never about 'freedom' that was just a nice coat of paint.
The issue here is simple, the last 100 years have been really fucking weird in terms of how we consume culture. It became largely a mass market commodity and a physical one at that.
Lets talk about music, as it's the most obvious and easiest to explain example. Most of us alive today think of a "song" in a fundamentally different way than people before us. A song has become a recording and a recording was, until lately, a physical object. In short a single tangible embodiment of two previously distinct aspects, a record of song (music notation say) and it's performance.
That new idea quantified music and we became used to paying for a distinct 'chunk' of something as a result. We liked a song, we brought the song because that was the only way we'd have access to it as 'the song' rather than a 'live' version we'd pay to go see or music notation we'd pay to play ourselves.
In other words this new idea in culture was gated because it was tied to physical production. So what happens when we move past the physicality? We have to deal with this strange new idea of a 'song' outside of the physical body that idea was born with and it's returned us to a very simple idea.
If songs are not longer a physical gated product then they can become output of a person again. If you don't have to pay to access the content you still need to pay if you want that content created. This is in short patronage.
It was an idea that was previously bound up in selling individual physicality of individual songs or albums and all the problems today can come down to how the record industry misunderstood that while we had to buy the songs in the past to access that was never the sum total of why. In the new age in which that 'had to' is done away with only the other 'why' which remains is the support of the artist.
What we are seeing is a shift in how we consume and buy culture to reflect that. It's a strange new and wonderful form of vastly egalitarian patronage. This decentralised support no longer requires a centralised gate keeping industry. Labels as they are are dead, we just have to hope they don't decide to take every one else with them in their utter mad scramble to avoid the inevitable.
Diversity doesn't have to mean fragmentation and unity does not have to mean a mono culture. It's simply a case of the ability to share with each other and to have a common heritage.
A microcosm of this for example is the festival I played the other week. It's a three day punk/ska festival put on by a friend of mine but there's actually a rather diverse range of bands, lots of different types of punk, lots of different type of sk, lots of reggae and dub based stuff along with acoustic that anything from punk to folk to country.
The reason that happens, the reason that works, is that even things that you'd think are incredibly drivers, incredibly technical almost metal like punk being seen as part of a larger subculture with a laid back reggae/dub band is their strange common history and the places that they cross over, ska punk bands ect it's a wonderful mix of different and ideas and it would be awfully boring if the scene broke it self down into just individual niche's with out that common understanding.
That's what I'm afraid of if we keep going down this road. That flow of culture ideas and cross over that produces more of itself is going to become increasely stagnated as people find it hard to introduce and be introduced to things outside of their tastes.
A concrete counter example is this text I've written here, almost certainly an entirely new arrangement of words as no one else ever has, yet expressing for about the millionth time here that Techdirt's focus isn't "free speech", but grifting off the past (in this piece), or in other pieces trying to grift off current creators (as when defending Megaupload and The Pirate Bay).
But not new words. You copy those words which are, clearly, the result of other peoples work. Do you pay licensing for the use of the language system you just used to express your self? No?
BUT! I'm sure you will cry, how can we know who invented the words we use? They are a common system of expression that evolved over the years! And this, to an extent is true, but let's narrow this down to a concrete example shall we?
There are a raft of words we use everyday that can be traced to Shakespeare and I'm sure entomologists can trace a lot of other words to a single individual who created them.
You no doubt use those words so by your logic your new arrangement of words is not free speech because it may rely on using words that other created to express a meaning to express yours. You are, in matter of fact, very literally remixing the work you copy from others to express your self.
Now of course this is absurd, that's kinda of the point, but for someone so intent on the idea that free speech can't involve building, working with, and adapting the work of others you sure are doing exactly that simply by speaking the English language.
Do you know how every revolution in history has ever started? It's started with people talking together. Suggesting ideas, and debating those suggested by others, to help mold an actionable and common set of ideals and goals.
A thousand individuals shouting at government all with a individual set of ideas is nothing but ignorable noise. A thousand individuals shouting with one voice for a common set of ideas? That's different.
Of course revolution requires a call to action and those who will act but action is meaningless with our direction and direction is unachievable without debate and consensus.
This rhetoric of yours is, if anything, an attempt to produce either inaction or action that is ineffective. There's a subtle difference between calling for people to act on their views and suggesting that discussing those views with like minded people is meaningless. Which suggests you either know that, or don't, either making you intentionally subversive or simply dangerously stupid.
I can imagine someone from the DOJ reading this and having a panic attack...
As the term is used in the DIOG, “news media” is not intended to include persons and entities that simply make information available. Instead, it is intended to apply to a person or entity that gathers information of potential interest to a segment of the general public, uses editorial skills to turn raw materials into a distinct work, and distributes that work to an audience.
And scribbling "as a journalism professional." at the bottom because damn me if the rest doesn't sound exactly like a blogger, SHOCK!
I watch a lot of stuff on youtube, it my main source of video based viewing. A lot of that is game related, news, reviews, let's plays/look ats and over the last few years there are very few games that I've brought were my decision to buy hasn't been influenced in some way by these shows. It's like I spend more on products I may not have otherwise bought as a result.
The only reason publishers might want to kill this is if they are putting out bad games because there is now such a breadth of access to larges amounts of game play with large amounts of commentary that bad games have nowhere to hide. In a way it's a lot like how in the music industry it's really hard to get away with filler tracks these days.
It just comes down to one simple thing... produce quality content. But that actually takes effort and aptitude.
Satire or not the idea of doing away with the internet is something I've never actually thought about. Even in the times I've been cut off for one reason or another it is out there, either waiting to be installed or returned to.
I'm in my late twenties and while kids today are growing up with the internet my generation has largely matured with it. From a thing that didn't seem to exist to me as a kid, to a young gangly geeky teenager engaging in a young gangly geeky web that was stretching and testing to find it's feet to understand it's potential in the same way I was. It's felt a like a mirror to my own development and now I'm meant to be an adult the net and the web are things that are as much an embedded reality of my life as water or electricity. Wonderful amazing things piped in to my house that I could almost forget are not as natural as the air I breath.
The idea of shutting that down, of cutting that off permanently, honestly feels like I'd be losing a part of my self. On top of that I believe that there is a deep seated low level change taking place in the way that people raised in a world of a ubiquitous free and open web and I think it has the potential to lead to a great and wonderful things.
I've heard it said that Homo Sapiens isn't quite the right word for us, that being 'wise' is the function of what actually makes us unique, story telling. We really should be Pan Narrans or something similar. The reason I bring it up? storytelling is way for us to both contextualise and more importantly in this context externalise our intelligence (I believe it's termed excelligence) as way for us to store information as a group. What an individual adds is not lost on their death and it allows growth of the tribe thought the information and analysis in the stories it tells about itself.
Many of the great leaps forward for us have been technologies that augment and extend that excelligence, language, writing, printing. They are all of value because they are all ways of us externalising our thoughts and more importantly sorting and communicating those thoughts to others. The internet, as you may have guessed this was leading to, is what seems like the ultimate expression of this advancement. It plugs into a fundamental truth of how we work, of how we've evolved and advanced and it has the potential to make the future wonderful.
When we talk about fighting for a free and open web this is part of the reason that I do. The internet seem simply to be the next logical stage in the evolution of our excelligence something that is as much a part of what makes us us as the changes in our physical evolution. To turn out back on that because it's a big scary is not just to lose a useful tool that is part of our lives it's to turn out back on finding out what we can become.
I didn't mean this to turn into such a long rambling rant but I just feel there is more to the question of "Is the internet worth it?" that largely goes undiscussed.
On the post: UK's Ofcom Recognizes That Copyright Can Be A Threat To User Generated Content
Re:
In other words all that UGC is produce by either an amature or even a professional but not all amateurs and professionals producing content are producing it in a UG manner... or something... I might just be talking out my ass at this point.
On the post: There Is No 'True' Price For Anything
Re:
A book is worth what the buyer is willing to pay, you can think that a books true price is £10,000, and maybe you can even force a retailer to have to sell it at that price but unless some one buys it then the price is totally meaningless.
On the post: Rotolight Uses DMCA To Censor Review They Didn't Like, Admits To DMCA Abuse For Censorship
Re: Seriously
On the post: UK's Anti-Porn Filtering Being Handled By A Chinese Company
The most worrying thing
On the post: Two New Reports Confirm: Best Way To Reduce Piracy Dramatically Is To Offer Good Legal Alternatives
Re: Easy choices...
EZTV provides a service that gives me quick, high quality, DRM free downloads of TV shows that I can play on any my devices. They are available soon after they have aired, in a easy to understand format and there is no region locked windowing.
That is a better service than anyone else offers simply for being able to sidestep the ridiculous policies of the big content producers that have nothing to do with the actual economic realities. This results in me, who wants to makes sure the people who produce content are paid for me, having to use platforms that are simply worse for the consumer.
Which are all things that have nothing to do with one platform giving me content for free and the other being paid for. I would happily pay far more for a service like EZTV than I do for netflix because it's such a vastly better service.
On the post: NSA: Sure We Can Search Your Emails, But Not Ours
Re: Re: You, I don't know...
Now if you mean that they could find those e-mails by going through what they collected on the address they were being sent to? Sure, they could, but that's slightly above the paygrade of whatever poor sap is likely dealing with freedom of information requests.
On the post: NSA: Sure We Can Search Your Emails, But Not Ours
Re: Re: You, I don't know...
On the post: NSA: Sure We Can Search Your Emails, But Not Ours
Re: You, I don't know...
On the post: NSA: Sure We Can Search Your Emails, But Not Ours
You, I don't know...
On the post: German Minister Calls Security A 'Super Fundamental Right' That Outranks Privacy; German Press Call Him 'Idiot In Charge'
Re: Re: Re: Of Course
On the post: German Minister Calls Security A 'Super Fundamental Right' That Outranks Privacy; German Press Call Him 'Idiot In Charge'
Re: Of Course
For example the US government are dancing around like mancies to avoid calling what has happened in Egypt a coup because a lot of the bribes... sorry I mean aid... can't legally be sent if it is.
The life lost was never about 'freedom' that was just a nice coat of paint.
On the post: Copyright And The End Of Property Rights
Re: Re:
Lets talk about music, as it's the most obvious and easiest to explain example. Most of us alive today think of a "song" in a fundamentally different way than people before us. A song has become a recording and a recording was, until lately, a physical object. In short a single tangible embodiment of two previously distinct aspects, a record of song (music notation say) and it's performance.
That new idea quantified music and we became used to paying for a distinct 'chunk' of something as a result. We liked a song, we brought the song because that was the only way we'd have access to it as 'the song' rather than a 'live' version we'd pay to go see or music notation we'd pay to play ourselves.
In other words this new idea in culture was gated because it was tied to physical production. So what happens when we move past the physicality? We have to deal with this strange new idea of a 'song' outside of the physical body that idea was born with and it's returned us to a very simple idea.
If songs are not longer a physical gated product then they can become output of a person again. If you don't have to pay to access the content you still need to pay if you want that content created. This is in short patronage.
It was an idea that was previously bound up in selling individual physicality of individual songs or albums and all the problems today can come down to how the record industry misunderstood that while we had to buy the songs in the past to access that was never the sum total of why. In the new age in which that 'had to' is done away with only the other 'why' which remains is the support of the artist.
What we are seeing is a shift in how we consume and buy culture to reflect that. It's a strange new and wonderful form of vastly egalitarian patronage. This decentralised support no longer requires a centralised gate keeping industry. Labels as they are are dead, we just have to hope they don't decide to take every one else with them in their utter mad scramble to avoid the inevitable.
On the post: Copyright And The End Of Property Rights
Re: Re: Cutural Impact
A microcosm of this for example is the festival I played the other week. It's a three day punk/ska festival put on by a friend of mine but there's actually a rather diverse range of bands, lots of different types of punk, lots of different type of sk, lots of reggae and dub based stuff along with acoustic that anything from punk to folk to country.
The reason that happens, the reason that works, is that even things that you'd think are incredibly drivers, incredibly technical almost metal like punk being seen as part of a larger subculture with a laid back reggae/dub band is their strange common history and the places that they cross over, ska punk bands ect it's a wonderful mix of different and ideas and it would be awfully boring if the scene broke it self down into just individual niche's with out that common understanding.
That's what I'm afraid of if we keep going down this road. That flow of culture ideas and cross over that produces more of itself is going to become increasely stagnated as people find it hard to introduce and be introduced to things outside of their tastes.
On the post: Ed Snowden Explains To Former Senator, Who Emailed In Support, That No Foreign Gov't Can Access His Documents
Re:
false flaaaaags man...
Takes off tin foil hat
On the post: The Public Domain: Now Available For Only $165 An Hour!*
Re: So what's your point?
But not new words. You copy those words which are, clearly, the result of other peoples work. Do you pay licensing for the use of the language system you just used to express your self? No?
BUT! I'm sure you will cry, how can we know who invented the words we use? They are a common system of expression that evolved over the years! And this, to an extent is true, but let's narrow this down to a concrete example shall we?
Shakespeare;
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html
There are a raft of words we use everyday that can be traced to Shakespeare and I'm sure entomologists can trace a lot of other words to a single individual who created them.
You no doubt use those words so by your logic your new arrangement of words is not free speech because it may rely on using words that other created to express a meaning to express yours. You are, in matter of fact, very literally remixing the work you copy from others to express your self.
Now of course this is absurd, that's kinda of the point, but for someone so intent on the idea that free speech can't involve building, working with, and adapting the work of others you sure are doing exactly that simply by speaking the English language.
On the post: The Public Domain: Now Available For Only $165 An Hour!*
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
A thousand individuals shouting at government all with a individual set of ideas is nothing but ignorable noise. A thousand individuals shouting with one voice for a common set of ideas? That's different.
Of course revolution requires a call to action and those who will act but action is meaningless with our direction and direction is unachievable without debate and consensus.
This rhetoric of yours is, if anything, an attempt to produce either inaction or action that is ineffective. There's a subtle difference between calling for people to act on their views and suggesting that discussing those views with like minded people is meaningless. Which suggests you either know that, or don't, either making you intentionally subversive or simply dangerously stupid.
On the post: DOJ's New 'Less Likely To Spy On Press' Rules Only Apply To Whoever DOJ Feels Is Really 'News Media'
As the term is used in the DIOG, “news media” is not intended to include persons and entities that simply make information available. Instead, it is intended to apply to a person or entity that gathers information of potential interest to a segment of the general public, uses editorial skills to turn raw materials into a distinct work, and distributes that work to an audience.
And scribbling "as a journalism professional." at the bottom because damn me if the rest doesn't sound exactly like a blogger, SHOCK!
On the post: Asiana Air Says It Will Sue Over Stupid News Program Broadcasting Offensive Joke Names Of Crash Pilots
Re: Re: Re:
Political correctness is simply an attempt to have an inclusive formal language. What a horror.
On the post: How Important Are YouTube Game Videos To Game Companies?
Re:
The only reason publishers might want to kill this is if they are putting out bad games because there is now such a breadth of access to larges amounts of game play with large amounts of commentary that bad games have nowhere to hide. In a way it's a lot like how in the music industry it's really hard to get away with filler tracks these days.
It just comes down to one simple thing... produce quality content. But that actually takes effort and aptitude.
On the post: Blind Fear Of Cyberwar Drives Columnist To Call For Elimination Of The Internet
Horrifying
I'm in my late twenties and while kids today are growing up with the internet my generation has largely matured with it. From a thing that didn't seem to exist to me as a kid, to a young gangly geeky teenager engaging in a young gangly geeky web that was stretching and testing to find it's feet to understand it's potential in the same way I was. It's felt a like a mirror to my own development and now I'm meant to be an adult the net and the web are things that are as much an embedded reality of my life as water or electricity. Wonderful amazing things piped in to my house that I could almost forget are not as natural as the air I breath.
The idea of shutting that down, of cutting that off permanently, honestly feels like I'd be losing a part of my self. On top of that I believe that there is a deep seated low level change taking place in the way that people raised in a world of a ubiquitous free and open web and I think it has the potential to lead to a great and wonderful things.
I've heard it said that Homo Sapiens isn't quite the right word for us, that being 'wise' is the function of what actually makes us unique, story telling. We really should be Pan Narrans or something similar. The reason I bring it up? storytelling is way for us to both contextualise and more importantly in this context externalise our intelligence (I believe it's termed excelligence) as way for us to store information as a group. What an individual adds is not lost on their death and it allows growth of the tribe thought the information and analysis in the stories it tells about itself.
Many of the great leaps forward for us have been technologies that augment and extend that excelligence, language, writing, printing. They are all of value because they are all ways of us externalising our thoughts and more importantly sorting and communicating those thoughts to others. The internet, as you may have guessed this was leading to, is what seems like the ultimate expression of this advancement. It plugs into a fundamental truth of how we work, of how we've evolved and advanced and it has the potential to make the future wonderful.
When we talk about fighting for a free and open web this is part of the reason that I do. The internet seem simply to be the next logical stage in the evolution of our excelligence something that is as much a part of what makes us us as the changes in our physical evolution. To turn out back on that because it's a big scary is not just to lose a useful tool that is part of our lives it's to turn out back on finding out what we can become.
I didn't mean this to turn into such a long rambling rant but I just feel there is more to the question of "Is the internet worth it?" that largely goes undiscussed.
Next >>