Interesting article about CD conversion services
Check it out at the new Playlist magazine online (nope, not Playboy):
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Check it out at the new Playlist magazine online (nope, not Playboy):
I'm reminded of Mark Cuban's great analysis of the case a few months ago:
We are a digital company that is platform agnostic. Bits are bits. We don’t care how they are distributed, just that they are. We want our content to get to the customer in the way the customer wants to receive it, when they want to receive it, at a price that is of value to them. Simple business.
Unless Grokster loses to MGM in front of the Supreme Court. If Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the domain of the big corporations only.
It won’t be a good day when high school entrepreneurs have to get a fairness opinion from a technology oriented law firm to confirm that big music or movie studios wont sue you because they can come up with an angle that makes a judge believe the technology might impact the music business. It will be a sad day when American corporations start to hold their US digital innovations and inventions overseas to protect them from the RIAA, moving important jobs overseas with them.
from: http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000230037801/
Check out the link here:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/06/27/technology/grokster/
Quote:
the Supreme Court concluded that companies that encourage the illegal use of their peer-to-peer software can be held accountable for any copyright infringement that occurs.
Now this sounds reasonable right? But the implications of this ruling are fucking huge. Say I'm Joe Blow small business owner who operates a business in the digital media space. My product or service has many legitimate uses and users, but some people choose to use my product or service to break copyright law. Now the RIAA/MPAA/[insert evil protectionist association here] can use their billions in capital and resources to sue me, Joe Blow. Even though I didn't "encourage" the illegal use of my product or service, they can tie me up in court for ages debating that point.
This is the same as saying "Hey gun companies are evil because some people choose to use their products to break the law" or "Car companies deserve to be shut down because some guy used his Ford to run over his neighbor in cold blood"
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH AMERICA??????
I own too many domain names.
So the big revolution unfolding before our eyes is that everyone can be a content producer.
The next big thing is content aggregation for a few reasons:
1: the signal to noise ratio of available content has grown exponentially, finding the good stuff is increasingly difficut. Let's call that Information Overload
2: With so much available content, once it is available in uniform ways, there is a lot of cool stuff you can do as an aggregator (no link now, but see the yahoo traffic//google maps "mashup", or the craigslist housing//google maps one).
If you REALLY want to understand the power of content aggregation, come talk to me about the inner workings of the electronic music scene. Because what is a DJ if he isn't a content aggregator?
On a more mainstream scale, see the iPod "shuffle" revolution. People are rediscovering their music collections (content) because its presented to them in new ways (creative aggregation).
Now let me think a bit about the implications. (besides wanting to finally give in and dabble on the decks)
For the last 4 and a half months, I've been banging my head against one of the largest breadth technical problems I've ever tried to solve. A problem with huge scope, and varied constraints. If I've ever looked distraught or confused over the past few months, it's because I've spent way too much time thinking about this problem. Sure I came up with many potential solutions, even interim solutions-- but all were suboptimal.
I recently adopted a new definition for the word "innovation". Innovation is what happens when you are able to bridge the gap between different clusters of context (thanks Drew).
Well 8 fucking bridges later, I think I've got it figured out.
It's weird because the connections seem so obvious now (that whole 20/20 hindsight thing), but it took months of thinking and experimenting (and frustration) until I finally figured it out.
It's weird because the solution isn't really that technically challenging, more of a big huge integration problem.
It's weird because this discovery will indirectly address many other problems that have been peeking over the horizon, solving some of them while throwing others right in my way.
My brain is weird in that sometimes I block HARD on certain things. Like when I was waiting to hear back about a certain job offer, I couldn't study effectively, work effectively, or even party effectively (I could only check my email effectively).
I can only imagine what's been waiting for this problem to go away.