The silver lining in today’s Supreme Court decision
The high court ruled it’s okay for Hollywood to sue Internet companies that help distribute pirated digital music and video. While I can certainly understand the weeping and gnashing of teeth from the freedom crowd — of which I’m a card-carrying member — this was inevitable. The man, as we used to call it, simply isn’t going to lay down and let people run all over him, not with a legal system that supports the modernist, top-down infrastructure.
If, in fact, we’re in a bottom-up, personal media revolution, in which, as Adam Curry noted at Gnomedex, we’re “taking back the media,” then this should be viewed as just another example of the status quo rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Let them. Let the RIAA be the RIAA. Let the motion picture crowd be the motion picture crowd. We’ll simply move our business elsewhere. There’s some great music being written and performed at the bottom. So, too, with videos. One day, great films will be done likewise. The message of this revolution ought to be that we really don’t care what the top has to say or do.
And the lesson for developers and artists alike is to stop trying to fight the man and be the man at the same time. I’m amazed at the number of smart tech people who have the bottom-up vision but choose instead to attack the personal media revolution’s business potential from the top-down. Why do we do that?
Let’s just build our culture and get on with it.
June 27th, 2005 at 1:16 pm
Thank you!! Thank you so very much for saying that! You are absolutely right. It’s quite obvious that the existing infrastructure is resistant to change as they have their "solid" business model that has pretty well guaranteed profit for some time now. With the recent decision I am with you in that we just need to take our business elsewhere. After all, it doesn’t matter what business model you base your industry on. If people stop buying, there will be no business to model on to begin with. Very good post.