content creators have been happily coexisting with piracy all this time, and I’m certainly one of them. Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it’s no wonder they’re not doing so well in the current environment
-
-
Today, everyone is patent happy and every small little action is patented, so Microsoft will have its proprietary set, Apple and Google will have theirs, all the other vendors will have theirs.
—
Interesting discussion on the future of gestural interfaces and interaction patterns.
The bigger question for me is really wondering why we’ve allowed companies to patent interaction patterns. It’s not like we let people patent a specific way to swing a hammer in the past.
-
To focus only on WikiLeaks is to miss the big picture of what’s happening with information — just like focusing only on Napter in 1999 would have led you to miss the bigger revolution in digital music. The original Napster was shut down in 2001, but its P2P heirs continue to share pirated files, and it paved the way for the rise of iTunes and Pandora — and the fall of Tower Records. Similarly, you can jail Julian Assange, but you probably can’t jail every 17 year old hacker whose blood is boiling because you just jailed Julian Assange — nor can you get a restraining order on every fed-up associate, manager, or cashier who wants to blow the whistle on you.
— Why WikiLeaks Matters More (And Less) than You Think - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review (via taylordavidson)
-
That Senator Liebermann & Co were able to pull Wikileaks from Amazon and Paypal (and now MasterCard have pulled them*) (Update - now Visa too) sans lawsuit, sans argument, sans any pushback that one normally expects is a scary thought to anybody who is not part of the US Establishment and who wants to rely on the Internet in a tough period.
*It would appear that one can still donate money to the Ku Klux Klan and buy porn via Visa and Mastercard….
-
The greatest threat we face right now from WikiLeaks is not the information it has spilled and may spill in the future, but the reactionary response to it that’s building in the United States that promises to repudiate the rule of law and our free speech traditions, if left unchecked.
— Why WikiLeaks Is Good for America | Threat Level | Wired.com
-
Wikileaks and the Long Haul « Clay Shirky →
One of the most insightful takes on the Wikileaks freakout by, no surprise, Clay Shirky.
