Danger, Rant Ahead:
Speaking to a friend yesterday about the whole Sony Rootkit fiasco (I didn’t know about this new threat yet) and DRM in-general, he said something very interesting:
The big media companies have been telling us for 50 years that life is all about “keeping up with the joneses”, “beating out the next guy”, “making your millions”, and taking everything you want along the way–no matter the consequences.
Now, they whine and moan because consumers are doing exactly what they’ve been taught all along, and they’re forced to eat their own dogfood.
Piracy is rampant, and they push laws through to force people to obey them. Then, they override our computers and DVD players with their Digital Rights Management software/hardware and carelessly enable hackers to take over our machines or steal our identities.
Finally, to make us feel that much more guilty, they play us anti-piracy commercials at the beginning of DVDs that will surely, somewhere, contain at least one scene where a person is blatantly taking something that doesn’t belong to them (money, sex, or even a person’s life), and has no intention (or capability) to pay it back.
But that’s okay, they will tell us… it’s only a movie.
I believe that all of what is happening are the last, futile throes of death of an old-market industry trying to convince us that Botox and race-cars will keep them young and cool. The problem is, they keep throwing the party and less and less people are showing up for them. It’s just simply not pretty watching old people try and look young and pretty when it’s obviously hopeless. Nobody wants to watch that horror show.
In 5 years, digital media will be completely different. I love emerging movements like
No comments:
Post a Comment