Copyright bills protect ‘old media’
February 7, 2012
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Episode 232: What Will Canadian Digital Policy Look Like Under the New Liberal Carney Government?
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I would agree. If you can’t adapt to the new market, then you should go out of business. This happens all the time in various different other sectors in the economy, why should creative works like this be special?
Given the success of Wikipedia for written work, and “cloudsourcing” generally, and the existence of efforts like kickstarter.com for incubating everything imaginable, and add to those the strange not-so-new reality that businesses now (and forever, unless we roll back the clock) have to compete with “free” versions on the internet, and as-fast-as-you-can downloads, when doing business used to mean keeping the product in a locked room and intentionally making it difficult to get at, It’s a wonder the sky hasn’t fallen. Yet, when you realize that life as we know it is still kicking, I can only conclude that we don’t actually rely on copyright very much and will probably rely on it even less in the future.
But, if businesses no longer need to guard the product, why do they insist on being able to?
An interesting experiment
Here is an interesting experiment being laid out by an author. It’s a very different way of looking at mapping an old work into the new world. I wish him the greatest success in this endeavour. I have the original book, and look forward to both contributing and buying the new work.
http://www.cringely.com/2012/02/what-the-dickens-accidental-empires-rebooted