"no one woke up this morning looking for a way to do less with their music or movies"
Cory Doctorow has long been a tireless champion of
emerging business models and shifts in copyright for creatives on the
Internet. His argument is simple - a business strategy which turns the
majority of web users into criminals (39 out of 40 music downloaders
according to the FT)
isn't sustainable. His talk, which looks at how digital rights
management encourages people to act illegally, has recently appeared on
Google Video and is bursting with arguments about why a shift in
thinking is needed (inevitable, even).
The best thing about Cory is that he practices what he preaches - as
well as a copyright campaigner he is a bestselling sci-fi novellist,
and at the same time he releases physical copies to sell in the shops,
he releases creative commons versions for people to download, share and
rework even, for free, from his site, Craphound. ('My biggest problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity'). He's also one of the BoingBoingers and recently published an Information Week column which suggested that HiDef video was going to cripple consumers and Hollywood with its inclusion of restrictive DRM.
Beyond
the activism part, is the issue about forming conversations between suppliers and consumers, about the
democratisation of the media and how artists need to be successful in
this context - which again comes right back to Cluetrain.
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