a blog about information
eJamming. I love it. Just possible that we will start seeing some real problems with today’s IPR law when things like this start happening. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh had better start dusting off his Cooking Pot Markets theory.
So I want to be able to say: I place no restriction on the use of my source for any purpose.
So there. I’ve said it.
And I come across this piece, Why I blog with kids. There’s a teacher somewhere who blogs with his kids. Thank you Clarence Fisher.
And reading the post takes me to another, which asks today “Why aren’t we all blogging?†And Nancy Mckeand, whose blog it is, subtitles it “A first attempt at blogging with no idea where it will take meâ€.
Teachers who make themselves vulnerable in this way will succeed in their primary goal, to impart learning to their wards in order that potential may be reached, extended and released. Here’s to Clarence and Nancy…. and others out there I may never hear about.
Yippee thrice.
…dream a little dream of me….
Mamas and Papas (or Satchmo, if you prefer his sandpaper). And thank you W.Schwant /F.Andre/G.Kahn whoever you may be.
I was trying to work out a post title for DRM and then decided not to, too schmaltzy. But Mama Cass’s voice meant I kept the song reference in.
This has been a confusing week for me as I watch events unfold in the DRM space. Take a look at this, which came to me courtesy Charlie Wood at Spanning, the Moonwatcher.
Let me get this right: Windows RSS Platform to ship without secure feed support. And that goes for all of IE7? No way to get anything RSS other than vanilla news. No Hotmail, no Amazon, no eBay. No authentication support at all?
Mmmhm. Don’t understand. Maybe it’s because my head was still buzzing with the iTunes stuff.
I’m still getting over the French decision re Apple and iTunes. I am no fan of DRM per se, but I needed to get my head around the decision.
Today you can buy any-format music and get it to play on an iPod.
Today you can manage any-format music regardless of origin via iTunes.
But IF you buy music from iTunes (which you don’t have to do) THEN you can only buy it in AAC format and FairPlay-protected and so on.
And the French have refused that constraint. And we may not have iTunes in France. I guess that’s like saying we don’t have internet gambling in the US. Well, fine.
The decision is interesting, because I want everything to be DRM free, yet have this nagging feeling that what was decided makes no sense.
Let me try this on pens, something physical. Let’s make a Parker pen an iPod. Just humour me, please. Let’s assume Parker pens outsell all other fountain pens, that they created the category and zoomed into world domination mode.
Then they made sure you could buy ink from anywhere, not just Parker ink, and put it into your Parker pen. So people were freer about how they used their pens.
Then let’s assume that you had a pen maintenance kit that came with the pen. Dropper, nib cleaner, blotter, whatever. And again Parker outsold everything else. And they made sure that you could use the pen maintenance kit for pens other than Parker.
And let’s assume you had Parker shops. But they only sold Parker pens and Parker ink and Parker everything.
Because that’s what it was, a Parker shop. End of allegory.
Maybe the French are right. But right now I think we have bigger issues to resolve re DRM than this.
Thanks to Doc Searls for pointing me towards this FactoryJoe post. Fantastic stuff. And if that gets me labelled even more Utopian, tough.
I particularly like:
Think about it this way: if the water that’s piped into your house had DRM on it and only allowed you to use it for showers, how would you wash your clothes? If you were only allowed to make ice cubes, how would you make iced tea? If you had to pay $0.99 everytime you wanted a glass of water?
The whole lot of proprietary infrastructure needs to be open sourced and given back to people. To people over companies. To those who believe in self-determination.
This is not tree-hugger stuff. Markets are consumerising and market participants are gaining further self-determinism than was previously possible. And it changes everything.
And the post continues:
Listen, here’s what’s at stake:
Ideas and hope need to flow like water if a civilization is to continue its ascension toward greatness. Impediments to that flow will stall growth. Fortunately, like a solvent, the culture of open source will continue to expand, will wear away at these impediments, to restore the natural flow of social capital, of ideas, of hope. Those who get this first will rise, and rise quickly.
Don’t think that the owners of the 21st century have been preselected.
There’s a lot of snowballs in that, Doc.