Yearly Archives: 2004

More Need for Creative Destruction

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If you thought my concerns about the current major content providors expressed a couple posts back were unwarranted then consider this from Dan Gilmour:

For a few minutes this morning at the D conference, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg sounded like a new age telecommunications executive, bragging about his expanding data network and plans to extend fiber optics to homes in his service territory. But he reverted to form, pretty much insisting that Verizon would reserve the right to discriminate on what gets delivered, and at what speed, on the lines and networks it controls.
Consolidation is going to create a broadband world where only a couple of companies, at most, control the pipes into our homes. If we allow companies like the Verizons and Comcasts to discriminate in favor of their own “content” products and services, today’s brand of media consolidation will look tame.
Where are the antitrust people on this? Where’s the FCC? Sleeping, or deliberately encouraging a dangerous lockdown of our future in the hands of companies that have a dismal track record when it comes to honest competition. Not a good situation…

These folks do not have our best interests at heart.

Get Rid of Them

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Jim Henley has it right:

HOWEVER. President Bush is no one’s idea of a legal mind. He may have initiated the project that became the memo, but he didn’t draft the thing. High-level government lawyers, most of them undoubtedly political appointees, did that. What that means is that there is systemic corruption in the Republican Party as an institution – “Bush’s Willing Torturers” we might call them. These are people that came up with the idea that the Constitutional phrase “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” meant
authority to set aside the laws is “inherent in the president.”
They represent a deadly danger to the American system and they are multiple. It’s not one guy somewhere, it’s a movement. Until the Republican Party roots them out, that Party is the enemy, not just of libertarians, but of anyone who values individual freedom and republican government. From the standpoint of liberty, there can no longer be any justification for preferring the Republicans to the Democrats.

Folks, we should not have to wait until November to get rid of these folks. If congress does not act, if the Republicans don’t come to their senses and choose someone else then the rest of us should just say no. A few million in the steets every day should do the trick.

Wizard People, Dear Reader

This entry was posted in Capitalism Harry Potter Intellectual Property Movies on by

Oh, cool!

…in a makeshift screening room in a Brooklyn warehouse, more than 75 filmgoers paid $7 each to watch the first film in the series, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” Sort of.
On the screen “The Sorcerer’s Stone” played as it was released by Warner Brothers. But the original soundtrack, dialogue and all, was turned down and replaced by an alternate version created by a 27-year-old comic book artist from Austin, Tex., named Brad Neely.

There is some chance that this type of creative endeavor will run smack up against some kind of copyright defense mounted by the MPAA folks. Blocking creativity based on existing works is clearly the goal of the folks who want forever copyrights. And as Paul Goyette says:

It would indeed be a shame. Creating and making as much as watching and listening? This could be the perfect remedy for our passive, bloated, consumption-driven culture.

I think this possibility frightens the content folks. Why if folks sitting at home are watching content created by other folks hanging out at home and serving it from home or their friendly hosting company what happens to the revenue streams of the cable companies, the moviemakers, the recording industry, etc. Massive disintermediation becomes a real possibility.
Which, I think, would be a great thing for everyone except the legacy industries. Creative destruction at its best!
Read the New York Times article.
Oh yea, on my cable connection the download of Wizard People, Dear Reader is currently taking less then 30 minutes!

It’s Already There!

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I suspect that SK Bubba doesn’t really mean this post title: To Much Technology. Here’s the post:

I was just wondering where the heck a package was that was supposed to be delivered today. I called the company and got a tracking number and looked it up on the Internet. The carrier said it had been delivered to my door. I looked on the porch and sure enough, there it was. How pathetic is that?
I had a similar experience this morning. Vendor sends email that says the package they sent yesterday has been delivered. A couple minutes later the shipping clerk is carrying the package through my door.
What a wonderful example of a productivity improvement brought on by enough technology.
Not that many years ago when I purchased (business or personal) or shipped something (business) there was no such thing as a tracking number. Some of you will remember the numerous phone calls that would go back and forth between folks that went something like:
Buyer: My #$%$ package isn’t here yet!
Seller: But we shipped it yesterday….
Repeated many times.
Today tracking numbers are common. Business use is nearly universal and most online retailers include a tracking number in an email as part of their service process. And today’s conversation is most often with a computer database that tells one exactly where the package is…right now. It’s easier, less confrontational and I even have a sense that deliveries are on time more often as well.
There is a lot of people time that had been involved with tracking packages that has now been outsourced to technology and not to India or China.
Seems a good thing to me. And likely to get even better as the related technology becomes more pervasive.