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Tuesday, 30 April 2002

Reason

Mike Godwin's Content vs Tech Factions piece is up at Reason
One way to understand the conflict between the Content Faction and the Tech Faction is to look at how they describe their customers. For the content industries, they're "consumers." By contrast, the information technology companies talk about "users."

If you see people as consumers, you control access to what you offer, and you do everything you can to prevent theft, for the same reason supermarkets have cameras by the door and bookstores have electronic theft detectors. Allowing people to take stuff for free is inconsistent with your business model.

But if you see people as users, you want to give them more features and power at cheaper prices. The impulse to empower users was at the heart of the microcomputer revolution: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak wanted to put computing power into ordinary people's hands, and that's why they founded Apple Computer. If this is your approach -- enabling people to do new things -- it's hard to adjust to the idea of building in limitations.


This is OK as far as it goes, but what the CBDTPA is proposing isn't electronic theft detectors, it is the equivalent of mandatory confiscation by armed security guards of all bags and clothing that might be used to carry stolen goods from anyone walking within 300 feet of the mall. This would ensure no-one stole CDs from Tower Records, but it would significantly limit the numbers who would want to shop at the mall.
Posted by Kevin Marks at 12:08

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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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