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Is BD Live a shot in the arm, or a shot in the foot?

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

This post is actually a question for TK and it focuses on my personal experience with BD Live and his contention that there is still a market for purchasing movies.

Purchase vs Rent vs On Demand

As I understand TK’s position, the studios plan to make money by getting you to buy all the movies you bought on VHS and then bought again on DVD by getting you to buy them again on Blu-ray. I am not the ideal consumer for this, I laugh every time I open the drawer of my wife’s mostly unwatched Disney VHS tapes.  I have recently taken a business from delivering training videos via DVD-ROM to delivering them over the Internet, so my opinion is that physical media is doomed and revenue from movie sales will trend towards zero, just as it has for newspapers and music. Certainly the embargoes against rental kiosks and other steps the studios are taking are an effort to promote sales over rentals and possibly rentals over downloads to stave off the inevitable price declines inherent with electronic delivery.

BD Live

BD Live is supposed to make Blu-ray Discs more valuable by linking the movies to online content. A main feature BD Live provides is the ability to get information about specific scenes while watching the movie. Consumers with Internet connected players can get up to date information about the actors, directors and possibly locations. This is a familiar function to TiVo users, it has existed for years as TiVo Swivel Search. Another feature of  BD Live is chat. I just can’t see wanting to chat during a movie and if I did I wouldn’t want to do it through the TV with a remote.

BD Live Inoperable Out of the Box

But all of that is irrelevant, here’s the rub. In the race to the lowest price, the manufacturer of my player decided not to include a memory card. Available for retail for less than $10, an SD card has been required to access BD Live content for every Blu-ray movie we’ve rented. I really should buy one, but I know I have a few spares lying around somewhere and it seems silly to buy another. Obviously I haven’t gotten curious enough to spend the cost of two lattes or to search the junk drawers. Maybe BD Live is great, but someone forgot to tell me.

What’s really funny is that the same player offered me a five dollar credit for connecting it to Amazon’s Video On Demand service. So the player is actually encouraging me to watch downloaded movies. Furthermore when I purchased the player I also was given a choice of Blu-ray movie for free. It seems incredibly short sighted that the movie studios aren’t chipping in another $5 to ensure you are walking out of the store with a memory card to make BD Live useful. The user experience for BD Live for those who don’t know what an SD Card is or how much one costs is horrible. I think this alone would sour the average consumer towards BD Live especially when all of the other online features including video on demand work.

Honestly that is a pretty easy problem to fix. Even after the fact it would be fairly simple to offer a promotion for consumers with Internet connected players for a free memory card. The real issue here is whether the BD Live content is more of an encouragement to purchase or to rent. The fundamental problem is that the content is delivered over the Internet. There is no guarantee that the content will be available in five years and there is no bonus offered for buying the content. Therefore it probably encourages renting more than purchasing. At some point the studios will want to recover the money they invested in producing any BD Live content and will make it available to consumers who watch movies via video on demand. Some of the features of BD Live, including chat, have already been demonstrated in video on demand prototypes from NetFlix.

A Better Option to Promote Purchase

I better option for the studios would have been something that made the movie sticky. This system would involve features from services like TiVo, IMDb, Amazon and Flixster. Fundamentally the system would provide a way to register the first sale of a Blu-ray Disc in an online catalog. That catalog could be connected and shared in social sites like Flixster does with movies in theaters and Facebook. By connecting it to IMDb it would be easy to create TiVo like recommendations of what movie from already in your library you might enjoy. Amazon like wish lists and allow the studios to offer loyal purchasers promotions and earlier release dates completely bypassing the current retail channels and certainly have more ability to forecast end user sales.

This catalog system could also solve a problem faced my most people who have collected large numbers of movies, specifically it could provide a nice cover-flow type interface, the ability to search for movies by keywords, actors, directors or quotes. It could provide a way for the user to specify the location of the movie to make it easier to find in large collections.

If the studios were really gutsy they would build in a lend/like system. Using the social network features you would borrow a copy of the movie from a friend, perhaps even via a studio authorized digital copy. Upon viewing and returning the movie to the friend you would be asked to rate the movie. If you liked the movie the studio could offer it to you directly.

Conclusion

As content becomes available digitally the price gets forced down. The way to preserve prices is to ensure there remains continued additional value in physical copies. BD Live does not provide this increased value, it actually encourages rental and opens the door to more video on demand. Movie studios should look at the consumer’s entire catalog and their overall viewing experience versus the individual movie and thereby drive features based on encouraging purchases.

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Posted in Broadband Video, Internet, Opinion, TiVo, social networks | Comments

Coolness with Google and MailChimp

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Subtitle this post: I am easily amused.

Often I keep track of planned participation in events for our Indian Guides tribe, the Iroquois, using a Google Docs spreadsheet. My use of spreadsheets and especially charts has become a running joke within our group. Normally our group uses Google Groups to communicate. It provides a simple means to communicate with everyone at once. However, while serving as chief last year, I found that the messages from our Google Group did not always get the attention they deserved. I finally settled on using MailChimp as a way to send messages that had a little more visual appeal, some personalization and to give me some feedback on who had opened the message so I would know who needed a phone call.

This past week while drumming up support for the  Encinitas Holiday Parade I stumbled on a little bit of synchronicity when combining my Google Docs Spreadsheets with MailChimp. Someone humorously requested a pie chart  in response to the link to the roster spreadsheet. After creating the acceptable pie chart in my spreadsheet I selected the publish link to get a link to the image. I then duplicated my earlier MailChimp campaign and modified the message to include the pie chart.

Parade AttendanceWhat happened next brought a smile to my face. When I received the message, gmail recognized the pie chart was coming from a Google Docs spreadsheet and offered me a preview of the spreadsheet. That in turn made me realize that the pie chart included in the mail message was dynamic and would update every time the mail message was opened, essentially converting the email message into a quick status indicator for the tribe. As I said at the beginning, I am easily amused, but isn’t technology wonderful?

One little bit of darkness in all this joy, you must have access to the spreadsheet to view the pie chart. I have thought of two possible workarounds for this. The first would be to create a public spreadsheet with no personal information that is somehow synced with the protected spreadsheet. The second would be to supply a static pie chart image to use if the first image is not available. And of course those people who have chosen to receive the text version of my emails are just plain out of luck.

Posted in Internet | Comments

A Cursory Look at @vark Answers

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

I recently decided that I could no longer avoid buying an iPhone. Let’s not go into the nasty details, but VoIP over 3G and the hope of tethering are certainly both in the mix. So where is the best place to buy an iPhone, or in my case, a pair of iPhones. It just so happens that I was standing in Best Buy when this question occurred to me. I carefully crafted a tweet to @vark and sent my message out to my social network.

vark 1 hours ago
Where is the best place to buy an iPhone? Why?

Answers came rolling in and you can read the @vark transcript.

The fastest to answer was Trey, an 18 year old from Arlington, VA. His answer included “duh”, so that one will get marked as not helpful. We can chalk that up to youthful exuberance and move on.  It is interesting that the majority of the people answering the question did not understand the emphasis was on the word best and the request for an explanation.

Two good answers came in, one from Julian in Westminster, UK and one from Felix in Lexington Park, MD. These answers justified their choice of the best location although the two locations differed.

Results

The good:  Aardvark did provide opinions that were useful. I believe that this question really exemplifies the type of question best handled by a social network.

The bad: Aardvark generated a lot of chaff surrounding the kernels of good data. Even when an answer was well thought out and complete, Julian’s answer may have not been useful since he didn’t have the same retail options as I do.

Aardvark needs to help users self regulate and also needs to progress in who is allowed to answer questions. This will be partially accomplished in two ways, as more people join more subject matter experts will be identified to answer questions and answer feedback will  assist in the pairing out of  the less qualified.

Word of mouth marketing is moving to social networking. As a result companies are now being forced not only to have a presence on social networks, but to identify experts in systems like Aardvark and ensure that their company is portrayed in the best possible light.

Posted in Opinion, social networks | Comments

Seeing the World Through @pogue Colored Glasses

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Pogue Colored Glasses

Imagine if Wikipedia customized answers for you based on your IQ. Now imagine if it customized answers based on your age or a poll of how attractive you were. Turning to social media to mine for data is a double edged sword, in some cases our personal networks are going to give better responses because our friends tastes are more likely to mirror our own than the tastes of the general public. However when it comes to factual information, limiting your search to people in your own circle may specifically exclude the expert opinion. When it comes to matters of opinion we are likely to have answers that support our own position rather than challenge it.

There is nothing inherently wrong in this as long as we understand it is happening. Where we experience problems is when we forget that our social networks represent the people we are connected to and start representing their responses as the world view.

This occurs frequently in David Pogue’s book “The World According to Twitter”. David repeatedly contrasts the Twitter universe to other online communities without making the distinction between Twitter as a whole and the people who follow and respond to him. In a book, largely for entertainment purposes, this is not necessarily a bad thing. As an exercise I leave it to you to imagine what “The World According to Twitter” might have looked like if the same questions had been asked instead by @oprah or @aplusk.

However, @pogue makes a serious mistake when he applies this same rational to a product review. In his coverage of Aardvark, a new IM based service for peer answered questions, he praises the service in the timeliness and accuracy of the responses. Unfortunately the value of the service directly relates to how many of your Facebook friends are already using Aardvark. In David Pogue’s case the answer was 54, in mine a measly 2.

I can ask the same questions of Aardvark and not receive any responses or worse yet I can receive responses that are incorrect without any way to assess the authority of the person who responded. It would be wonderful if we were all intelligent, witty and handsome enough to have great followers like @pogue. Until then I would recommend he, and any other reviewer, borrow someone’s social network and repeat your tests, break free from your ivory tower and see how the service works for us little people.

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Posted in Internet, Opinion | Comments

Anatomy of a Bad Tweet

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

Why You Should Not Tweet Your Headlines

I am starting to feel like a hater when it comes to the NC Times use of social media. I think that they are sitting around in some conference room thinking up new ways to irritate me. However, many people rely on the same tactic used by the NC Times when tweeting. They merely retweet the subject of their post without considering the usefulness or retweetability of their update. Hopefully by pointing out their mistake I can help you improve your tweets and increase your follower count.

Today I received the following tweet on my mobile phone:Bad Tweet

First I will break down the incorrect elements of this tweet and then I will put it back together in a form that more suited to social networking.

Problematic elements of the tweet above:

  • Useless hashtag: The NC Times should not use a hashtag with their username on all tweets. This is redundant information. The @username construct is more powerful than a hashtag on Twitter. Hashtags are more properly used as subordinate labels.
  • Useless geotag: Useless may be incorrect terminology. The REGION: label above is meant to signal who might be interested in this story. Unfortunately Twitter offers no capability to use a label in this format. The more appropriate thing to do would be to use separate Twitter accounts for stories of limited interest and allow people to follow segments of interest.
  • Unnecessary words: When this tweet is taken in context, the words brush and camp are not needed. At the time of this tweet it was generally known that there were brush fires on Camp Pendleton. The intent of the story was to provide an update on the fires. The majority of people in the region would understand Pendleton to mean Camp Pendleton.
  • Unnecessary punctuation: Both the quotes around the headline and the parenthesis around the shortened URL are not required. These are elements of style more appropriately reserved for formal writing. The parenthesis also include parasitic spaces to separate them from the link.

When we remove the useless and unnecessary elements of the tweet above the tweet goes from 80 characters to 38 characters. We have removed an astounding 52.5% of the tweet.

The measure of success of a tweet is retweetableness. We can compute the maximum size of a tweet based on the following formula:

Tweet Length Calculation

Therefore @nctimes could be composing tweets up to 127 characters long. This tweet falls well under that limit at 80 characters long. A tweet should not needlessly use that much space, but the second factor to consider is completeness of the content.

Our new 38 character tweet: “fires on Pendleton http://bit.ly/uBG5r” really doesn’t tell us anything that isn’t already known.

Probably the most important information in the article is the danger the fires present. That gives us the following tweet, “Two Pendleton fires pose no threat to structures  http://bit.ly/uBG5r”. This new tweet is 68 characters long. Suddenly we have a tweet that actually gives us a status update and it is still shorter than the original.

We could add more details and stay within our optimal length, “SD Sheriff’s helicopters and back fires used to fight two Pendleton fires; no threat to structures http://bit.ly/uBG5r” is 118 characters long and captures most of the important details of the story. This tweet is much more likely to be retweeted.

In business we are looking at social media as a means to drive traffic to web sites or brick and mortar stores to increase sales or advertising revenue. It may seem like a good idea to depend on teaser tweets to get people to click through to your site. This may work occasionally if your content is especially compelling and useful, but in most cases this is not a good strategy. Your strategy should be to provide valuable content and build up an actively listening follower base. Your reward will be brand loyalty due to the enhanced reputation that your social networking presence is providing.

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Posted in Internet, Opinion | Comments

Revisiting Twitter’s Monopoly

Friday, August 7th, 2009

AT&T did it as Ma Bell, Microsoft did it, AT&T and Apple are doing it again, it seems monopolies of one form or another are all the rage today and everyone from the FCC to David Pogue wants answers. But who is crying out against the Twitter monopoly?

Twitter’s closed social network is a monopoly and this week we have two major demonstrations of why this is bad for everyone.

First, because there is no Twitter alternative, there is no recourse when Twitter is taken offline by a DDoS attack. Months ago Barrett Lyon was pointing out Twitter’s vulnerabilities and arguing that as a communication service Twitter had an obligation to provide a better network infrastructure. Obviously Twitter, as a money losing proposition, has to balance survival with investment, but in the long run competition is good for technology and business.

Second, there is no alternative to the unfiltered mess that is Twitter. As a result we are starting to see bans on Twitter. Whether it is the Marines banning social networking, the NFL banning tweets from the sidelines or your own company banning Twitter in the workplace to protect trade secrets the result is the same, all or nothing. Twitter being offered only as a monolithic service provides no opportunity for enterprise monitoring and filtering.

I have argued in the past that an appropriate business model for Twitter would be to sell their software after making it conform to open microblogging standards following in the footsteps of companies like sendmail. They could also sell Twitter as a service. A network of microblogging servers running different software would be more fault tolerant and would allow enterprise filtering of Tweets, permitting open communication while protecting everything from trade secrets to national security. It would allow consumer choice of providers and encourage innovation and reliability.

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Posted in Internet, Opinion | Comments

The NC Times New Look

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

A comparison to the NY Times

This review compares the site redesign done at the NC Times to the NY Times. It should be known that the NY Times spends oodles of money on their electronic assets and has in the past developed entire programs for the display of their news.

A screenshot of the North County Times website.

Screen shot of the North County Times

Screen shot of the New York Times website

Screen shot of the New York Times

These two screen shots show the pages in a standard Firefox window at 1024×768, the most common display size currently in use.

Both websites are displayed with a horizontal scroll bar, this is an artifact of replicating the screen size. The scroll bar would not be present for a user full screen on a 1024×768 display. The inclusion of this scroll bar does affect the percentage numbers below.

I have left the light blue-gray box on the top of the NY Times page even though it can be removed.

Category NY Times NC Times
Number of Headlines 10 5
Number of Article Words 48 33
Number of Pictures 2 1[1]
Traffic No Yes
Weather No[2] Yes
Content Begins ~ 350 px (57%)[3] ~ 380 px (62%)
Number of Columns 5 3
Widest Column of Text 340 px (caption)
150 px (story)		 600 px
Ads 3 to 4 1
Ad Space 180×90 (2)
80×30 (1)
340×80 partial (1)		 740×100
Ad Space Total 62000 sq px (10%) 74000 sq px (12 %)


What we can conclude is that the home page of the NY Times is able to convey more news and use more pictures. The NY Times places more emphasis on their content by having the navigation along the left hand side, rather than at the top of the page.

The most important difference is in the layout of the columns. By using many narrow columns the NY Times is able to present more headlines and has more story content as well.

The North County Times does have a dynamic element that permits the display of more than one picture on the homepage. The NY Times picture element is static and related to the story content. The placement of the dynamic picture navigation control results in picture captions not being immediately visible and therefore the pictures lack context.

When discussing ad placement, the NY Times is able to display 4 ads. Two of those ads appear to be linked and display the same content. One of their ads is mostly off the display. The NC Times shows a slightly larger single ad, but the space allocated for ads is actually significantly larger and not in use in the screen shot.

While both of these sites change frequently, this review attempts to address the major site elements to evaluate the recent NC Times redesign. I am not impressed with the redesign and hope that the NC Times will continue to attempt to improve the site with a mind towards increased usability.

[1] Five pictures dynamically rotate through one space.
[2] Available after personalization.
[3] ~325 px (53%) after personalization

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Posted in Internet, Opinion | Comments

NC Times Redesign

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

The North County Times or NC Times launched a redesign of their site, and while I am no design expert I have criticized the functionality of their site in the past. It’s important then to revisit past criticisms and to see what the upgraded site has to offer.

My biggest complaint with the NC Times and the other newspapers is the walled garden approach they have taken with their content. Not only do they lock down the distribution of the content they create but the content that users on the site create in response. They do this to preserve ad revenue, but in the end they are competing against services who have figured out how to monetize content through syndication.

Results of my initial 5 minute evaluation are not good. While the site loads much faster and has an updated more modern look to it, the usability is poor because of the large type reducing the amount of content available without clicking or scrolling. This is exacerbated by the large amount of space reserved for ads and the masthead. While the large drop down auto-dealership banner advertisement is gone, and the site no longer crashes my mobile browser, the site still does not support alternative browsing via mobile devices in any real sense. On my phone I need to scroll halfway down the page before I get to the headline for the story.

The site now has breadcrumbs that improve navigation and the new menu bar navigation is cleaner than the old style, however key pages that were very useful are as far as I can tell completely gone. One I will specifically miss is the regional columnists page that provided at a glance the subject and date of each columnists most recent post.

RSS feeds appear to be the same clunky system that existed before. One really odd behavior is that the RSS icon on each section home page links to an RSS explanation page rather than being an actual RSS link. Of course they also didn’t bother to put RSS links in their page headers.

One of the most important features of the modern newspaper website is the ability to handle trackbacks and pingbacks. It will be interesting to see if this review is linked back to the comments for the announcement of the web site redesign. One really foolish thing that was done was to remove the comments from the story page itself into an alternate tab. Separating the comments from the story is one symptom of the newspaper arrogance that their content is somehow better than user generated comment.

One really weird aspect of the site that I find interesting occurs on the homepage. At the bottom of the main column appear objects that look like widgets providing a glimpse into each of the main sections.

This content appears on the home page and looks like a widget.

This content appears on the home page and looks like a widget.

Unfortunately this content is not dynamic, clicking on any of the hyperlinks result not in the expected dynamic preview behavior of a widget, but an actual navigation to the story or section clicked.

While there are some positive things about the redesign, overall the NC Times took some steps backwards in usability and did not fix some fundamental technology problems. I believe this change will be yet another milestone marking the decline of the North County’s most important media asset.

Update:

As expected pingbacks and trackbacks do not register as comments. However we were informed that a mobile site exists:

ACE said on: August 5, 2009, 5:58 pm
We do have a mobile-optimized site at http://www.nctimes.com/mobile. It is not a default for mobile devices out of respect for iPhone users, who would then be limited to it. If you have mobile problems, let us know at website@nctimes.com. — Ace

While I agree that auto-detection can be problematic, I guess that the NC Times creators have never seen pages for m.twitter.com and other professional web sites. If you look at the bottom of http://m.twitter.com you will find a line that says, “View Twitter in: ” with a button that toggles between ‘Standard’ and ‘Mobile’.  While the lack of RSS feeds pointing to the mobile site is problematic, the nonstandard use of a subdirectory versus a subdomain is inane, the most wrong headed part of their mobile site is a complete lack of advertising.

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Posted in Internet, Opinion | Comments

Augemented Social Networking

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

In The Dirty Little Secret Of The Twitter Elite Mitch Joel writes, “Just because they’re following you on Twitter, it does not mean that they are paying attention to you. ” His conclusion, in the form of a rhetorical question,

The bigger question is this: how much longer can we continue to use the words “Social Media” if every day, the majority of the power users are doing everything they can to filter out and aggregate their personal preferences – essentially rendering them less social?

Stating a conclusion as a rhetorical question certainly shows a lack of commitment to a position, and that is a good thing. Mitch’s point that social media platforms are being used for marketing is not incorrect, what he fails to remember is that these platforms still have, at their very core, a set of one to one connections.

It is very true that Ashton and Oprah can not possibly have a personal relationship to each and every follower, however it is entirely possible that the Ashton and Oprah brands could. This is accomplished via what I will call Augmented Social Networking, and it is still in its infancy. As corporate marketing progresses from a mass media, print and broadcast mode, through intermediate steps, email and finally into social networking the tools that it uses to manage its customer relationship have similarly grown to adapt to the capabilities of social networks. At the very bottom end are the tools like CoTweet currently available to allow companies to share the responsibilities of managing a single Twitter account. At the top end of that spectrum would be a tool like Toucan that allows the integration of Twitter with a customer relationship management platform like Salesforce.

Whether its intelligent agents working in conjunction with existing systems or office assistants using simple tools, Augmented Social Networking allows companies and individuals to establish many meaningful one-to-one personal relationships in place of the former one-to-many relationships. So, in response to the rhetorical question above, social networks will reject power users who do not establish personal relationships. While, for the time being, it may seem productive to have a one-way conversation over a social network, over time those that follow this paradigm are doomed to be filtered themselves.

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Posted in Internet, Opinion | Comments

Technology Bill of Rights

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Paul Venezia of Infoworld has proposed a Bill of Rights for Technology. When naming something a “Bill of Rights” you are attempting to piggy back onto the authority of the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Bill of Rights was intended to protect individuals from tyrannical governments. As we take a look at Paul’s six Bills let us see if we can figure out who he is protecting us from.

Article 1. Any individual shall be able to choose anonymity when posting to Internet sites

Similar to ensuring Freedom of Speech, yet it doesn’t guarantee the right to speak and anonymity is not a right in the real world. Paul says, “Let’s be straight — if someone absolutely wants to post anonymously, they will find a way do so, whether allowed or not. Thus, the right to basic anonymity should be maintained. Besides, in the vast majority of cases, an anonymous post will still be traceable to some degree by the site admins, but not by the casual reader.” So we don’t really need this right, right?

Article 2. No network provider may constrain or restrict access to the Internet in any way, shape, or form other than agreed-upon access speeds

OK, so a wireless provider can’t block services like video or VoIP that are in direct competition with paid services. This may be OK for common carriers who operate government granted monopolies, but in a free market you should be able to contract for the services you want and not be forced to pay for services you don’t want. Network neutrality is a smokescreen to restrict the rights of the consumers, especially the less tech savvy ones who have no use for the Internet beyond web browsing and email.

Article 3. No individual shall be held liable for effects of malware or malicious code unknowingly run on a personal computer

OK, so the user, the administrator and the malware writer are all exempt from the damages caused by malware. This makes no sense and leads to the situation we are in today where zombies run rampant and email is almost all spam. Let’s start holding people accountable and see if that doesn’t help the situation. If I own a pool I am expected to take reasonable precautions to ensure someone doesn’t accidentally drown, having a computer connected to the Internet should carry the same responsibility. ISPs should be forced to turn off network connections to infected machines.

Article 4. A company that produces and sells closed source software for use on computers shall be responsible for the security of that product, and a user has a right to seek damages in the event of a failure to secure their product

Ignoring for a moment that we just exempted individuals in Article 3, I do not significantly disagree with this statement. We have exempted software providers from ensuring a reasonable level of quality in favor of innovation. Beta products are now released to the public and remain in beta for years. However, the effects of this article could be chilling. The cost of writing software for health and safety related devices is orders of magnitude higher than that of typical software products. Certainly this cost increase would end the availability of computers in the home. The loop hole non-closed source software is clearly anti-business and thus this article clearly denies people the ability to make money by writing software. This article alone if enacted could bring to an end the age of the computer.

Article 5. Any software or hardware used to conduct or support laws and public policy shall be open-source

This article arises from flaws in devices used to produce evidence against them in criminal matters, whether they are brethalyzers or speed cameras. Certainly these devices can be flawed, but is a radar gun inherently less accurate than the estimate made by a patrolman or vice versa? Voting fraud went on before voting machines were invented and why we can hope to minimize it we can’t realistically expect that it is entirely preventable. Calling for open-source is overkill, merely allowing an audit by a certified independent auditor should be sufficient.

Article 6. Any media content legally purchased by an individual shall be available for private use on any device, at any time

Fair use currently gives you the right to make a copy. This does not force the media provider to make it easy for you to make that copy. If someone sells you a book he is not obligated to provide you a digital copy. If he sells you a DRM protected song so that he can make it available to you via the Internet but protect the copyright holders right to unauthorized distribution he is not obligated to give you an unlocked version. If you do not like these terms then you do not have to buy the product. Legal elimination of content protection would kill the innovation of delivery models.

Paul’s bills do not apparently protect us from some overarching government authority. Rather they seem to be designed to strip away the rights of companies to do business as they please. They seem to favor the elite technophiles at the cost of the ordinary user. Tyranny of the geeks is not something that we should welcome, even if the geeks are well meaning they don’t have the moral authority to make decisions for the rest of society.

Posted in Internet, Opinion | Comments

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