Comments on: Gone viral

By: Roberto Ainslie

Roberto Ainslie — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 03:35:42 +0000

You can add my blog to the 30. Posted: http://tokyoblues.squarespace.com/blog/2010/1/22/adrian-storey-aka-uchijin.html

By: Hugo

Hugo — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:40:36 +0000

i woke up thinking about this. like you say, “everyone with a DSLR is now a photographer or citizen journalist.” add a plane ticket, and you are a foreign correspondent. whereas before you had to put in years working at a local rag, slowly rise to the top, and then convince an editor that your story was worth approving. now you just go, shoot, post, and wait for the mob to approve. the result? so much chaff waiting to be winnowed. can this process be monetized? should it be monetized? i’m starting to think it shouldn’t.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:01:30 +0000

What I’ve been waiting to see happen for over a decade now is a workable micro payments system for the internet. The free/ad supported web can’t last forever, and nor should it. Unfortunately micro payments aren’t an easy one to get going, for various reasons.

Of course, micro payments solve the problem of getting money flowing through the network, but they don’t solve the problem of content theft. For that? I’m a fan of another one from the “too hard” basket: DRM.

The problem with DRM though is that any implementation has to be open, used by everyone (not proprietary, thus locking people to specific systems), and needs to have allowances for fair use. To date almost all DRM has been closed, proprietary, and acted as though fair use didn’t exist.

So… yeah, I think the solution is two next-to-impossible to get right technologies :)

By: Jrim

Jrim — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:40:42 +0000

Yeah, it’s a tough one. I think it’s important to separate things out in terms of the nature of the wrong and the harm done, otherwise you just end up looking like Metallica trying to sue the pants off spotty teenagers for downloading a few of their songs. At the end of the day, the financial profit that any bloggers are likely to make from reposting your shots is extremely minimal, so the problem is more with the blatant copyright infringement. Maybe they SHOULD have paid XX amount of dollars to use that photo, but realistically that was never going to happen. (If it’s a corporation ripping your stuff off to use in an ad campaign–well, that’s a whole different magnitude of shittiness.)

A lot of it comes down to respect: you respect my rights, I’ll respect yours. Some record labels now get people to contact bloggers directly when they post a link to a leaked album–they’ll post a nice message asking them to take the link down, and normally it works. There are, of course, some blogs that seem to exist solely to get search engine hits, and I’m sure those are harder to deal with (and might require more severe measures). But as I said on Twitter, some people will do this without realising they’re doing anything wrong–ignorance, rather than malicious intent.