- Matt Asay says every open source firm should hire a skilled, creative lawyer ASAP. I disagree; every open source firm should hire a skilled, creative lawyer, in late 2009. :)
- Tim Lee and Derek Slater point out that there is a huge, vibrant infrastructure around handling your mp3s, and nothing comparable for DVDs, because of the DMCA. Neither mentioned AppleTV, but they should have- I think it is going to be much less successful than iPod because there is no TV/DVD equivalent of Rip, Mix, Burn. (AppleTV’s web page says ‘bring iTunes to your TV’, much less interesting than ‘bring the web to your TV’ or ‘bring all video to your TV’, really.)
- Mike Linksvayer thinks that the iPhone isn’t revolutionary because it isn’t open. I think I disagree; revolutions can happen along any of multiple dimensions, and iPhone’s ease of use and advanced integration with the PC can be revolutionary, even if the closedness (patents, crappy Cingular-only network) are more of the Same Old Stuff. More on that later; but in a nutshell I feel like I’m working on a really, really nice horse and buggy right now, and Apple just released prototypes for a model T.
- JB Zimmerman thinks interestingly about property rights in virtual worlds. I’m going to write a lot about that soon, since I’m taking both IP and Real Property right now.
5 thoughts on “misc. links before I go to my 8am class (ugh)”
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I think what’s more aggravating than the expected closed platform is the number of patents that Apple put into this device. From what I understand, no one else will be able to use multitouch for a decade unless someone can find prior art. What use are new intuitive gestures if there’s only one device that supports them? Picking up on your model T analogy, it’s as if someone invented the steering wheel but patented it, meaning all other cars had to make due with joysticks or simulated horse reins.
Actually, we do tend to forget, but there were lots of patents on early car parts- the internal combustion engine, in fact, was patented for quite a while. See Wikipedia on George Selden and the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers.
I don’t think it has a lot to do with the DMCA, actually. It’s more that most people find it makes sense to watch video exactly as it’s delivered: in the right order, sitting on the couch in front of the TV.
the amount of people who actually want to watch video on a portable device or cut it into bits and mix it with other bits of video is very, very small. And they can mostly do it already – it’s not like the software isn’t out there.
I don’t think people want to watch things on portable devices (until we have a train culture, that will never be as popular here as it is in Japan) but there are lots of other things you can do if you can rip your DVDs or decrypt HDMI streams. Most households have more than one TV, for example, which could all draw on a central household video storage if that were legal; many SUVs now come with DVD players in the back seat, which could access entire DVD libraries if that were legal (many parents I know would kill for that); and there are many forms of content which people would be happy to watch in small doses while they work out or are otherwise occupied (daily show, for example.) At any rate, whether or not there is demand for consuming content that way should be determined by the market- instead they are being determined by a small oligopoly, whose power is enforced by the DMCA.
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