On 19/11/2007, David Greaves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > avehaveyouanyideahowdifficultitistoreadyouremailsthey > lookquiteinterestingbutthelackofformattingandgeneral > runningtogetherrreallymakeslifedifficultforsomeofuson > thelistDavid
lol, I do apologise and hope this is better (CAPS EMPHASIS mine) Ashley said at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071118205358171 "A lot of the rights holders are not at all familiar with this world. They are often writers, or directors, or producers -- and for them, THEY CAN SEE THAT THIS WORLD HAS OPPORTUNITY, BUT THEY ALSO SEE THAT IT HAS GREAT RISK OF UNDERMINING THEIR CURRENT BUSINESS. And so this is something that we've had to take them on a journey with. And the initial point was, yes, convincing them that the content was well-protected, that once they understood enough about copyright and digital rights management to want to be assured that the content would be available free within the UK but not freely copying available outside the UK. And we had auditors in to demonstrate that that was the case." This reminded me of something Eben Moglen said at http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2420/stories/20071019507610000.htm "What's happening is that, at one and the same time, the digital revolution is offering capitalists the undreamt of POSSIBILITY THAT THEY CAN CONTINUE TO CHARGE LARGE PRICES FOR GOODS THAT HAVE NO COST OF MANUFACTURE AND DISTRIBUTION. THAT IS THE BONANZA. That is perfection for capitalism. Profit becomes the whole of the price. It's a very great dream for them. At the same time, they are facing the POSSIBILITY OF COMPLETE RUIN IF WE MOVE TO A VOLUNTARY DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM IN WHICH THEY NO LONGER OWN ANYTHING but perform services to creators. Because then, in distributing culture, they must compete with children and lovers and people who distribute culture just because they want to. So there is a competitive crisis building. On the one hand, their pay-off matrix shows in the positive side some very large numbers. And on the negative side, their pay-off matrix shows equally large negative numbers. There is no saddle point in this game, the game theoreticians would say. The game itself does not give you an optimum strategy. There are two possibilities: they have superior force, and so they coerce the game to the cells in which they win. Or we have superior force in which case THEY MUST CHANGE THEIR WAY OF DOING BUSINESS. Unfortunately, there is really no choice in the middle. The middle becomes hard to hold because the ends are so attractive. So, international capital at one and the same time sees that it has opportunities beyond its wildest dreams and it has challenges that might put it out of business. This produces that same uneasiness that beset capital when it first encountered the communist movement in the middle of the 19th century. And so I took the moment at which it encountered communism and I changed a few words to show how it works at the opening of the 20th century. And the spectre of free information that haunts capitalism now is like the spectre of communism that haunted it in the 19th century with just one exception; this one works. The communists of 1867 were writing about something that they hoped to do. We are writing about the spreading out of something we have already done. This one is already showing that it can happen. ... As they begin to think of themselves as exporters of bit streams, knowledge and symbols and entertainment, the developed societies with the highly developed capitalist sectors begin to recognise that they must live and play in our zero-marginal-cost world. Denying that their goods have zero marginal cost won't work. They tried that last decade. Making exceptions from the general rules of economics won't work because of the traison des clercs [French for "treason of the clergy": a phrase that has come to denote the moment in socially revolutionary situations when the retained intellectual defenders of the established order begin to question the system] that follows from that as the economists refuse to go with the programme. So, they have to fall back to simple microeconomic theory because it's the rules by which they lived and it becomes the rules by which they are forced to change fundamentally what they do because there is no alternative. That is the crisis." -- Regards, Dave This post is my personal opinion and doesn't reflect any employers official positions. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
