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Copyleftism, Open Culture, and the Future of Mass Media
I'd like to start a discussion of the future of mass media and Open Culture.
A Brief (Immediate) History of Media Culture: In the last decade, we've seen the growth of niche markets and the rise of user-generated content as YouTube and Netflix quickly replaced television in millions of households. Similarly, annual revenues of subscription-based music streaming services are on the rise while physical media purchases continue their rapid decline, (excepting the niche used and new vinyl markets with yet another year of monumental growth.) Subscription-based media access is quickly replacing broadcast packages, where for a fixed monthly fee consumers can access any media under the provider’s network of licenses (Spotify and Netflix are this year's most active examples.) And media streaming hardware is gaining popularity, as Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast and Amazon Fire TV are each vying for the public dollar. In the 3rd quarter of 2014, mobile use hit critical mass, rivaling television use in hours-per-day. The smartphone and the tablet were proudly dubbed, "America's First Screen." This is a direct reflection of the way users get their news and information and consume media in the digital age. The democratization of music-making and filmmaking technologies has made user-generated content a critical element of our global culture. At present, 300 hours of new user content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. And paired with social media, user-content can have instant exposure to millions of potential viewers with little or no distribution expense. More important still is the continued-growth of the Open Culture movement. The Wikipedia has become a global primary source of information and has spawned innumerable spin-off wikis of their own. Creative Commons makes content share-able and relevant as users are free to copy, transform, and combine ideas instead of creators scrambling to secure their works under digital lock-and-key. The GNU Project, Copyleftism, and Open Culture are growing and having a greater impact on the world with each passing day. Many major universities have opened their digital doors, offering online course material completely free to the public, and an ever-increasing number of texts, films, and music albums are finding free and legal accessibility on the web. What does the future hold for these cultures? By what system will creators be compensated for their work in the digital age? Will media conglomerates succeed in locking down content, further-extending the reach of traditional copyright? Will the public passively accept forms of DRM as simply part of the digital territory? What lasting-impact will increased media accessibility have on the global audience? And what's next? |
We will soon be in a place to build the Tower of Babel, once again.
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"In a strange turn of events, we have even more breaking news! The authors of the bible are now being sued by a group of story tellers who claim that their original works were appropriated without their consent. One of the group spoke with us, and commented 'Well, we were trying to explain to the children why the world is the way it is. You know, which deity makes the lightning, which deity makes the rain, and so forth. And suddenly, our best stories and myths are stolen by a bunch of guys! Seriously, they stole everything word for word! All they did was change the name of every deity to "God", as if that would fool us!' The authors of the bible have yet to comment." |
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I liked the Tower of Babel better back when it was E-ana.
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The OP addresses a lot of music/art related points, but I'm going to focus on the news element of the media.
The way a lot of reports are done today, television news stations are getting a lot of their news sources from trending topics on Twitter and that shit. I think this shows a move towards social media being the place for all news and it's smart of news stations to be integrating that into their systems (webisodes of popular broadcasts, news Tweets, online news sources). As far as television news goes, I think it's on the up-and-out, but it will take a very long time for that to happen. The news has been a standard of television for so long that a lot of people will cling to it, so until television gives way to Internet videos I think that television news will stay. Given that we're in what's considered the second Golden age of television, I don't think that TV is going to join pagers and VCRs in the land of the forgotten for a good long while. What will definitely change in the near future is television news losing its status as the main source for news. These days, more people access news on the Internet than on television because of TV news' bad reputation and convenience (though there is still a lot of overlap in users between both mediums). Newspapers are going bye bye, have been for a while now. They were able to hold on to some revenue when television became the main source of news because of the bathroom factor. These days with the portability of smart phones and access to the Internet, that factor is being eliminated. I either see print becoming a source for local news and/or college campus/high school news or a larger move towards news magazines that speak to a certain niche. The former is more likely. The globalization of news these days is good and bad. In the good, we have a diversity of opinion, sources, more eyes for fact-checking and biases, and a decreasing corporate control of what is considered news. In the bad, we have the rising popularity in the fringe (9/11 truther movement, the Food Babe), less of a need for quality over quantity, users living in echo-chambers where they can generate the news sources that align with their opinion (this was also present before in television news, but with the massive amount of content available on the Internet, the echo-chamber walls become stronger), and a new criteria for what is considered news. I put the new criteria for news as both a pro and a con because many people don't want to hear about news that depresses them, even if it is relevant to their lives, while a lot of what is considered "newsworthy" by the television/MMM crowd often times depends on how much time they have to fill. |
My complaint: scientific publishing is still remarkably closed. There are open-access movements, but many of their journals are tainted by lots of bull**** publisher's (many out of India) that will publish anything. It will be nice to see scientific research open up in the next decade or two.
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I think copyright protection / discussions for music and movies will be less relevant in the future because of, as innerspacecowboy points out, the rising popularity of streaming services like Spotify, Google Music or Netflix. I believe such services will outcompete the "need" for copyright piracy.
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Certainly on-topic, I'm proud to share my first published article as a music journalist for Queens Free Press in NYC! The article is live on their website and will appear in print as well. And I'm already at work on a follow up piece.
CHECK IT OUT! Pirates to the Rescue: Giving the Listening Public What Commercial Services Will Not https://imgur.com/A86MUrt.jpg Jon Aslund |
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This is a topic I am interested in, although I'm not feeling particularly wordy at the moment. |
i download **** and use adblock
and i feel no remorse |
Here is an example of where you can go wrong with copyright.
Darude's 1999 song "Sandstorm" resurfaced in 2014 as an Internet meme. It's all here in this article, including a video of the song: Darude - Sandstorm | Know Your Meme I have recreated the graph laid out in the article. Darude - "Sandstorm" Internet search popularity: http://i1383.photobucket.com/albums/...pskocystjb.jpg The article also states that the song was used in a number of videos before that in the late-2000s. Now, if the labels or the artist would have taken the steps to get all of those user uploads deleted, then a 15-year-old song would never have been able to regain popularity in this way. To put it a different way, that song sat dormant for 15 years and because people used it without permission, it actually served as a way to promote the song. In other words, free publicity and free word of mouth (one of the oldest forms of publicity in the world). This is why I think copyright is wrongheaded in some cases. Darude states that he was "weirded out" by the meme's popularity, but I don't get why, other than being annoyed at requests to play "Sandstorm." It helped him out and brought his song to a younger generation. If those user uploads had been quashed, as they so often do, it would have only served to keep the song in obscurity. In this situation, this is not the same as someone stealing music and claiming they created it. If someone posts a song they didn't create, but says who made it and the song title, then I know exactly who made it and the song title. When the song gets deleted for copyright, then I don't know who made it, nor do I know the title of the song...because it doesn't exist. Another example would be Taylor Swift. She pulled her music from Spotify because she didn't think the royalties were high enough on that service. Her right to do so, but IMO, artists like her, and their labels as well, don't consider the fact that they're destroying their ability to have name recognition, which really isn't something you can put a price on. For example, a user in Thailand might have never heard of Taylor Swift before using Spotify. Now they do and can then go and buy her albums. Now she's gone from Spotify, and the user in Thailand will never hear of her because she simply isn't there (in the service) to be discovered. ------- A major issue for me is with sports broadcasting and blackout rules. I have given up and now they don't exist to me. I'm not die hard enough to find ways to get this content. It works because the leagues get their money upfront from the cable networks. But how much are they losing out in other areas (name recognition, merchandise, etc.) because they don't exist to people who have no access to said content? |
imo:
Something like what happened to Darude is not something you want to hold your breath for. And Taylor Swift is Taylor ****ing Swift. |
Darude sucked balls 15 years ago and now it's popular again?
Euuchhh .. Rick Astley I could understand 'cause it was a bit of a joke, but how does that become a meme? |
Relevant article: Pulsewidth: Tidal Takedown
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