Tag: jaron lanier

Essential Reading on the Internet’s Emerging Exploitation Economy.

We write a lot about the issues facing creators, but we’re only just the first to be effected by the Exploitation Economy.

Uber and the Lawlessness of ‘Sharing Economy’ Corporates | The Guardian

It’s not only about musicians and creators, we are just the first to be effected.  The same Silicon Valley scam is going to exploit more and more people. Read on…

“Nullification is a wilful flouting of regulation, based on some nebulous idea of a higher good only scofflaws can deliver. It can be an invitation to escalate a conflict, of course, as Arkansas governor Orville Faubus did in 1957 when he refused to desegregate public schools and president Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the law. But when companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and Google engage in a nullification effort, it’s a libertarian-inspired attempt to establish their services as popular well before regulators can get around to confronting them. Then, when officials push back, they can appeal to their consumer-following to push regulators to surrender.”

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE GUARDIAN:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/28/uber-lawlessness-sharing-economy-corporates-airbnb-google

 

Stop calling it the “Sharing Economy.” That isn’t what it is. | Olivier Blanchard

What it is, is the Exploitation Economy…

“Disruption rocks though!”

No, it doesn’t. The right kind of disruption rocks. The kind that has value, that solves a problem, that improves an imperfect system. But disruption for the sake of disruption is just noise. It can even be destructive, and that doesn’t rock. It doesn’t rock at all.

Because Apple was “disruptive,” anything deemed disruptive now somehow borrows from Apple’s cachet. “Disruption” has become another meaningless buzzword appropriated by overzealous cheerleaders of the entrepreneurial clique they aspire to someday belong to. And look… every once in a while, someone does come up with a really cool and radical game-changing idea: Vaccines, the motorcar, radio, television, HBO, the internet, laptops, smart phones, Netflix, carbon fiber bicycles, drought-resistant corn, overpriced laptops that don’t burn your thighs in crowded coffee shops… Most of the time though, “disruption” isn’t that. It’s a mirage. It’s a case of The Emperor’s New Clothes, episode twenty-seven thousand, and the same army of early first-adopter fanboys that also claimed that Google Plus and Quora and Jelly were going to revolutionize everything have now jumped on the next desperate bandwagon. What will it be next week? Your guess is as good as mine.”

READ THE FULL POST AT OLIVIER BLANCHARD:
http://olivierblanchard.net/stop-calling-it-the-sharing-economy-that-isnt-what-it-is/

 

The Crowdsourcing Scam | The Baffler

It’s all the same Silicon Valley scam. Whether you are a musician or a cab driver, this about labor, and you could be next…

Silicon Valley calls this arrangement “crowdsourcing,” a label that’s been extended to include contests, online volunteerism, fundraising, and more. Crowdsourced work is supposed to be a new, more casual, and more liberating form of work, but it is anything but. When companies use the word “crowdsourcing”—a coinage that suggests voluntary democratic participation—they are performing a neat ideological inversion.

The kind of tentative employment that we might have scoffed at a decade or two ago, in which individuals provide intellectual labor to a corporation for free or for sub-market wages, has been gussied up with the trappings of technological sophistication, populist appeal, and, in rare cases, the possibility of viral fame.

But in reality, this labor regime is just another variation on the age-old practice of exploiting ordinary workers and restructuring industrial relations to benefit large corporations and owners of the platforms serving them. The lies and rhetorical obfuscations of crowdsourcing have helped tech companies devalue work, and a long-term, reasonably secure, decently paying job has increasingly become a MacGuffin—something we ardently chase after but will likely never capture, since it’s there only to distract us from the main action of the script.

READ THE FULL POST AT THE BAFFLER:
http://thebaffler.com/salvos/crowdsourcing-scam

 

Silicon Valley Is Not a Force for Good | The Atlantic

We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water, what we need is fair and ethical businesses.

It’s been a long journey from Google to Snapchat—or to apps that enable drivers to auction off the public street-parking spot they’re about to leave in San Francisco. With a few exceptions, the Valley’s innovations have become smaller, and smaller-minded. Many turn on concepts (network effects, regulatory arbitrage, price discrimination) that economists would say are double-edged, if not pernicious. And while the Web was touted as a great democratizing force, recent tech innovations have created lots of profits at the top of the ladder and lots of job losses lower down. The tech sector itself has proved disappointing as a jobs engine and at times hostile to women.

READ THE FULL POST AT THE ATLANTIC:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/silicon-valley-shrinking-vision/395309/

 

Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class | Salon

Jaron Lanier was the first to identify and speak about this issue. We’re glad to see others catching up to him. Here’s a refresher…

“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”

“Future” also looks at the way the creative class – especially musicians, journalists and photographers — has borne the brunt of disruptive technology.

READ THE FULL STORY AT SALON:
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/jaron_lanier_the_internet_destroyed_the_middle_class/

 

 

Sleeping Through a Revolution | Jonathan Taplin @ USC

This presentation by Jonathan Taplin at the Annenberg Innovation Lab breaks it all down. Required Viewing.

 

by Trichordist Editor

Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class | Salon

Jaron Lanier was the first to identify and speak about this issue. We’re glad to see others catching up to him. Here’s a refresher…

“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”

“Future” also looks at the way the creative class – especially musicians, journalists and photographers — has borne the brunt of disruptive technology.

READ THE FULL STORY AT SALON:
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/jaron_lanier_the_internet_destroyed_the_middle_class/

by Trichordist Editor

The Future Of Music According to Gene Simmons and Jaron Lanier…

Gene Simmons may not be the most sympathetic figure in conversations about artists rights in the digital age but there is something to be said when he and Jaron Lanier make essentially the same observations about the future of music and artist revenue streams.

Simmons is quoted in a new interview in Esquire Magazine, “Rock Is Finally Dead”:

“The masses do not recognize file-sharing and downloading as stealing because there’s a copy left behind for you — it’s not that copy that’s the problem, it’s the other one that someone received but didn’t pay for. The problem is that nobody will pay you for the 10,000 hours you put in to create what you created. I can only imagine the frustration of all that work, and having no one value it enough to pay you for it.

It’s very sad for new bands. My heart goes out to them. They just don’t have a chance. If you play guitar, it’s almost impossible. You’re better off not even learning how to play guitar or write songs, and just singing in the shower and auditioning for The X Factor. And I’m not slamming The X Factor, or pop singers. But where’s the next Bob Dylan? Where’s the next Beatles? Where are the songwriters? Where are the creators? Many of them now have to work behind the scenes, to prop up pop acts and write their stuff for them.”

Simmons goes on to state that music and culture have stagnated.  He asks what great bands and artists have emerged in the post internet era?

Jaron Lanier made essentially the same observation back in 2010 in an interview with The New York Times, “The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion.“

“…authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.

It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump,” Mr. Lanier writes. Or, to use another of his grim metaphors: “Creative people — the new peasants — come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert.”

It speaks volumes when two people of such different backgrounds and perspectives make the same observation.

by Trichordist Editor

Jaron Lanier on Internet and middle class: “We have screwed things up” | Salon

Salon Q&A: Tech visionary Jaron Lanier on Thomas Piketty, Jeff Bezos and Amazon, how to save the creative class

His latest book, published in the U.S. last May, covers an enormous amount of ground in what’s often a personal and eccentric style. “Who Owns the Future?” describes in especially stark terms the Internet’s false promise to artists – “trinkets tossed into the crowd spread illusions and false hopes” — and the larger creative class. “The clamor for online attention only turns into money for a token minority of ordinary people, but there is another new, tiny class of people who always benefit,” he writes on the book’s opening page. “Those who keep the new ledgers, the giant computing services that model you, spy on you, and predict your actions, turn your life activities into the greatest fortunes in history.”

The book received mostly positive reviews, though some objected to his proposed solution – that citizens be reimbursed with micro-payments whenever their personal information led to the generation of revenue. Since people’s Facebook preferences help companies sell, for instance, and the work of human translators provide the basis for online translation programs, these people should be compensated: “A new kind of middle class, and a more genuine, growing information economy, could come about if we could break out of the ‘free information’ idea and into a universal micro-payment system.”

We spoke to the Berkeley-based Lanier about “Who Owns the Future?,” the explosion of surveillance, Amazon’s policies, Kickstarter and his role as a critic both inside and outside the beast.

READ THE INTERVIEW AT SALON:
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/jaron_lanier_on_internet_and_middle_class_we_have_screwed_things_up/

by Trichordist Editor

How the Internet is Killing Innovation | Venture Beat

It appears that Jaron Lanier is not the only one who is coming to terms with the broken promises of internet hype.

I believed the same lies that you still believe, for a long time. I was in college during the early days of the World Wide Web, and like others, I rejoiced in the incredible access to knowledge it provided, and diversity of thought it promoted. So when I first read in 2008 about how the Internet had a negative impact by narrowing modern scholarship, I didn’t believe it. The Internet was great, and was making us more productive, more creative, and more innovative. That’s what we were promised.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE:
http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/14/how-the-internet-is-killing-innovation/

by trichordist

“Google & The World Brain” Airing Now on Al Jazeera America

This may be the single most important piece of work to date that explores the rights and concerns of creators in the digital age. The film details how Google has made plans to commercially monetize and monopolize all creative works for their own corporate profit.

FIND CHANNEL AND AIRTIME:
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/2013/8/trailer-for-googleandtheworldbrain.html

MORE ABOUT THE FILM:
http://www.worldbrainthefilm.com/

The goal of accumulating all human knowledge in one repository has been a dream since ancient times. Only recently, however, has that dream become a reality. Quietly and behind closed doors, Google has been executing a project to scan and digitize every printed word on the planet. Working with the world’s most prestigious libraries, the webmasters are reinventing the limits of copyright in the name of free access to anyone, anywhere. What can possibly be wrong with this? As “Google and the World Brain reveals,” a whole lot.

Some argue that Google’s actions represent aggressive theft on an enormous scale, others see them as an attempt to monopolize our shared cultural heritage, and still others view the project as an attempt to flatten our minds by consolidating complex ideas into searchable “extra long tweets.”

At first slowly, and then with intensifying conviction, a diverse coalition mobilizes to stop the fulfillment of this ambitious dream. Incisive and riveting as it uncovers a high-stakes multinational heist, Ben Lewis’s film voices an important alternative to the technological utopianism of our time.

by trichordist

Fixing the Digital Economy by Jaron Lanier | The New York Times

Insightful commentary in the New York Times from Technologist, Inventor, Author Jaron Lanier. Both of Jaron Lanier’s books are recommended on the Trichordist Bookshelf.

TWO big trends in the world appear to contradict each other.

On the one hand, computer networks are said to be disrupting centralized power of all kinds and giving it to the individual. Customers can bring corporations to their knees by tweeting complaints. A tiny organization like WikiLeaks can alarm the great powers with nothing but encryption and net access. Young Egyptians can organize a nearly instant revolution with their mobile phones and the Internet.

But then there’s the other trend. Inequality is soaring in rich countries around the world, not just the United States. Money from the top 1 percent has flooded our politics. The job market in America has been hollowed out; unpaid internships are common and “entry-level” jobs seem to last a lifetime, while technical and management posts become ever more lucrative. The individual appears to be powerless in the face of tough prospects.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE NEW YORK TIMES HERE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/fixing-the-digital-economy.html

by trichordist

Trichordist Bookshelf – Essential Reading for Artists Rights

“WHO OWNS THE FUTURE” by JARON LANIER – BUY AT AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/Who-Owns-Future-Jaron-Lanier/dp/1451654960/

The Dazzling New Masterwork from the Prophet of Silicon Valley

Jaron Lanier is the bestselling author of You Are Not a Gadget, the father of virtual reality, and one of the most influential thinkers of our time. For decades, Lanier has drawn on his expertise and experience as a computer scientist, musician, and digital media pioneer to predict the revolutionary ways in which technology is transforming our culture.

Who Owns the Future? is a visionary reckoning with the effects network technologies have had on our economy. Lanier asserts that the rise of digital networks led our economy into recession and decimated the middle class. Now, as technology flattens more and more industries—from media to medicine to manufacturing—we are facing even greater challenges to employment and personal wealth.

But there is an alternative to allowing technology to own our future. In this ambitious and deeply humane book, Lanier charts the path toward a new information economy that will stabilize the middle class and allow it to grow. It is time for ordinary people to be rewarded for what they do and share on the web.

Insightful, original, and provocative, Who Owns the Future? is necessary reading for everyone who lives a part of their lives online.

“FREELOADING” by CHRIS RUEN – BUY AT AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/Freeloading-Insatiable-Content-Starves-Creativity/dp/1935928996

“A wonderful book that catches an encouraging shift in the zeitgeist. Ruen’s epiphany regarding the effects of his own piracy and freeloading of the bands he loves was eye opening.” – David Byrne

“Fascinating.” – The Village Voice

“The original slacker’s dream of free everything may have been realized by the Internet-but along with it came the slacker’s nightmare of never getting paid for one’s creativity. Freeloading seeks-and to a large extent succeeds-to wrestle with the collapse of the commons and the possibilities for a renewed social contract.” – Douglas Rushkoff

“Brooklyn’s Chris Ruen is one of the most compelling and forward thinking critics of our current download culture.” – M3 Music Conference, Netherlands

“A book…that promises to contribute greatly to copyright debates.” – Terry Hart, Copyhype

Author Chris Ruen, himself a former dedicated freeloader, came to understand how illegal downloads can threaten an entire artistic community after spending time with successful Brooklyn bands who had yet to make a significant profit on their popular music. The product of innumerable late-night, caffeine-fueled conversations and interviews with contemporary musicians such as Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, Ira Wolf Tuton of Yeasayer, and Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio, Freeloading not only dissects this ongoing battle-casting a critical eye on the famous SOPA protests and the attendant rhetoric-but proposes concise, practical solutions that would provide protection to artists and consumers alike.

“FREE RIDE” by ROBERT LEVINE – BUY AT AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Ride-Parasites-Destroying-Business/dp/0307739775

“A book that should change the debate about the future of culture….With this stylishly written and well-reported manifesto, Levine has become a leading voice on one side of our most hotly contested debate involving law and technology.”
—Jeffrey Rosen, The New York Times Book Review

“Turbo-reported….Free Ride is a timely and impressive book–part guilt trip, part wake-up call, and full of the kind of reporting that could only have been done with a book advance from an Old Media company.”
—Businessweek

“[A] smart, caustic tour of the modern culture industry.”
—Fortune

“Brilliant…A crash course in the existential problems facing the [media].”
—Richard Morrison, The Times

“The most convincing defense of the current predicament of the creative industries that I have read.”
—James Crabtree, Financial Times

“With penetrating analysis and insight, Levine, a former executive editor of Billboard magazine, dissects the current economic climate of the struggling American media companies caught in the powerful fiscal grip of the digital industry…. This incisive book is a start at an informed dialogue.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Can the culture business survive the digital age? That’s the burning question Robert Levine poses in his provocative new book. And his answer is one that will get your blood boiling. Rich with revealing stories and telling tales, Free Ride makes a lucid case that information is actually expensive – and that it’s only the big technology firms profiting most from the work of others that demand information be free.”
—Gary Rivlin, author of Broke, USA

“One of the great issues of the digital age is how people who create content will be able to make a living. Robert Levine’s timely and well-researched book provides a valuable look at how copyright protection was lost on the internet and offers suggestions about how it could be restored.”
—Walter Isaacson, President/CEO of the Aspen Institute and author of Benjamin Franklin

“This book thoroughly documents a wide-spread outbreak of cyber amnesia. Despite libertarian delusions, industries often get Free Rides, especially in their early days, but they eventually give back. Taxpayers build roads, then get hired to build cars. The Internet gives back a lot in exchange for its Free Ride, but one thing it defiantly isn’t giving back is a way for enough people to make a living. No matter how amusing or addictive the Internet becomes, its foundation will crumble unless it starts returning the favors it was given and still depends on.”
—Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget

“Free Ride is a brilliantly written book that exposes the dark side of the Internet. A must read for anyone interested in the horrific undermining of our intellectual culture.”
—Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood

“Robert Levine deftly dissects the self-serving Orwellian freedom-speak being served up by Silicon Valley’s digital new lords as they amass fortunes devaluing the work of artists, journalists and other old-fashioned ‘content creators.’ Free Ride begs us to remove our blinders and take a hard look down a cultural dead-end road.”
—Fred Goodman, author of Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis

“Without being a Luddite, Levine makes the phony digital media gurus of our day seem as simple-minded as their slogans.”
—Ron Rosenbaum, author of How the End Begins and Explaining Hitler

“YOU ARE NOT A GADGET” by JARON LANIER – BUY AT AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307389979

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A programmer, musician, and father of virtual reality technology, Jaron Lanier was a pioneer in digital media, and among the first to predict the revolutionary changes it would bring to our commerce and culture. Now, with the Web influencing virtually every aspect of our lives, he offers this provocative critique of how digital design is shaping society, for better and for worse.

Informed by Lanier’s experience and expertise as a computer scientist, You Are Not a Gadget discusses the technical and cultural problems that have unwittingly risen from programming choices—such as the nature of user identity—that were “locked-in” at the birth of digital media and considers what a future based on current design philosophies will bring. With the proliferation of social networks, cloud-based data storage systems, and Web 2.0 designs that elevate the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and wisdom of individuals, his message has never been more urgent.

by trichordist

Artists Rights Watch – Sunday Jan 6, 2013

Happy New Year! Grab the coffee!

Recent posts from The Trichordist:
* First USC-Annenberg Brand Supported Piracy Report and Google Response
* Trojan Horse: Orphan Works and the War on Authors by Brad Holland, Part 2
* Trojan Horse: Orphan Works and the War on Authors by Brad Holland, Part 3
* Trojan Horse: Orphan Works and the War on Authors by Brad Holland, Part 4
* What the FTC Should Know About Brand Sponsored Piracy and Google’s “Pinto Problem”

FROM AROUND THE WEB:

THE SMITHSONIAN :
* What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?

“I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.)

“Instead, it was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’

“And I realized this was a hopeless, stupid design of society and that it was our fault. It really hit on a personal level—this isn’t working. And I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point you just have to say there’s too much wrong with these experiments.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES:
* Copyright Rules and the Art They Inspire

PITCHFORK:
* The Year in News 2012

THE REGISTER UK:
* The ‘Digital Economy’ in 2012: A big noisy hole where money should be

“Privacy and copyright are two things nobody cares about,” Mark Bide told us, “unless it’s their own privacy, and their own copyright.” How true.”

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES:
* Report links Google, Yahoo to Internet piracy sites

COPYRIGHT ALLIANCE:
* Instagram Still Has the Right to Commercialize Your Work (or Why You Should Read Terms of Service Carefully)

CNET:
* Google, Yahoo accused of funding piracy

TECHCRUNCH:
* Keen On… Piracy: How Online Ad Networks Are Supporting The Major Pirate Movie And Music Sites [TCTV]

Annenberg’s Advertising Transparency Report should be seen as a wake-up call to brands to invest their advertising dollars in legal networks like Spotify or YouTube rather than pirate sites. Pretty simple, eh? Let’s hope that Madison Avenue wakes up to the troubling implications of Taplin’s report and shifts all its online advertising dollars to movie and music sites which actually pay artists for their content.

VOX INDIE:
* More Evidence Ad Dollars Fuel Web Piracy

HUFFINGTON POST:
* Towards a Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers

THE MUSICAL DISCONNECT:
* The Takedown-Why the DMCA has failed

AD LAND:
* David Lowery makes list of people who changed the music industry.
* Collateral Damage: How Free Culture destroys advertising.

STOP FILE LOCKERS:
* Crocko.com lose Paypal. Resellers to follow.
* UltraMegaBit: A Crime Committed on American Soil
* Avangate forced to drop file sharing sites. More sites poised to lose Avangate payment processing.

DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
* Abject Looting Continues at Pandora…
* In France, 92% of Pirates Never Receive a Second Warning Letter…
* Growth of Paid Downloads vs. Streaming, 2012 vs. 2011…

TORRENT FREAK:
* Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2013
* Music Biz Wants To Block Pirate Bay….Plus 260 Additional Sites
* IMAGiNE BitTorrent Group Leader Sentenced To Five Years in Prison
* Identifying Pirates Now Easier Following Swedish Supreme Court Decisions

COPYHYPE:
* A look ahead to 2013

BARRY SOOKMAN:
* Most popular intellectual property and technology law blogs

by Trichordist Editor

The Trichordist Random Reader Weekly News & Links Sun Jun 17

Grab the Coffee!

This past weeks posts on The Trichordist:
* The Wall Of Shame Continues…
* CopyLike.Org – Pay Creators Like You Pay Everyone Else
* FarePlay.Org – An Open Letter
* Launch & Iterate, Google’s Permissionless Innovation
* Google Launches “Hot Trends”, The Pirate Bay Tops News Items…
* Artists Deserve To Be Compensated For Their Work by Mark Isham (Guest Post)

The biggest story of the week is no doubt the Pro-Creator/Copyright win in the court of public opinion which has the pro-piracy crowd tongue tied. Oatmeal Versus FunnyJunk is no doubt a case study for creators when looking at the illegal exploitation of their work. We applaud Matt Inman for turning the tables on those illegally exploiting his work in such a profound way. There’s much to be found on the Web this week about this story, and it deserves it’s own in depth post, until then this brief overview from Copyhype is our favorite:
http://www.copyhype.com/2012/06/oatmeal-v-funnyjunk-a-brief-observation/

21 Cents per stream? We’re watching this one with interest. New music streaming service Arena says, “101 Distribution has announced the launch of 101 Arena, the first and only free streaming music service to pay 100 percent of all advertising revenue generated directly to artists and film makers.” To put this in perspective, Spotify is only paying out .005 Cents per Stream according to most published accounts. More info at this link from PR Newswire:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/next-generation-streaming-app-puts-focus-on-artist-profit-148672305.html

Independent film distributor Kathy Wolf has launched a legal and legitimate online movie distribution and sharing platform. We’re always excited to see new models evolve that respond to the marketplace while respecting creators rights. The Huffington Post Reports:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-wolfe/movie-file-sharing-goes-l_b_1575233.html
http://wolfeondemand.muvies.com/

Here’s a fun little post we found from Moses Avalon this week following a panel at the Music and Entertainment Industry Educators Association Summit. Nice plugs for both Robert Levine’s “Free Ride” and David Lowery’s “New Boss / Old Boss”. More here on the StumbleUpon Blog of Moses Avalon:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/18AuPZ/mosesavalon.com/free-ride/

There is a lot of debate over how search engines operate, including the filtering and ranking of search returns. The way search engines operate is suggested to effect everything from consumer choices to the aiding in the illegal exploitation of copyrighted works, SearchEngineLand.Com reports:
http://searchengineland.com/a-letter-to-the-ftc-regarding-search-engine-disclosure-124169

Think Social Media is a game changer? Maybe… Digital Music News Reports 93% of Americans still listen to Broadcast Radio…
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120612radio#ipynIIM25jAuEyVZl53zA

Will Apple, Amazon and Google own .Love and .Music? Forbes is calling it the greatest land grab in history as tech and internet companies battle for the next generation of root level domain addresses.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/06/14/facebook-is-ignoring-the-greatest-internet-landgrab-in-history/

One of our favorite thinkers, Jaron Lanier gave a fantastic speech at the Personal Democracy Forum titled, “How to Not Create a New Cyber Plutocracy.” You can read more about Jaron and the Personal Democracy Forum at the link below, the YouTube video of his talk follows.
http://personaldemocracy.com/media/how-not-create-new-cyber-plutocracy

 

[ THE 101 ] [NEW BOSS / OLD BOSS ] [ SPOTIFY ] [GROOVESHARK ] [ LARRY LESSIG ]
[ JOHN PERRY BARLOW ] [ HUMAN RIGHTS OF ARTISTS ] [ INFRINGEMENT IS THEFT ]
[ THE SKY IS RISING : MAGIC BEAVER EDITION ] [SF GATE BLUNDERS PIRACY FACTS ]
[ WHY ARENT MORE MUSICIANS WORKING ] [ ARTISTS FOR AN ETHICAL INTERNET ]

by trichordist