Hi Mark,

What I find both fascinating and mind-boggling is that "Big Media" hasn't learned anything from the software development industry, which went through this same process about ten years ago.

Just over ten years ago, the US patent office, almost accidentally began granting patents for software. The immediate result was a large rush to the patent office, and years of patent-infringement litigation. Costs for software development skyrocketed, because now software development companies had to figure in all their legal costs for filing patents and defending against lawsuits over and above all the costs for programmers and hardware. Software development slowed to a crawl, and many small, innovative companies disappeared. Only large companies could afford the legal costs, and they were very conservative about development.

Now, ten years later, commercial software development is pretty much dead - only video game development has any real activity (even Google, arguably the most innovative IT company in the US right now doesn't offer software products so much as software services). Pretty much all the innovation happening in software right now is in Open Source, General Purpose License software - the IT equivalent of Creative Commons copyright.

I strongly suspect that Big Media will follow the same pattern. The more they try to lock down access to their IP, the higher they will make the costs, the more conservative they will be about production, and the more irrelevant they will become. Which will drive the innovative, engaging producers of cultural products to Creative Commons, and Big Media will eventually become as non-existant as the Big Software Companies.

This has already happened to newspapers. They just haven't admitted it, yet.

This is maybe the most optimistic feedback on this topic I've fielded yet. Thanks! It certainly adds support to the sense I share with you about Big Media's future diminishment in pop culture. (I'm not ready to declare its "irrelevance" yet though.)

One question I'd have is whether the pressure is really off software developers? I keep hearing about this on the peripheries of copyfight debates right now. (Efforts to "enclose the commons" of opensource, and so on.)

"...most optomistic?" Really? And here I thought I was being kind of cynical...

No, the pressure isn't off software developers yet. My husband was telling me today (he's a software development guy, in the MScIS program here at AU) that Sun Microsystems and their Java IP was recently bought up by Oracle, and they (with support from IBM) want to make it all commercial license, instead of Open Source. Java is a very significant Open Source environment, and that could have a very big negative impact on the whole movement. There's still a great deal of resistance from "traditional" IT people to the whole Open Source approach.

And yes, I wouldn't call Big Media irrelevant yet, either, but unless they change their approach significantly over the next years, they will become so. I loved Clay Shirky's bit in his blog where he says that when Rupert Murdoch says that consumers just have to used to the idea of paying for the content in order to get quality stuff, what he actually means is that Big Media has no idea how to produce without a very large budget, and likes to think that it isn't possible to create quality product without that big budget, even though there have been a great many small independant producers that have shown that it is possible...

Because in the end, Darwin was wrong about survival of the fittest - it's actually survival of the most adaptable. That's why the big, strong, fierce Bengal Tiger, top of it's food chain, is only not extinct because of the huge artificial input of conservationists, and the small, agile, highly adaptable fox is thriving to the point of being a pest, with absolutely no help from humans.

To extend the metaphor, ACTA and other provisions is very much like creating a wildlife sanctuary for Bengal Tigers (not that I'm opposed to conservation of tigers, just opposed to conservation of institutions, structures and companies that are going - and should be - extinct). It keeps them for going extinct in the short term, but the reality is that barring a huge extinction event among humans, tigers will never be the Lords of the Jungle they once were. Neither will the Big Media companies.

Ok, I'll get off my soap box now...

Hi Mark,

What I find both fascinating and mind-boggling is that "Big Media" hasn't learned anything from the software development industry, which went through this same process about ten years ago.

Just over ten years ago, the US patent office, almost accidentally began granting patents for software. The immediate result was a large rush to the patent office, and years of patent-infringement litigation. Costs for software development skyrocketed, because now software development companies had to figure in all their legal costs for filing patents and defending against lawsuits over and above all the costs for programmers and hardware. Software development slowed to a crawl, and many small, innovative companies disappeared. Only large companies could afford the legal costs, and they were very conservative about development.

Now, ten years later, commercial software development is pretty much dead - only video game development has any real activity (even Google, arguably the most innovative IT company in the US right now doesn't offer software products so much as software services). Pretty much all the innovation happening in software right now is in Open Source, General Purpose License software - the IT equivalent of Creative Commons copyright.

I strongly suspect that Big Media will follow the same pattern. The more they try to lock down access to their IP, the higher they will make the costs, the more conservative they will be about production, and the more irrelevant they will become. Which will drive the innovative, engaging producers of cultural products to Creative Commons, and Big Media will eventually become as non-existant as the Big Software Companies.

This has already happened to newspapers. They just haven't admitted it, yet.

This is maybe the most optimistic feedback on this topic I've fielded yet. Thanks! It certainly adds support to the sense I share with you about Big Media's future diminishment in pop culture. (I'm not ready to declare its "irrelevance" yet though.)

One question I'd have is whether the pressure is really off software developers? I keep hearing about this on the peripheries of copyfight debates right now. (Efforts to "enclose the commons" of opensource, and so on.)

"...most optomistic?" Really? And here I thought I was being kind of cynical...

No, the pressure isn't off software developers yet. My husband was telling me today (he's a software development guy, in the MScIS program here at AU) that Sun Microsystems and their Java IP was recently bought up by Oracle, and they (with support from IBM) want to make it all commercial license, instead of Open Source. Java is a very significant Open Source environment, and that could have a very big negative impact on the whole movement. There's still a great deal of resistance from "traditional" IT people to the whole Open Source approach.

And yes, I wouldn't call Big Media irrelevant yet, either, but unless they change their approach significantly over the next years, they will become so. I loved Clay Shirky's bit in his blog where he says that when Rupert Murdoch says that consumers just have to used to the idea of paying for the content in order to get quality stuff, what he actually means is that Big Media has no idea how to produce without a very large budget, and likes to think that it isn't possible to create quality product without that big budget, even though there have been a great many small independant producers that have shown that it is possible...

Because in the end, Darwin was wrong about survival of the fittest - it's actually survival of the most adaptable. That's why the big, strong, fierce Bengal Tiger, top of it's food chain, is only not extinct because of the huge artificial input of conservationists, and the small, agile, highly adaptable fox is thriving to the point of being a pest, with absolutely no help from humans.

To extend the metaphor, ACTA and other provisions is very much like creating a wildlife sanctuary for Bengal Tigers (not that I'm opposed to conservation of tigers, just opposed to conservation of institutions, structures and companies that are going - and should be - extinct). It keeps them for going extinct in the short term, but the reality is that barring a huge extinction event among humans, tigers will never be the Lords of the Jungle they once were. Neither will the Big Media companies.

Ok, I'll get off my soap box now...

Hi Mark,

This is a superb exemplar of the method for using the blog as a sounding board, pitting one daemon against the other to aid you with decision-making. It aids in clarifying issues, bracketing opposing perspectives, and invites the readers to join in your discussion, and watch for updates on the debate.

You have allowed yourself the chance to creatively present an internal debate; by externalizing it, the blog has given you a working draft for further iterations. The decision is a tentative one, awaiting further elaborations.

Your post has aided me with further formulating my ideas on identity construction processes, as your post is clearly a form of performance in which you role-play two opposing perspectives. You refer to the word vertiginous, and I find it is an apt adjective when using quaternity (the act of drawing ideas to a central focus, rather than forcing the ideas to have a beginning, middle, and end) for connective writing to engage in sense-making.

The issue you raise about publishing your work in blogs gives me food for thought.

I should credit Mary, Nancy, and Sandra--other TLSTN students (participants? delegates? instigators?)--with some of the ideas dramatized here. They led a useful discussion of the pros and cons of publishing research in progress.

Quaternity: good word, that.

Thanks for this; I sampled your first sample activity and became aware of Activity, which is a feature I hadn't known the Landing offers, and had been asking for (all of which leaves me feeling foolish, but pleased, at any rate, that the function's there).

In reply to: Sandra Law

I wonder if someone could come up with a Pissonnet using the term Pedablogy, possibly starting the pissonnet with the phrase "Pedablogy apps" or "blog apps".

Pissonnet Competition Site

http://www.amykitchenerfdn.org/pissonnet.html

The genre seems to require single-syllable words, so you'd have to stick with blog and scrap the polysyllabic pedablogy.

In reply to: Mark A. McCutcheon

Right, I did notice that but apparently forgot when I wrote my post.

In reply to: Sandra Law

I wonder if someone could come up with a Pissonnet using the term Pedablogy, possibly starting the pissonnet with the phrase "Pedablogy apps" or "blog apps".

Pissonnet Competition Site

http://www.amykitchenerfdn.org/pissonnet.html

The genre seems to require single-syllable words, so you'd have to stick with blog and scrap the polysyllabic pedablogy.

In reply to: Mark A. McCutcheon

Right, I did notice that but apparently forgot when I wrote my post.

In reply to: Sandra Law

I wonder if someone could come up with a Pissonnet using the term Pedablogy, possibly starting the pissonnet with the phrase "Pedablogy apps" or "blog apps".

Pissonnet Competition Site

http://www.amykitchenerfdn.org/pissonnet.html

The genre seems to require single-syllable words, so you'd have to stick with blog and scrap the polysyllabic pedablogy.

In reply to: Mark A. McCutcheon

Right, I did notice that but apparently forgot when I wrote my post.