More Digital Copyright Stuff

Who owns the network news?

My old pal George “Hotchner” Scriban uses the phrase “Big Content” on his blog, Blogaritaville. Dave Winer likes to bandy about his terms “BigCo” (Big Companies) and “BigPub” (Big Publishers).

Wanna know who these knobs are (by “these knobs” I mean Big Content, not George and Dave…usually)? If you have Acrobat Reader (or similar software that can read .PDF files), take a gander at PROMO’s (the PROject On Media Ownership) Who Owns the Network News map. You’ll be amazed at just how much is owned by just five companies: General Electric, AOL/Time Warner, News Corporation, Walt Disney (a.k.a. Big Mouse) and Viacom.

(I love it that GE has stakes in both the WWF and Polo Ralph Lauren Media. I wonder how often those two companies’ target markets overlap.)

Thanks to my friend and former co-worker George Purdy for pointing me to PROMO’s map.

Canadian hearings on digital copyright hit Toronto tomorrow!

Just got this news from my friend Paul Huggins at Yahoo:

Significant “Digital Copyright” legislation is currently in the public consultations phase.

This is the process: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp01100e.html

This is the consultation paper itself: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp01099e.html

This legislation will impact all of our lives on both the professional and the personal level. In the smaller sense by creating rules and regs. to control/define much of the legal (and not so legal) freedoms that we take for granted on the Internet.

In the larger sense it impacts us by formalizing a new balance between the interests and rights of creators vs. brokers vs. consumers of intellectual “property”.

If you want to say to your grand-kids, “I was there when they wrote that piece-of-junk || excellent bill”, you might want to attend these hearings.

The public hearings are being held in Toronto at the Holiday Inn on King Street tomorrow from 8:30am to 5pm. Registration is free — check here for the details.

A lesson from the commies

Cory at BoingBoing points to this Observer article “comparing the music-industry’s attempt to mandate copy-prevention and the Stalinist regime’s tight control on photocopiers”:

There is, however, one sobering statistic which may eventually cause even Congress to balk at the studios’ arrogance. US domestic spending on computing technology is running at $600 billion a year, while Hollywood generates a measly $35bn.

To concede the demand for copy protection would be tantamount to compelling a huge, dynamic industry to march to the soporific beat of a technophobic industry desperate to preserve its obsolete business models.

Well, I’ll be. For once, the adage “money talks, bullshit walks” works in the good guys’ favour.