Slashdot | Sony CEO Proposes “Guardrails For the Internet”
Micheal Lynton, the guy who said ‘I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.’ has posted an editorial at the Huffington Post titled Guardrails for the Internet, in which he defends his comment, and suggests that just as the interstate system needs guardrails, so too does the information superhighway. The following is pretty indicative of the article: ‘Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it, and those of us in the entertainment business want to meet that kind of demand as efficiently and effectively as possible. But what has happened online is that if it is ‘beyond store hours’ and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want. Freedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don’t figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.’
What we’re seeing here are the death throes of an industry that refuses to change.
There is money to be made out there… Tremendous opportunities to forge ahead… But these old industries are too set in their ways to recognize the possibilities.
Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it, and those of us in the entertainment business want to meet that kind of demand as efficiently and effectively as possible. But what has happened online is that if it is ‘beyond store hours’ and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want.
This quote, right here, illustrates the fundamental difference between success and failure.
On the Internet there’s no reason to have store hours. It’s all code. It’s all database-driven, dynamically-generated, streaming… It’s all available 24/7 with minimal human intervention.
I understand that he’s using the ‘beyond store hours’ thing as a metaphor… That he doesn’t actually mean that a web store would be closed. Rather, what he means is that people want to do things that the media companies don’t want them to. They want to make copies of their movies and music… Share it with their friends… Use it to make a mixtape… Whatever.
This guy views sharing a song with your friends or copying it to your iPod as no different than breaking a store’s windows and stealing a CD.
But we aren’t talking about physical goods anymore. We aren’t talking about a CD or a DVD. When I buy a song on-line I haven’t somehow depleted a virtual warehouse – I’ve made a perfect copy of it. You only store a single copy of that song, and you can sell it billions of times. And if I don’t buy the song, if I pirate it, I still haven’t depleted a virtual warehouse. You’ve still got your single copy, and you can still sell it billions of times.
The problem is that these days it is hard to charge people a lot for pure data. Just a song, or just a movie, or just a piece of software doesn’t get you too far. Sure, people will pay for it if the price is right… But if the price is wrong it is easier just to pirate the thing. And if that’s all you’ve got – pure data – then you can pirate the whole thing very easily.
But if you sell your CD/DVD with a neat case and some photographs you can turn it into a collector’s item. And folks will happily pay – not for the data, but for all the extra goodies.
And if you sell your software with an on-line community, or kick-ass technical support people will happily pay.
The problem is that, for the last several decades, distribution has been hard. It has been difficult to get the data from one point to another. Unless you had very expensive equipment making a copy resulted in some kind of degredation. You had to warehouse hundreds of copies and sell physical items instead of the data store on them.
This meant that you had to either pay what the media companies wanted for their data, or put up with a substandard copy.
The Internet has democratized the distribution of data. You don’t have to store your data on a CD, or a DVD, or a tape, or a disk. You don’t need to ship crates across the country. You don’t need to stock store shelves. You can just keep the data on a server somewhere and transmit it across the Internet. And pretty much anyone can do that.
I can do that. You can do that. My parents can do that. The media companies can do that. But they don’t want to compete on this level playing field.
They’d much rather go back to selling just the data – no extras, no frills. They’d much rather go back to charging whatever they want, and forcing people to pay it, because there’s no other way to get the data.
…and liberty for some
