Digital rights, digital wrongs, newspaper science, and hardback socializing. Just another four short links:
- Twitter Mistrial -- this isn't a calamity for justice, we're just able to do something we couldn't do before (were there many jurors running pamphlets off on their printing presses in the old days?) so we need to figure out whether we want it or not.
- UK Government Outlines Digital Rights Agency -- a strawman proposal for a rights agency to mediate between producers and consumers. The conservative in me bucks at market intervention, but I find it hard to argue with the problem statement: Consumers are no longer prepared to be told when and where they can access the content that they want. They do not see why a TV show that is airing in the US should not be available in the UK. They are not willing to wait to see a film at home until several months after it has passed through the cinemas. They don't accept the logic that says that if you have bought a CD you cannot then copy that music onto your iPod. And of course with digital content perfect copies can be made with very little time and at virtually no cost.
- With a Newspaper Gone, Who's the Watchdog and Where Do Advertisers Go? (Julie Starr) -- roundup of people treating the closure of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, which leaves the town print-free for news, as a science experiment: if local councils really become unaccountable when local papers cease to investigate them, I’d expect to see a big increase in the value of positions of financial authority at local government level. Those positions will suddenly become a lot more valuable if no-one is watching the purse-strings all that carefully, so more candidates will want them and those candidates will spend more to win them.
- The Tweetbook -- two years of tweets as a hardcover book. Fascinating to see the ephemeral preserved in print, although in general I wonder about the wisdom of trading ephemeral for eternal. (via Waxy)
Comments: 4
Nina Simon [23 March 2009 09:47 AM]
I recently saw this book in an airport. I thought it was about Twitter, but apparently there is still a mainstream audience that associates the word "tweets" with something else... Made me laugh at my myopic self.
Francis [23 March 2009 05:07 PM]
Re: #2
I would not call it market intervention, its about ensuring that there is a level playing field and freedom of choice for the consumer and producer.
Perhaps if you stopped thinking of yourself as a conservative or liberal or socialist or any such "tag", you would decide on the merit of the suggestion and the issue it is addressing. Left or rightwing is dead :-)
Tyler [30 March 2009 11:50 AM]
Just a small point, but there is another paper in Seattle, the Seattle Times. The cancellation of the PI doesn't exactly leave us with no news coverage, not to mention the smaller, free newspapers (The Stranger, Seattle Weekly, Eat the State) which also cover local news.
William [28 November 2011 10:09 AM]
@jeff, check out his other post