<nettime> Copyright Scene

[Matt Smith <matt@mail.fl.aec.at>]

hi


i just want to vent about those recent postings on scary new copy"right"
enforcement.

after you peel away all the fuzzy market/tech talk about whats sinking the
New Economy the fact remains that there _still_ is nobody out there making
serious coin except for pornographers.
combine this with a bummed out stockmarket & CEOs with payments to make on
their porsches (or shareholders on theirs) and one sees who is starting to
panic...but the scary part is that it is these people IBM, Matsushita and
Intel are now offering a way out - or taking over from, which ever way u
want to see it.

after reading about this it seems completely clear to me what is
happening: the pressure to make money has hit home with all the vaporware
producers and startups, either they die or get return on their investment.
the harsh reality is that the fibre has been laid, the satellites
launched, Cisco been catupulted to the top (we will see what they do...)
of the junkpile with real money from real people - including everybody on
this list. i feel stupid for not being aware of this yesterday - now seems
to be the last bloom of freaky technology, the big playground is going to
be shutdown for everybody who doesnt pay their licensing fee to the
Allmighty Masters of the Keys - the entities controlling standards of
technology, its development and implementation. These entities are the
ones who are fighting a winning war (it seems now atleast) against
contrary movements, such as open source or free codecs. and they feel this
is just, since they are the ones who are spending the BIG money on the
infrastructure we all use - even though it was US/WE, the common nerd
buying their buggy products all along, and more recently also non-nerds,
real people, who gave them that exact money they are now using to fuck us
over!

This shit is heading down the same path as telefone, then radio and
television went - the cost of providing content or infrastructure to these
networks was legislated and monopolized into realms only accessible to
conglomerations of investment. the beautiful Brian Eno quote from one of
the early Wired mags "One day the television guide will be our fonebook"
may never come true afterall, there will be the nerds and their
homebrew nets made with obsolete technology and there will be the "masses"
with the entertainment/enslavement appliances hooked into the swirling
black fibre feeding them the essentials to live within the walls of
the World Wide Gated Community, happily microtransacting ever after.

fuck that, its time for everybody seriously interested in preserving
atleast a trace of what we were dreaming the net could be, to look into
some real activism (including my slack self)  - its probably
futile anyways, but so what, personally, in light of these developments,
have nothing to lose anymore - i will be out of work as a techy/designer
for cultural projects mainly, as these people wont  be doing anything
online anymore if they cannot afford to buy a key, maintain its licence
and pay for distribution. basically the same stuff (marginalisation/no
access to mainstream media etc)  everybody in culture/art world has been
bitchin about for the last 2500 years.

phew, thanks for letting me unload some bile.
matt


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