100 Years of Change Adversity
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Ars.Technica has a fantastic article up titled “100 years of Big Content fearing technology—in its own words“.
The article basically touches over most major technological advances over the last centry, and digs up what “Big Content” had to say about it at the time. Big Content being Music, Film and Print industries.
Such business-busters as the Xerox machine:
“the day may not be far off when no one need purchase books”
The VCR:
We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine.
And of course, MP3:
We’ve come full circle here, as this is the inverse of Sousa; a new technology won’t eliminate the amateurs, it will eliminate all the professionals and leave nothing but amateurs.
Of course, this seems all too familiar. The roadblocks and excuses being thrown up today are the same that were spun up all those years ago, those which failed to come to fruition. The same things are being threatened – the death of industries, the loss of jobs and the destruction of dreams.
However, what can be said of all of these advances is that they caused change. They caused a reshuffle of the industry in question, but eventually everything settled down again to get back to what they were doing: making money. In fact, if I remember correctly, most content industries are in boom, some making more money than they ever had (with the exception of newspapers, but I feel they’re the author of their own demise).
So “Big Content” is quite comfortable where it is, thank you very much, and is apparently quite happy to fight tooth and nail against anything that may cause change. The problem is, these industries have a lot of teeth and too many nails. We have the huge lobby groups, the MP/RIAA and the very prominent spokespeople with their voice in the ear of our politicians.
This is why so many people keep an eye on the laws being passed in our names, on behalf of these industries. We need to watch whats going on in the fields of Copyright and Intellectual Property (don’t even get me started about software patents) before we regulate ourselves out of evolution.
