Going after Pirate Bay for sharing BitTorrent files that refer users to copyright-infringing files is akin to going after the Yellow Pages for publishing the phone number to a restaurant owned by the mob. They are both nothing more than technologies that can be used either legally or illegally.
Everything any of us does online involves file-sharing. By sending an email, you’re creating a file and sharing it with the recipient. By surfing to a web page, the file that marks up that web page is being shared with you; the JPG and GIF files on that page are being shared with you. By viewing a video on YouTube, a Flash video file is being shared with you. The code of this web page now exists both on the computer that holds this website AND on your computer AND, unless they’ve all cleared their caches, on the computers of every other person who has read this web page.
The Internet was borne out of Arpanet, a Cold War system for information redundancy during the event of a nuclear attack. The Internet IS file-sharing.
Copyright is nothing more than a social agreement about who has control over the supply of an item. Because media conglomerates – studios, record labels, etc. – have in the past relied wholly upon supply control to achieve their goals (X copies going to Y outlets in Z territories) and are stuck in that archaic mindset, they are having difficulties with this new medium which exists solely through a lack of supply control.
The only thing media conglomerates have going for them is deep pockets, but all the cash in the world won’t make an iota of difference when you’re going up against the very essence of the medium itself.
As soon as the media conglomerates picked up their swords, they lost their battle. And somewhere Sun Tzu thought to himself, “Told you so.”
I think it’s possible to let your problems work for you. They can affect how you tell a story, but any story can be told any way.
The simplest possible method to tell the story is for you yourself to deliver the story directly to camera. And there’s even different ways of doing that – video/film diary, home video/movies, various styles of news report, documentary/mockumentary, etc.
That’s the simplest. Everything else is an expansion of that.
140 dead so far in terror attacks in Mumbai… I’m listening to BBC news. And a reporter on the ground in Mumbai quoted some lady as saying, “Only God can help our country now.”
So I’ve got 2 problems with that.
First – I’ve heard this sort of blurt of trauma before, over and over again, every time one of these conflagrations occur. And you know what? Maybe not only God can help your country. Maybe you can help your country. Maybe you can help the entire world. Maybe you can be the change you want in the world. Does that sound familiar to you? Click here if it doesn’t.
Second – the BBC reporter who allowed this shocked woman’s fear-mongering statement to perpetuate needs to have her ass fired. This is the sort of theological shirking of societal responsibility that allows criminals to go in and murder 140 people (thus far).
I’d like you to consider the possibility that there are no “instruments of God”. I’d like you to consider the possibility that whatever deity you follow does not “control” you. Perhaps whatever omnipotence in which you believe is just that – omnipotent. If it needs to control you or use you as an instrument, that doesn’t really sound very omnipotent. Actually sounds kinda desperate.
