Edgar Bronfman Jr., the head of Universal, the world's biggest music company, predicted in a speech in May that soon "a few clicks of your mouse will make it possible for you to summon every book ever written in any language, every movie ever made, every television show ever produced, and every piece of music ever recorded." In this vast intellectual commons nothing will ever again be out of print or impossible to find; every scrap of human culture transcribed, no matter how obscure or commercially unsuccessful, will be available to all.
It's 2015, 15 years later since that was said by Edgar Bronfman Jr. I find it interesting that we're still not there. It seems that it's getting harder to find out of print publications/books/records, especially if they were somewhat obscure or rare from the beginning.
I don't know why, but I would guess that it's because those works are drowning in the vast and seemingly endless supply of others works. That, combined with it not being digitalized and that the physical representation might have rotted away or on the verge of rotting away.
Ironically, Bronfman's vision is closest still only in the piracy world as legitimate licensing requires too much organizational buy-offs to ever be universal.
Interestingly, services like spotify could have only come about after pressure from piracy because the industry would never have conceded such control and monetary loss unless forced to.
Now comes the next wave: video which popcorntime will help force the path.
It's remarkable that progress can be achieved mostly through breaking regulation theses day - there's something these services have in common with uber and airbnb.
Of course piracy better solves the distribution problem, distribution is easy. Copyright helps solve the problem of artist compensation. That problem's hard but ask any artist* who isn't living off a trust fund and they'll tell you how important it is. If you skip the hard part by definition you've made things easier on yourself.
If the community of music listeners took better care of musicians then they wouldn't run to the arms of the music industry. Unfortunately music listeners want and expect free or near-free.
> It's remarkable that progress can be achieved mostly through breaking regulation theses day
Not to be offensive but I think it's completely uninteresting. Human decency has always slowed progress. Which empire obeyed the laws of the lands it invaded? Think of how our medical knowledge would progress if we abandoned all ethics, or how efficient our criminal justice system could be if we abandoned due process, how much oil we could drill or ore we could mine if we abandoned environmental regulations.
We don't do these things because local actors pursuing locally optimal solutions don't always benefit the group. In fact it's possible for the opposite to happen like in The Tragedy of the Commons.
IOW I dislike regulations too but they solve problems we don't have better solutions for.
*who you know well enough to ask personal questions
Even with more recent works, many copyright owners haven't uploaded their work to be online (digital, searchable, and shareable).This practice hinders academia also with journals insisting only to sell content and not share it.
If everyone agreed to a standard with a micro-payment protocol that would let anyone with content immediately expose it to sell it independent of platform or site, "everything a click away" may be in reach, but this protocol would have to be open. As long as walled gardens are competing, the gardens are all that is a click away, and since the gardens are selective with their content (as a consequence of being for-profit) all the old stuff will continue to have no place to stay. So we have a handful of copyright holders give their stuff away for free, but everything else disappears into the offline abyss.
The future I envision will be "composer + protocol ==> consumer" and will have no middlemen.
It's the effect that history started in 1995, and anything before then is lost in the primordial mists of time.
You hit this a lot editing Wikipedia. Anything after 1995 is easily backed up, anything before then requires having paper on hand. Google Books helps a little.
It's 2015, 15 years later since that was said by Edgar Bronfman Jr. I find it interesting that we're still not there. It seems that it's getting harder to find out of print publications/books/records, especially if they were somewhat obscure or rare from the beginning.
I don't know why, but I would guess that it's because those works are drowning in the vast and seemingly endless supply of others works. That, combined with it not being digitalized and that the physical representation might have rotted away or on the verge of rotting away.
What do you make out of this?