A critic of the Digital Content Exchange recently told us “the urgency you mention will not be shared with any of the stakeholders you mention”. **
A critic probably once said the same thing to the environmental movement of the 1960s. The DCE and Jim Yates are basically playing the same role as the Green Movement:
It is 1968 all over again, and the “denial lobby”, aided and abetted by average people who want to continue to throw trash out the car window on the highway (people today who want free downloads), will rule for a while. But we trust that people will eventually have their consciousness raised to the need for copyright sustainability. Creativity itself, (nurtured by copyright ... or what else?), is at stake.
It took the green movement twenty years before anyone took them seriously when they said that "going green can actually be profitable". And, like the green movement, we know that a digital content exchange will instantly make all the media industries more profitable, once the DCE is brought to scale.
But for right now, when Jim Yates is talking to the record industry, he might as well be Barry Commoner in 1967 talking to ExxonMobil!
**The stakeholders we most frequently mention here are the record labels, the music publishers, the artists, the tech giants (Google, Apple, Microsoft, HP), NetFlix, the MPAA, Blockbuster, the Universities under the Higher Education Opportunity Act, and public libraries.
A critic probably once said the same thing to the environmental movement of the 1960s. The DCE and Jim Yates are basically playing the same role as the Green Movement:
- Preaching sustainability on behalf of the future.
- Recommending a change in the way business is done which is a) difficult to implement, b) seems too costly, and c) comes from people “outside the industry” who "don't understand how their business works" and who should, therefore, "mind their own business".
- Saying that people have to clean up their messes (but offering a clean-up technology to do it).
It is 1968 all over again, and the “denial lobby”, aided and abetted by average people who want to continue to throw trash out the car window on the highway (people today who want free downloads), will rule for a while. But we trust that people will eventually have their consciousness raised to the need for copyright sustainability. Creativity itself, (nurtured by copyright ... or what else?), is at stake.
It took the green movement twenty years before anyone took them seriously when they said that "going green can actually be profitable". And, like the green movement, we know that a digital content exchange will instantly make all the media industries more profitable, once the DCE is brought to scale.
But for right now, when Jim Yates is talking to the record industry, he might as well be Barry Commoner in 1967 talking to ExxonMobil!
**The stakeholders we most frequently mention here are the record labels, the music publishers, the artists, the tech giants (Google, Apple, Microsoft, HP), NetFlix, the MPAA, Blockbuster, the Universities under the Higher Education Opportunity Act, and public libraries.
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