Why I follow maverick internet inventor Jim Yates, and why you should too.

I follow Jim Yates, and here is why you should too:

1. He is an inventor who has already been very successful solving one digital age problem and is now gifting his time and energies into solving another problem that should concern all of us: that artists have lost any meaningful control of their creations because of digitization.
2. He has invented a method which monetizes a User’s valid media collection (music, video and books) and demonetizes illegal downloads by making them not forward compatible.
3. His method for dealing with illegal downloads is totally "opt in" and does no harm to either the user (who may continue to use his illegal files the same as he always has) or to any record company that may want to continue to allow access to free music for promotional or other purposes.
4. His invention works without the need for licensing ... from the record companies or anyone else.  (Though record companies can benefit greatly by becoming a User).
5. The method Jim Yates uses is exciting, and therefore fun to follow, because it has never been tried.  And all other methods that promised to “stop” illegal file sharing have been dismal failures.
6. When the peer-to-peer file sharing problem arose in the early 2000s, he began working on a solution and has both written a patent application and developed a web-based media cloud portal.
7. His background put him in a unique position to work on this problem.   In his last position, he solved the financial industry’s problem of counterfeit securities and was midwife to that industry’s complete conversion to digitization.  
8. He has twin degrees from Washington University, in both engineering and business.
9. His career has had a twin path: working in the securities industry with the New York Stock Exchange and in computer engineering.  
10. He is not from the record industry.  Or the home video industry.  Or book publishing.  If these industries had solutions from within, don't you think they would have found at least one by now? After all, they are the parties that supposedly have the financial incentive to fix the problem.
11. The earlier company he founded, Bridge Data, is now owned by Thomson Reuters.  Many of the features that are now taken for granted in financial information and securities trading were invented by him and implemented under his management of Bridge.
12. I have been using Jim’s  application in beta test for years and I am personally excited about it.  It really works!  I say that as a true record freak.  (If you have ooTunes, check out my DJ set, streamed right out of my immobilized and verified cloud on the DCE.  Simply do an ooTunes search for “Emmett”).