In the past week, Marketplace Tech Report from American Public Media has been picking up on some themes that have been voiced on Chronicle of a Solution, and nowhere else. First, on October 13, 2011, Max Dawson, professor of radio, TV and film at Northwestern University, in critiquing Ultraviolet (the new digital rights authentication and cloud-based licensing system introduced by some major motion picture studios), said:
"Its success will largely depend on two factors. If this requires you to ditch your entire media collection you got through iTunes, the consumer will reject it. The other thing is compelling content; neither "Green Lantern" or "Horrible Bosses" falls into that category. As much as I'd like to see studios be able to achieve success, I'm not too sure this is the right solution."These problems cited by Professor Dawson are problems we've highlighted here. And of course are problems that only the DCE can fix.
First, you do not have "to ditch your entire media collection" with the DCE's patent-pending backward-compatibility method. In fact, the DCE is somewhat counting on your not ditching your old media collection. We want the vinyl records, VHS tapes, everything that was legally issued. All of those past issues have some value. We would not want those legacy media items to be off-exchange any more so than a stockbroker would want your grandmother to keep her old shares of IBM in a coffee can under the sink. *
Second, we have long said, going back to our US patent application, our original white paper and our Google book case Amicus brief, that we are the only answer to the problem of selection. We even solve the ultimate problem of lack of selection, the orphan works problem. Videos which are registered at the request of the buyer and then immobilized in the cloud, become a modern Alexandrine Library (with music and books included of course). Next, our method of verification enables this library to be loaned digitally. Finally, in contrast to the limited offerings for sale at Ultraviolet, the DCE creates a market of upwards of every movie ever commercially released, to the extent that there is at least one DCE user who is willing to part with a movie they own for the right price, (in the securities industry, this is called an offer).
And then today, again on the radio, discussing "the Cloud":
Of course, "cloud" is a woefully inaccurate name for what's going on here. It's not up in the sky, floating, ethereal. We're talking about real computers owned by someone else, stored somewhere else .... [Security expert Cristofer] Hoff says don't think of it like meteorology, "It's kind of like a bank. You give them stuff that matters to you, you expect that they'll take good care of it."~Marketplace Tech Report from American Public Media, October 21, 2011
We at the Digital Content Exchange have been making this comparison for a long time. The comparison is contained in the very header of this blog. Our white papers and slide decks always make reference to banking or securities. And we have been a virtual Paul Revere on counterfeit media.
The question for you if you are in the media or tech industry becomes this: "Now that you recognize that there is a banking-like quality to a cloud, are you so sure that your media executives/developers know everything there is to know about handling fungible bank-like commodities that have value? Or do you want to bring in someone who has worked with these types of digital assets all his life? Is there nothing you can learn from the securities industry, which is well-recognized as having learned how to handle and move fungible commodities and prevent forgeries?".
*The backward compatibility feature of the DCE solves "the legacy problem". Note that the legacy problem has been successfully overcome by the securities industry. Shares of stock were voluntarily turned in for registration and immobilized so that the shareholder could do more with them, more efficiently. Registration was preferred by users because the advantages of the new technology outweighed the old user preferences (including the illicit user preference of being able to use forgeries in place of authentic). The addition of physical items to a board of exchange is no big deal . It has been done with physical shares of stock and is done at the bank every day when you turn in cash. The DCE grants access to people's music through cloud storage. Just like a bank or a stock brokerage gives its customers access to their accounts on the internet.
