Some pissed off DVD watcher really wanted to just get to his Matrix, I guess. Can’t give an attribution here, because I don’t know who did it, but this thing has been floating around the webosphere all day it seems, and I love a good graphical display of an issue. Marketing bloat is to DVDs what software bloat is to Windows.
Possibly the best definition of so-called digital ‘piracy’ was recently provided by Channel 4 Television’s Commissioning Editor for Education, Alice Taylor at Creative Scotland Perspectives.
Alice is also a founding member of the Open Rights Group. While it would be interesting to hear what Channel 4 executives thought about all this, it’s at least good to see it has staff that are up on the use of content in a way that one would hope the BBC would be.
Good snips:
““Piracy” – as done by teenagers, all my friends, pretty much everyone I know, is simply demand where appropriate supply does not exist. Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies – in other words, anti-copying, anti-fair use – are also anti-accessibility. They attempt to block and restrict, and they fail every time. Every single time. To be accessible, work needs to be available, always and to everyone. No delineations, no restrictions: it’s too messy. Too expensive. Too dull.”
And…
“Attention is our scarcest resource. Time ticks on, but there are still and will forever be 24 hours in a day. Attention is everything. We pick out signals from the noise by listening to trusted sources: friends, and favourite authors, bloggers, tweeters, journalists, broadcasters, remixers. Curators, all of them. They spread the word, we investigate, to revel in the shared experience.”
I recently contacted the administrators of parliamentlive.tv to see about getting access to about five minutes of footage from a House of Commons session I wanted to include in a video project.
Being that this was a public proceeding, lacking any sort of national security concerns and having to do with the common good, I thought this should be a fairly simple process. After all, the footage is openly available on a government website. It’s already been filmed, edited and posted. Getting the raw file should be no big deal. As it turns out, however, UK Parliament keeps about as tight a control on its content as the BBC does an episode of Doctor Who.
The response I got back cautioned me that “The situation relating to the use of Proceedings of Parliament on website is very complex.” And while I could freely link to any recording on the Parliament website I wanted to, should I actually choose to host and play a clip anywhere else or combine it with a video project, “this would be possible subject to a number of conditions.”
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