RESHARED POST FROM ALEX SCHLEBER

Bumping an old thread I should have contributed to earlier. Pasting my comment below. The original post and discussion are worth the read. h/t +Alex Schleber.
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I agree with almost everything that +Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu says. I think he nails both of the critical pins that support #dinomedia . They are, in order of mention:

1) economic rights over properties
2) The Law which enforces those rights.

I think both the legal framework and the rights over property that they enforce are obsolete in the digital age; they are a legacy issue, a vestigal organ, a parasite from a paradigm past. The sooner we realize that it is in all of our best interest to systematically dismantle the old system and replace it with a unified organizational model that respects the digital paradigm, the sooner these growing pains will end. It is in the interest of both consumers and producers that property rights be abolished, and that content be shared freely without the pretense of ownership or contract. But these assumptions are fundamntal to the infrastructure of the existing system, and indeed are fundamental to our very conception of governance in a just society, and most people don’t understand how it could be otherwise. Resolving these anomalies will require a fundamental reworking of the basic infrastructure of social and economic organization; the problem is that no one in a position to do anything about it has any real incentive to engage in such fundamental political theory, despite the growing cries for change. It’s a sure sign that revolution is at hand. We are well over a year into a global popular revolution, and its only growing stronger. Frankly, it’s about damn time.

I don’t think +Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu would disagree with too much of this, but he is waiting for a “backlash”, he claims, presumably from corporate entities fighting to defend their claimed “rights” to these “properties”. I would disagree that we have yet to see this backlash; in fact, we’ve been seeing these fights for a decade, if not more. The “owners” of digital content have been fighting and fussing over these changes every step of the way, often resulting in nothing more than headaches and inconvenience for everyone (including them). They continue even today with aggressively vicious defenses that reveal the raw inhumanity of corporate profit-mongering. So you are correct to think that they will defend their perceived rights, but you are wrong to think they have yet to form their backlash.

One of the major lessons to draw over the last decade is that despite their constant fighting, those owners are getting steamrolled. Their ability to maintain exclusive control over their content has been an abysmal failure, and their combined economic and political might has left them on the back foot, constantly playing catch up and whining about it the whole time. You might be baffled about why the dinomedia thinks they would fare so poorly in a genuinely free and open #attentioneconomy. Attracting attention is their job, they should be doing it better than anyone. Right?

The truth is that dinomedia don’t do a lot of things all that well except spending a lot of money on some fairly cheap thrills. Not only can we do better, but we are doing better, and every day we get better at it. The rise of the digital media gives us some quite clear examples of how the larger revolution develops. Dino media went extinct not because we stole their cameras or siezed their studios. We brought them down by building better alternatives for ourselves, by ourselves, in domains where their power and reach simply did not extend. When they clumsily try to shoehorn into our new domains, we can morph yet again. We’re used to it, it’s a fact of digital life. We’re willing to put up with the hassle because our alternatives are better than the ones we are fed by the corporate machines. Our alternatives are so much better that the people have fled in droves to digital spaces to take advantage of it. The digital migration rivals the urbanization of the Industrial Revolution not only in scale, but more importantly in terms of the direct material consequences for the everyday lives of working people.

The capitalists will continue trying to set up fences for walling in what they claim is their “property”, and the flow of information will continue to frustrate and ignore those feeble claims, and in doing so will continue to erode their legitimacy. Digital space isn’t theirs, it is ours. All of ours, collectively, and in such situations the very concept of “ownership” ceases to apply. Eventually, a generation of people raised on this brutal anomaly in our organizational framekwork will finally mature enough to snap out of this barren delusion and seriously take up the task of intelligently redseigning the whole mess. We had to do it at the beginning of the Industrial Age (we called it “The Enlightenment”), and we have to do it again now as we enter the Digital Age.

At this point you and I can’t do much more than endure the process as it unfolds, like a slow and painful birth. There’s not much more to do but try to set up the conditions for it to go smoothly, and be ready to act in case anything important happens. But the fact that this process takes patience doesn’t mean we can’t fully and accurately appreciate the vitals and take stock of our position. And clearly the people are winning. From the long view, describing corporate dominance as an “obstacle” to our growth will be treated as too generous a description.

Alex Schleber originally shared this post:

Darn it… #copywrong in action.

Notice how much time (5 years give or take) was wasted on this baloney, all while the basic economic realities of entry-level digital content are crumbling all around those from the #dinomedia that still don’t get that there is no more scarcity of content, only Overabundance, and a resulting Darwinian fight for our scarce Attention…

I first wrote about this case a long time ago here -> businessmindhacks.com/post/youtube-vs-viacom-should-youtube-be-torn-apart-by-piranha

It was already completely crazy then to go after your most “infected” fan(atic)s, that were willing to spread your message and brand for you “for free”. And in the interim things haven’t gotten any better for those #attentioneconomy realities I already pointed out back then. They are following their cold, hard logic to the inevitable conclusion ->

“From Kevin Kelly’s The Satisfaction Paradox: On why Curation will be the only thing you’ll still pay for”: businessmindhacks.com/post/from-kevin-kellys-the-satisfaction-paradox-on-why-curation-will-be-the-only-thing-youll-still-pay-for

“…Only then will some in the #Dinomedia come to see, that the race was not about who was still going to eek out some residual “crumbs” profits from the Old System, but who was going to wholesale import the masses into their Ecosystem.”
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/cc +Daniel Estrada +Gideon Rosenblatt

Viacom v. YouTube ruling is a bummer for Google and the UGC community

The new appellate decision in looks like a loss for Google and the UGC community.