A must-read blog post, in which David adds another important laeyr of clarity and understanding of the fundamental market behaviours that are beginning to flow (and become visible) from a new set of structures for the interaction of information.
Here’s an excerpt – the last few paragraphs. You really need to read it from the beginning to get the full force and importance of what David writes here.
Then I described the End to End principle and how it’s enabled the Net to spawn an amazing marketplace of innovation. Tinker with the center and there can be disastrous unintended consequences. E.g., if packets contained bits that ID’ed the user in any strong sense, the Net would have been nought but a research library. (No, I don’t know that that’s true. Emergent effects are too hard to predict. It was just an example, and at least a few people nodded. Good enough.)
I said that I understand that to them the Net looks like a medium through which content passes, some of which people aren’t paying for. But, (sez I) their customers aren’t “consuming” content. We’re not consuming anything. We’re listening to music, We’re watching video streams, We’re talking with friends. To call it content is to miss why it matters to Big Content’s customers.
BigCon’s product, I said, is special. It’s published. That means it’s given over to the public for us to appropriate it, make it our own. We hum it, we quote it, we make jokes with it as a punchline, we get it wrong. We do that because it matters to us. And that’s how creative works succeed. They become ours in some sense.
Further, culture advances by our having the leeway to build on published work and incorporate it into other works. From The Star Spangled Banner to most of Disney’s feature length cartoons, that’s what we do.
So, we need the leeway, both to be able to continue as a culture, and more important from their point of view to continue to get value from what the Big Content folks produce. It’s our ability to absorb and reuse that gives their product value.
I ended by saying, perhaps too forcefully, “I’m here arguing for using this remarkable global connectedness to enable the flowering of culture the Internet seems born to provide…and you call me the barbarian?” I think it just alienated them.
I also made the stupid, self-indulgent error of saying that trying to “monetize communities” (the official topic of the session) was evil. Shoot, I’m in favor of monetizing communities. But, as the Greek doctor said, first do no harm. D’oh d’oh d’oh.
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