This is video of a talk I gave at the first-annual WheaTalks event, a TED Talks-inspired night of bright ideas-in-progress. In it, I make the case that individuals need and deserve a system of just browsing, that is, browsing that is fair and ethical, and that respects individual privacy. Corporate rights holders continue to lobby for expansive intellectual property protections, restrict access and use of content, and devise new ways to monetize users’ personal information. One aspect of these efforts is the tendency of content producers and distributors to conflate privacy with piracy. As insidious as this is, it is also revealing insofar as it highlights the fact that as user data and personal information become increasingly profitable revenue streams, efforts to restrict companies’ access to that data and information become tantamount — in their minds at least — to a form of theft. At the end of the talk, I propose a somewhat common-sense (read: impossibly utopian) solution to this stand-off.
Tag: copyright
eff YouTube
This condescending-but-terrifying “instructional indoctrination video” is probably the most upsetting thing I’ve seen yet in the increasingly bald-faced campaign to establish Copyright™ as the tertium quidof culture and technology, and to ensure that the sole function of each is to strengthen and consolidate the corporate control of information, communication and creation.
For forgetting what your site was all about and why it was so revolutionary, for reinventing yourself as Hulu-lite, for infantilizing users and for pandering to industry pressure… eff YouTube
My Digital Humanity 