Back on April 23, the New York Times ran a piece by
Jonathan Tarplay that essentially would imply that it should no longer be
possible for users to post their own unsupervised content online for free if
they could not otherwise get people to pay for it.
I discovered this piece this morning before a meeting in DC why looking an LTE in a printed New York
Times. “’Safe Harbor’ Online, here.
The original article is titled “It is time to break up
Google?”. While we can reasonably talk
about monopolies on the Internet and the “Big 5” who survived the dot-com bust
of 2000 (there is a tweet running around about which one you could live
without) the article really talks about all of them.
But the writer takes particular aim at the Safe Harbor
Provision of the DMCA, without noting the even more powerful sister it has,
Section 230, which is even more important in preventing service providers
having to preview what gets published.
And the writer suggests that service companies should
pay users for the posts, because they make money off them. That would mean that most posts would not get
published because readers won’t pay for them.
No more could people publish anything that doesn’t “sell”. Think of the implications for the POD book
publishing industry.
But I can see that may be what some observers
want ("It would be a good thing" as my piano teacher would have said in the early 1950s about banning television.). Let’s bring back the physical
world (especially book stores) so people can have low-pay retail jobs
again. Let’s force people (like me) to
shut up and actually pay personal attention to others, especially the less
gifted in the world, and even things out.
I can see how the reasoning would go, countering our “mind your own
business” individualistic world.
We need Reid Ewing’s little film “it’s Free!” back
online.
No comments:
Post a Comment