→ Where it hurts.
Witness the Sound of One Braincell Retching.
You know, I had an idea not entirely dissimilar to this the other day. What with all this IP rubbish going on it sort of occurred to me to wonder exactly how hard it would be to completely drop out of “old media”. So no watching, reading, listening or playing to anything that was distributed by or licensed with a pre-internet-style business model.
The obvious ones were obvious: No watching TV or buying TV shows on physical media. No going to, renting, or buying movies. Ditto for music. No reading books, magazines or newspapers. No buying games…
Except, wait. No going to movies? Really? That’s not the sort of thing that’s a problem, though; movies and concerts are good. They’re an experience, they’re value-add. And no buying books? Except there’s nothing wrong with the business model of physical books, but there is something wrong with the business models of DRM’d ebooks. And what about things like Netflix? (I mean, not that we really get that here but… we should!)
The original idea was to opt-out of outdated and unfair business models and to hurt the publishers that use them, whilst still supporting producers that adopt new, internet- and remix-culture-friendly business models. But where do you draw the line? Is Steam okay? What about iTunes? Whose opinion do you look to: The publisher’s? The artist’s?
Explaining this to a colleague and he mentioned he had a similar idea again, except his was to simply boycott anything that came from the US, since most of the draconian new IP laws are originating from the States. Except, that’s hard too when you start dealing with multinationals; UMG are synonymous with evil but their parent company is French, not American.
It seems everyone wants to do something to hurt the people that are pushing this bullshit… it’s just no-one can quite agree on what.
