| >Media companies couldn't give any less fucks about the web. They can go 100 years without publishing on the web, since they have other revenue paths that they're perfectly happy with. No they can't. Physical media is going under. Newspapers and magazines are folding, music is primarily distributed digitally, even TV stations are treating the web as their primary means of content distribution. Media companies have no other revenue paths that will matter over a decade, much less a century, and most no longer have the money, resources or capabilities to do anything else. >The web needs these media companies more than the media companies need the web. The web is nothing but a network of networks. It wouldn't even blink if every big media company went bankrupt and took all of their content with them. The web would be a lot less interesting and a lot less fun, and make a lot less money, but it would still exist, and people would just keep distributing and pirating what they have. Media companies, meanwhile, have bet their entire future on the web, and are only now realizing that it isn't the gravy train they thought it was. > Just acknowledgement of the fact that artists own their works, and web developers need to kiss their ass if they want artists to publish on the web. Whether or not artists own their works is orthogonal to the fact that digital content distribution has rendered their works nearly valueless, and opened a nearly infinite competitive market for similar work. Rights are irrelevant. Morality is irrelevant. What the artists want or feel entitled to is irrelevant. The cultural significance of the corpus is irrelevant. Effective DRM is technically impossible and if that's what artists are depending on to survive in the digital age, then they will lose. They can die like the dinosaurs, or adapt to the new order and become birds. But they cannot, ever, ever unstrike the meteor that is the web. |
I'm not thrilled with DRM in the browser, but at least it's heavily sandboxed, and is way preferable to a series of native apps that get full access to my desktop.