How the sky is falling

[Gindil]

Thought it might be good to present an article about how the technology has truly helped every industry it's been in. Thing is, people don't realize that things such as the DVD player or the CD player make music, games, or movies more valuable by allowing people to have something to talk about.

Linkage [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1656485] It's 15 pages, double space but well worth it.

By the late 1970?s we get to the example that is perhaps the most familiar: the VCR. The free television model, augmented by cable, had been established for some time. Along came a technology that allowed people to copy this freely provided television content and do what they wanted with it. The content industry warned us that the VCR must be stopped. Here was Jack Valenti of the MPAA, speaking to Congress:

The VCR is stripping those things clean, those markets clean of our profit potential, you are going to have devastation in this marketplace. . . . We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine.

If that were not enough, he went on to say, ?I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.?

I'm glad you were wrong Hack Valenti. Rest in Hell.

 

[Xojins]

So... what are we supposed to be discussing? That the VCR was a useful invention?

 

[TheIr0nMike]

I'm sensing a point to this, but I don't know what it is.

 

[Gindil]

It's more in looking at how content industries decree new technology is bad when it turns out to do fairly well for them. Fax machines, VCRs, DVD Players, even online streaming have done a lot for the respective industries.

Nowadays, there is still file sharing along with "cloud" services such as Apple's newest streaming.

The point is that it makes the content more valuable, even though the authors, movie makers, etc say the sky is falling when the technology is introduced.

 

[QCX]

The main thoughts on new technology I constantly turn back to is; Why do we keep making new devices when we should improve the ones we have.

There is technology that we have let slip, that had great potential. Mini-disk for one is a great idea. Take a look at CDs or DVDs, they are pretty delicate, a small scratch can easily damage the data stored. But if you combine the CD with a Floppy disk case, you got yourself a securer way to contain the disk. That was idea behind the mini-disk.

But at the time of release, DVDs only just came on the market and the mini was too expensive to manufacture. So it baffles me why they have not jumped on this now, when the storage of DVD is massive and to manufacture them would be cheap.

Of course now we are looking at flash drives, which is awesome. And if you look at it, they are kind of like the old cartridges for nintendo, just smaller.

Fucking incredible what happened over the last 20 years.