Theft of copyright, music and even the news... or sweet disintermediation?

The change, it had to come. I see and hear the almost daily blustering,
blistering complaints from various vested interests (read old guard
proprietors and those who prosper under them) and whilst I may have some
sympathy for people suffering through the pain of change there's a point
where we all have to just wake up, get up and move on. The internet is
here, the web is here, convergence is upon us. More than that, we live in a
world where data of any sort can be circulated, replicated and re-used
faster and with greater ease than ever before. That sort of restructuring
matters a lot. It changes the economics of entire industries by reducing
(or even removing) the cost of transport and production and makes the entry
of new competition frictionless, or at least far easier. We may argue about
the timing, but as sure as sunrise we will eventually not recognise much of
what today we call newspapers and magazines; we shall see television and
radio "transmission" fragment and diversify, if not disappear completely
into an IP-universe; and we shall see - perhaps slightly more contentiously
- the collapse of what I would call 'corporate' music publishing (in favour
of a more or less democratic model, of the people, by the people if you
like).

 I'm sure none of this will shock you - it's been suggested, even promoted,
for decades. But many people still doubt it. These are the people who look
at us, seemingly awash with paper at home and at work, and say "I told you
so, there will never be a paperless world". And they'd be right, up to a
point. Paper has its good uses, like for wrapping presents, but storing
data is not one of them. For those of us who worked in 'the old days' when
computers were huge things hidden under buildings and tended by a strange
technological priesthood, paper was what we opened all manner of accounts
with, what we stored our account records on, how we kept track of payments,
how we communicated, diarised, journalised, photographed and managed our
lives. Even the simplest transaction was recorded on paper before being
finally input - overnight, it must be said - into the big iron we thought
of as 'computers'. Imagine what our world would be like if we still ran our
lives on a paper-based recording and transaction system? Imagine the
forests we would need to cut down, or the wait-states added to every single
move we made. There would be no 'instant' in our lives, we'd be back to
waiting patiently - read days or weeks - until one vital piece of paper
found its way through the maze and back again. (Actually a slower life with
a mass carbon sequestration program based on storing more paper could
actually stack up, if you wanted to turn it into a business case. But don't
ask me to think it through, please. It'll probably fall over when we factor
in the cost of moving all of that paper from here to there, and the
producutive hours lost when a piece of paper gets filed in the wrong spot,
as it inevitably does.) Point is, in just a scant few decades we have
completely removed time, materials and much human error from our
transaction systems - by largely replacing paper with a new world of
connected computers.

 By and large, the mass computing and interactive communication revolution
has been a productivity booster, with the economic gains made providing for
much of the new wealth and prosperity we see around us (global economic
collapses aside). You can simply do more with less, quicker, in a digitised
world - and have access to greater choice. It makes everything faster, more
repeatable, more accurate. It releases labour from drudgery and puts them
to work in more educated and potentially more satisfying ways (at least in
theory - I don't know how rewarding it was to be in a typing pool but I'm
guessing we are better off doing our own typing). It also has tended to
reduce the layers of distribution and wholesaling, to "disintermediate" and
put buyers and sellers more closely together.

 So why do laggards like the old media still exist? Of course
disintermediation hasn't yet freed every industry up, or released value
from every step in every possible process. For example many people still
see paper as a tangible "thing" to "prove" something to themselves; they
like to keep it close, touch it, and cling to their old, comfortable ways.
It's the same with music - vinyl or a CD is holdable, collectable in a very
physical way. And that's understandable - we still live in a physical
world. But many others (of all ages, I hasten to add) now live what we
could call 'parallel' digital lives to their 'real' ones and not only are
happy to ditch paper or plastic, they positively choose to do so. For them
their life's data is now online, along with their digital transactions,
their photographs and their music. Whilst we still have the "clingers" - a
whole baby-booming generation of them, at least - who have lived through
the 'immediate pre-digital era' and remain arguably more comfortable with a
newspaper, say, than with an RSS reader, a favourite set of bloggers or
something like Twitter or FriendFeed - we will still have newspapers, CDs
and the like. The market is still there. But with every passing day that
number dwindles and the cliff approaches.

 And then there's government and industry action taken to "protect" existing
investments, AKA simply prolonging the agony. It may be disguised as
'regulation' of TV or radio markets and their attached radio spectrum, or
it may be bold-as-brass "licensing" protectionism. Or it could be law, such
as copyright. None of these things are by universal right, they are simply
ideas that have had their time and are now under pressure to justify or
reinvent themselves, or disappear.

 So you can see the threats, plain as day. Why buy a newspaper when you can
tap into a diversity of news feeds online? Why buy CDs or even DVDs when
you can store them on a media server, or even "in the cloud'? Why indeed
pay for the printed word - or even an online one - when a barrage of
bloggers will happily aggregate, share, decode and analyse the news for
you, free of charge? Why get the views or news of a few, filtered through a
corporate prism, when you can tap into the unfiltered and diverse views of
many? Why not cut out the middle-man and make virtual contact with the
participants, rather than the reporters? Why pay for hard-copy music and
support a monolithic corporate culture, when the tools of audio recording,
musicianship and (legal) music sales and exchange have been virtualised and
made available just a mouse-click or two away? Simply put, these are all
ideas that bring sellers (if you like) closer to buyers (or whatever word
you choose to use). It makes sense socially and economically to do so. It's
a model that questions whether we need the big, expensive corporate layers
and filters of the past. Indeed it asks, can we afford not to change?

 There may be a good reason to prolong the lives of the dinosaurs, but right
now I can't see it. All of the arguments about preserving 'existing capital
investment' and 'quality and standards of journalism' or 'fostering new
musical talent' are built on the past with all of the waste and excess that
goes with it, locked in. Economically - and socially - it's
anti-competitive with a big fat negative ROI to boot. The old guard are
saying, effectively, that we are not smart, educated and discerning enough,
we need an elite of some sort - preferably "us" - to run the show. Well
maybe we don't.

 What started me thinking about productivity as a driver for the creation of
new media constructs? This article (a good example of disintermediation if
ever I saw one) on 'make your own online video ads':
http://snipurl.com/pn24h

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