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All the news that's... whatever.
Welcome
to Random Bytes...
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Saturday, November 23, 2002
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Tom notes over at Plasticbag
(thanks Doc) that "the future isn't in
protecting traderoutes, its about making everyone a pirate". Quite the
statement. His description of the dynamic is largely correct - the way that
people get their data is changing in extremely fundamental ways. But,
doesn't mean that, as he notes, that "Apple is out to make everyone a
pirate" just because they are completely out ahead of everyone else in the
industry. Apple is amongst the first set of the Big Players that has
realized that the "real deal" is about making sure that everyone
participates in your traderoute. Apple is doing it again. No longer
satisfied with jousting against Microsoft, they've chosen another large foe
that has to defend its traderoutes in order to survive. The problem is that
while companies like Sony have vast traderoutes, the traders are fleeing in
large numbers to players like Apple amongst others. And Apple, despite the
fact that is has a huge number of traders (Napster refugees and the like),
they don't have anything that they can legally traffic in. Of course
something will have to break, resulting in a (please pardon the expression)
huge paradigm shift. The fact that everybody is a pirate in the meantime is
simply indicative of the trend, and not the trend itself. The showdown comes
when both Apple (and its complicit allies) and Sony realize that they both
have what the other wants - consumers and distribution. The result will be
both good for consumers and a bloody mess in the meantime. 
12:55:38 PM
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I've received a number of emails recently about an article that I wrote a
while back - a small burst of fan mail I suppose. The burst got me to
thinking that the way the Internet links changed in some small way over the
last little while - like the recent google dance for
instance. Checking the referring logs to my website I couldn't come up with
anything concrete, so on a lark I did a
Google search for "History of DNS" and lo and behold, in some small way
it looked like I found a keyword that was mine. (Considering that I don't
own Ross" or
"Rader"
this wasn't a bad consolation.). The problem is though that while my *words* own the link,
my website doesn't. See, I
wrote the article for Webhosting Magazine
a long time and ago and the version that they put up on their website is
substantially more popular than mine. The problem? They don't have
publication rights for the Internet. I would never say anything to them - no
harm, no foul, I'm not a "real writer" and there
is no real economic losses of material consequence (although I'm sure that
under the legal definition of loss that there would be). What bugged me
about this initially, and still does today, is that I *gave* them the
article on very specific grounds and they essentially ignored me. And now
I have to share my keyword with them.
12:24:02 PM
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"The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights."
- J. Paul Getty
12:21:37 PM
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© Copyright
2003
Ross Wm. Rader. The opinions expressed in this weblog are solely those of the respective authors.
Last update:
1/27/2003; 11:37:07 PM.
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