"...the business of creativity has had very little to do with creativity or the artists themselves. It has become the purview of smart business people who view creative endeavors as their property."
- Terry Heaton
Terry has a brilliant piece up on his pomo blog entitled We Don't Need No Stage in which he dissects the fatal flaws with current "content" business models. His essay goes a long way to providing the correct context for the Spectrial going on in Sweden right now. His basic point is that "There is no stage in the online world, and value propositions based on such are unworkable. Content has been freed from the limitations of the stage, and the sooner we all accept that, the sooner we can get on with the task of creating ways to pay for the costs of creating content."
You need to read the whole thing but Terry gets directly to the heart of the issue in explaining the backstory to the Hulu Boxee controversy, why NBC/Universal President Jeff Zucker pulled the plug on that collaboration and the larger point about Zucker's infamous "analog dollars/digital pennies" argument:
...at the heart of the personal media revolution is a satisfaction with those pennies. It's a growth market for those with low barriers to entry, including costs. Mass media does not want to truthfully examine costs, for those costs support the infrastructure that allows for the making of money in the first place. A printing press used to be a license to print money. Same with a broadcast tower (and license). All that has changed, and to the new participants in the media game, those pennies look like a lot of money.
Since the media executives going after The Pirate Bay know all of this, what do they hope to accomplish through the Swedish Court system? Anyone who has studied the "carriage-maker" analogy knows that the content companies want to keep making carriages and #brokep is Henry Ford.
