Bill Spight wrote:There are forces moving us towards a state of electronic tenancy, where what we have is owned by somebody else. I understand why it is happening, but I regard it as pernicious. As we know, serfdom can last for centuries.
Indeed.
This notion first arose with the ill-fated DivX initiative which attemped to put all control over your home video content in the hands of the content providers/creators. Movie studios and television networks would have had the ability to disable your DVDs, at any time, for whatever reasons they chose (Disney was chomping at the bit for this because they had a practice of rereleasing their animated classics into theatres on a 7-year cycle, and they wanted to be able to "turn off" everyone's home video copy of, say, Snow White during such a theatre run). Luckily, that was killed by consumer crusades at a time when the nascent DVD format would have suffered greatly from a marketplace format war with DivX.
Then Napster came along, put the fear (and rage) of God into the music industry at large, and then quietly transformed into media lessors with the catchy slogan, "Have everything, own nothing." It is the unspoken mantra of all those who advocate for electronic tenancy. And now the dark spectre of DivX is rising from the grave with a new name and new logo called Ultraviolet. It is trying to worm its way back into the marketplace under the Trojan Horse auspices of media portability and consumer convenience, when in fact, it is electronic tenancy that cedes ultimate control over the content to the creators.
Eventually the world will have all its data up on some cloud, where access to and control over it is willingly handed over to the technology megacorps who are not required to operate with any transparency and gladly participate in eroding and, ultimately, eliminating any and all old-fashioned notions of individual "ownership" of anything media-related.
