iStockphoto is offline this morning as the company prepares to launch its subscription service. How this will effect the already squeezed profits of photographers is unclear, but time will tell. On a side point I recently signed up as a contributing photographer to both iStockphoto and Photoshelter.
This must be stopped at all cost. Why are governments around the world pandering to giant corporations who are trading in information be it entertainment or otherwise and putting the profits of these companies ahead of fundamental freedoms and rights of everyday people. Orwellian predictions of the future saw this kind of big brother society, but who would have thought it would evolve to protect the entertainment industry. These people must be stopped.
This treaty, if it was passed is as much a threat to people freedom as terrorism and rouge states, if not more so. It bypasses the presumption of innocence, due process, right to privacy, and freedom of information, and for what? to protect companies like Warner and Universal? Again, why are Governments changing laws so that companies can force people to adopt to their business models rather than said companies actually wake up and face the realities if the 21st cenuary.
Write to your politicians, MEP’s and whoever else you can think of and make sure this treaty and others like it never see the light of day. What’s more, consumer protection needs to be put in place so consumers are protected from the insane over reaching imperial ambitions of the entertainment industry. Remember, this isn’t even to protect artists, this is so companies who are effectively trading in the ownership of information trying to make it so it’s a far greater crime to download a song from the internet than it is to steal a car, or rob a bank. You can’t invade a persons privacy to investigate these crimes without a warrant or a some form of due process but it will be ok to do far worse without any sort of due process to investigate so called copyright infringement. What the hell????
Ahhhrrrggghhhhhh.
From Amazon’s Blog of all places. Interesting list though. I have jailbroken my iPod touch, but I’m reluctant to touch my iPhone what with June just around the corner. Still, there’s some pretty neat stuff out there already, and it’s not clear if some of these things will even be possible with the SDK.
I Love typography has a great round up of websites that make good use of type. this is well worth a look because some of these sites are simply gorgeous.
From Shawn over at CameraCon:
Our first TimeShoots have been great - the Flickr page received pictures of
moose, housecats, indoors, outdoors, lighthouses, beaches, beer, ice, at
least one person in a bathtub and shots from four different continents!
The pictures come from all kinds of photographers - beginners, intermediates
and pros - using all kinds of cameras. It doesn’t matter what kind of camera
you shoot with or what level of photographer you are. There’s no critiquing
of your photographs or judging you as a photographer.We’ve got a (new) Flickr site where the pictures will be posted and where
you can see the shots from the previous TimeShoots:
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/timeshoot/>And an email address for you to send your photos to (they will automagically
show up on the TimeShoot Flickr site):“help14army (AT) photos.flickr.com”
All you have to do is send an email with your photo attached. Use the
email’s Subject Line to put a title to your photo and use the Body area of
the email to send along any other details - where it was shot, what kind of
gear you used, camera information, your name/website URL, etc.You can send up to a maximum of 3 photos. You retains all rights to your
posted images.Remember, take photos wherever you happen to be under whatever circumstances
you happen to be in at 12pm ET (actually, you’ve got a 10 minute leeway on
either side of 12pm ET) and send your best shots to “help14army (AT)
photos.flickr.com”.You can use this web page:
http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzcTo figure out what time 12pm ET is in your Time Zone.
Seems like a lot to digest all at once but once you get the hang of it, we
hope you’ll be able to participate and join in!
I missed this the first two times it happened but it’s a great idea. I will definitely try and participate this time. Should be about 5pm here in Ireland.
Absolutely incredible. Homer Simpson, constructed almost entirely in text with css. Brilliant.
(Via Daring Fireball)
With the recent demise of HD-DVD, the success of Blu-Ray as the next generation successor would seem assured, yet many pundits are wondering if the format has long term success. They quote recent reports that Blu-Ray will be superseded in the near term by high-def download services and that there isn’t really a future for the format. Yet despite these reports, Blu-Ray is starting to show significant traction. Samsung recently announced that they were significantly increasing their forecast for their Blu-Ray business. The argument against Blu-Ray is that with the music industry clearly going towards digital downloads the movie industry must surely follow suit. Yet there are some clear differences as to how both segments of the entertainment market work.
A ringing endorsement from Kermit the Frog, who sounds remarkably like a young Bill Gates (or more disturbingly a young Bill Gates sounds remarkably like Kermit the Frog)
From RTÉ Business:
Eircom has rejected claims by four major record companies that it, as the largest broadband internet service provider in the State, must bear some liability for the illegal free downloading of music by computer users.
The companies have claimed Eircom’s networks are being used ‘on a grand scale’ for illegal downloading.
So Basically, they haven’t had any luck anywhere else so they’re going to try their luck in what they think to be a little small out of the way country that they can bully around. Another colossal wast of money, resources and everyone’s time.
[Read RTÉ Business: Eircom rejects record firms’ claims]
Dan Moren in a blog post on Mac User about Sony’s purchase of Grace Note writes:
“…if Sony follows its usual game plan, expect it to turn Gracenote into a qualitatively better but ultimately unsuccessful proprietary format.”
This is a pretty common misconception about Sony that’s been floated by gadget blogs and others in the technology press. However, it’s simply not true to say that much of what Sony invents turns out to be unsuccessful. I don’t blame Dan at all for the comment because for some reason this seems to be the general perception. But lets look at the facts.
The most well known perceived failure of a Sony format is undoubtedly that of betamax. The consumer format, although of a higher quality was ultimately killed by competition from VHS. VHS is considered to have won the war because it had a less strict licensing program and the format could record for longer duration. What people don’t realise however that there is more to this story. A professional version of Betamax, Betacam went on to become the dominant broadcast format, and its successors Digital Betacam and now HD-CAM are used in virtually every broadcast facility in the world. So while the original Betamax format may have been a failure, what it ultimately led to has netted millions if not billions of dollars for Sony over the years.
Lets take a look at some of Sony’s other formats.
There’s the Compact Disc which they co-developed with Philips. You could hardly consider it a failure. Then there’s Minidisc. While Minidisc never took off as a distribution format, as a playback and recording format it was very successful, at least until mp3 and the iPod became dominant. Minidisc is still one of the primary recording formats for jingles and commercials at Radio Stations around the world, having replaced the traditional cart system. It is also still widely used for field audio recording along with DAT (Digital Audio Tape, which Sony also invented) Incidentally, Sony’s ATRAC format, which gets a lot of grief for being a failed competitor to iTunes, was not a download format to begin with. It started as the compression standard used on Minidisc. So while ATRAC did fail as an online delivery format, it is unfair to blame ATRAC itself. It was Sony’s Connect Store that was a failure, not the format. Incidentally, both Minidisc and ATRAC were licensed to other companies.
Sony’s failure to capitalize on the music download market was an unfortunate shortsighted decision based on a management that had become too blinkered by protecting its many devisions. Sony paid for that mistake and the once proud Walkman brand was delegated to second place by the increasingly popular iPod. But that does not mean that the Walkman was never a success in the first place. Technology eventually moves on, and just because new technology replaces an old one that should not invalidate the success of the older one in the first place.
What else has Sony been responsible for?
A recent success for the company is Blu-Ray. Devised as a high definition replacement for DVD, Blu-Ray was developed by Sony, and has so far been successful and looks to grow that success considerably. Many people who had speculated that Blu-Ray would fail based their suspicions on nothing more than this very stereotype, that Sony’s formats are all doomed to failure.
The Playstation is another highly successful brand for Sony. It became synonymous with gaming for a decade, taking over Nintendo’s mantle. Nintendo may have returned to the forefront with the Wii, but the Playstation 3, which some consider to have had a rocky start seems to be gaining considerable traction, and is still a highly recognized brand. Sony also had a minor part in the development of DVD (After abandoning their own disk standard, they joined forces with Toshiba for a unified universal format which became DVD). Video 8 and Hi 8 Were highly successful camcorder formats in the Analogue era, both having been developed by Sony. In the digital era they developed consumer camcorder miniDV format, as well as the newer High Definition version, HDV. They invented the Trinitron, the first flat screen TV (The Tube - not the LCD or Plasma.) Sony and Philips also jointly developed the Sony-Philips digital interface format (S/PDIF) The format is used for transmission of digital audio used on virtually every audio device with a digital out (Including the Apple TV). Sony also invented the now defunct 3.5inch Floppy Disk, that was the primary disk format around the world for at least a decade.
It is often argued that Sony’s Memory stick format is not successful because there hasn’t been wide spread adoption of it by other companies, but the sheer number of Sony products that use memory stick alone and the volume at which they sell make the format a success. If the lack of third party adoption is your only measure of success then by that measure iTunes should be considered a massive failure.
The perceived lack of success of Sony’s UMD format is another misconception. The idea of movies on UMD was certainly a failure. It was doomed from the start because both the distributers and retailers jacked up the prices to ridiculous levels, where it was often more expensive to buy a poorer quality movie on UMD than it was to buy the DVD. Yet the disk format itself is used for the distribution of PSP games. The PSP has been a huge success so for its intended task, UMD has been reasonably successful, just not for movies.
Sony, like Apple in many ways has always been an innovator. It is constantly inventing products. Some of them succeed and some of them don’t, but at least they try. It doesn’t wait around for others to come up with something and then adopt it, it is out there pushing the boundaries of technology. Like I said earlier success and failure in the technology world comes in cycles. Sony has had some dramatic failures but also some great successes, but they never stand still.
I have always had a great respect for the people at Sony, because they are not afraid to invent for the sake of inventing. I’m not saying that the management at Sony have not made some bad decisions over the years but what large corporation hasn’t. There was a time when IBM was king of the computing world and when the Apple II was the dominant personal computer. One of the world’s biggest Airlines used to be Pan-Am, one of the most popular formats for photography was the polaroid and the biggest name in video games was Atari. Sony has made its mistakes but it never stopped innovating. It always bounces back and the geniuses at the company always keep inventing.
The funny thing about formats is that only seem to be considered proprietary if they are unsuccessful. If a format is a success it’s considered a standard. And Sony have contributed more standards over their lifetime than any other company I know of.
(Source: Wikipedia)
[UPDATED to fix numerous typos]
Technorati Tags: Sony, Technology, Blu-Ray, Minidisc, Playstation, Broadcast
Proof that the people at the top of the Recording Industry are a bunch of, I believe the technical term is: “A@$%holes.”
From T3:
With iPlayer already established as one of the most popular sites on the net, the Beeb is getting tough with any ISP that tries to traffic shape site content. Auntie has threatened to create a blacklist of providers attempting to control the volume of traffic being sent into a network in a specified period or the maximum rate at which traffic is sent.
Oh my God, this is hilarious. Someone took the classic 1999 iMac Commercial with Jeff Goldblum and slowed it down 30%. The result: Drunk Jeff. Classic.
[Via MacUser, via Macenstein]
Be careful what you read on the internet. Tech sites have a habit of releasing press releases and stories today that are completely bogus. Just remember, you’ve been warned.
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