Feel The Burn
A discussion group member made this post recently which says a lot about the state of distributing and manufacturing consumer electronics and the bundling of software content with devices.
Sams Club in Flint, MI has LG internal DVD burners that will do 16X DVD+/-R’s, RW’s, DVD-RAM, CD/RW’s and double layer DVD’s for $79… The unit comes with Nero Express, Nero BackItUp, InCD, PowerDVD, & Power Producer Gold
What it says to me is not comforting. Who got to keep what part of $79 when a consumer purchased this product? Whose content will be recorded onto these discs?
In the first postwar decade in major economies, consumer electronics items were major purchases after a home, a car, and appliances. There were maintenance and repair shops, there was a secondary resale market for trade-ins, and the content was advertiser supported broadcast radio and television. People structured their lives around broadcasting schedules for information and entertainment. Global reporting of news transformed our perceptions of world events and cultures, and the concept of censorship and propaganda took on new meaning proportionate to the magnitude of the new media. Music, motion pictures, theatre and games of chance were consumed in public places.
Then packaged entertainment media in the form of vinyl records in the 1960’s became the second major content business to sell directly to the consumer after printed information. At the time, invention, manufacturing, and consumption of consumer electronics occurred in the same countries. The concepts of record albums and singles were rooted in the culture. A generation grew up around the recording and distribution of its own popular music. Collecting music in a home library next to the popular fiction, classics, and reference books also became established culturally. Transistor radios, powered by batteries, mass produced and imported, allowed people to take their music with them.
By the 1970’s, motion pictures joined printed information and prerecorded music in the market in the form of packaged, prerecorded videotape and videodisc. The media was analog and the content shared with broadcasting and theatres. Consumers were introduced to home recording of prerecorded audio and video programming as an alternative to buying packaged content. They liked it. They really liked it. The criminalization of casual copying as a form of piracy in the league of professional underworld counterfeiting rings soon followed.
In the age of digital content, consumer electronics manufacturers have resorted to the same tactics as content owners to appeal to government for protection by blocking unlicensed devices from being sold. The value of the IP in a device has taken on a different role, as items in the Bill of Materials, or list of components, in a piece of equipment. Dolby, a company that never actually made anything tangible except money, was way ahead of its time.
Finally, with the introduction of microprocessors into consumer electronics, computer games became the fourth content sector to become packaged for home consumption. By the 1980’s, the digitalization of information, music and video had begun and over the following 20 years it was nearly completed. The 1990’s enjoyed a period of great creativity and commerce in multimedia CD-ROM that ended abruptly with the Internet. First text, then music, and now video have found their way around the network in a form of peer to peer traffic that defies both the content owners and the professional counterfeiters efforts to interject any tolls, although advertising has functioned as a transaction subsidy. But the Internet has given rise to a form of personal expression and creativity that has flourished without the intervention of publishers.
Today, both the content and the device have been devalued to the point where government intervention is necessary to defend the legitimacy of the original. The price of devices is so low there is no longer a repair option, just replacement. This is because of cost reduction in manufacturing materials, processes and labor to the point where the IP license fee is the last item in the list of materials to be squeezed. The price of content is so high, on the other hand, that one out of every three discs sold is counterfeit, according to the IFPI.
Clearly this is not a good situation for anyone, and yet continued pressure on governments to filter the Internet I fear will only exacerbate the problem for business, abrogate important consumer rights and wants, and give governments license to censor, manipulate, and propagandize the public. I would like to see the pendulum swing back to a new age of appropriately priced and distributed content as well as higher value electronics. I would like to be part of a dialog about how to restore value squeezed out of content and technology by means other than invading privacy, limiting freedom, and punishing consumers. I would like content owners to be compensated, invention to be rewarded, and piracy to be fought where content and devices are made for resale.
posted by julia b schwerin