User-generated Content: GEN 230 Creative Expression: Literary Arts: Fall 2008

You can fool some people sometimes,
But you cant fool all the people all the time.
So now we see the light,
We gonna stand up for our rights!

So you better:
Get up, stand up! Stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up! Dont give up the fight!

-- Bob Marley

property
aka intellectual property?

raw material
for more information?

If information as raw material is replacing wood, steel, and plastic as raw material, then what you do with that information will be the economy of your generation.

Rip, mix, and burn

What is user-generated content?

text, images, music, and video made and shared by people online

Where do you find it online?

web sites, blogs, wikis, social networking sites, tags and feeds

old media	A content publisher gives you something you want in exchange for something you don't want (an advertisement) while the publisher has a moment of your attention.
new media	Consumers unshackle content from restrictions of time, place and manner.

The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it.

Formal research

The two recent studies cited here are the tip of the iceberg. Generation M better describes our Gamers, and Teen Content Creators better describes our Players. The research shows that many Gen M's are becoming content creators and that all content creators are Gen M's, too.

This report attempts to provide a detailed picture of the recreational, non-school-related media behavior of young people in the U.S. ...

In addition to easy physical access to most media, large numbers of these kids also report a social environment that is conducive to media use. ...

Few would deny that media play a central role in the lives of today’s children and adolescents. Their homes, indeed their bedrooms, are saturated with media. Many young people carry miniaturized, portable media with them wherever they go. They comprise the primary audience for popular music; they form important niche audiences for TV, movies, video games, and print media (each of these industries produces extensive content targeted primarily at kids); they typically are among the early adopters of personal computers (indeed, of most new media) and are a primary target of much of the content of the World Wide Web.

American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.

More than half of online teens are Content Creators.

Some 57% of online teens create content for the internet. That amounts to half of all teens ages 12-17, or about 12 million youth. These Content Creators report having done one or more of the following activities: create a blog; create or work on a personal webpage; create or work on a webpage for school, a friend, or an organization; share original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos online; or remix content found online into a new creation.

The most popular Content Creating activities are sharing self-authored content and working on webpages for others.

33% of online teens share their own creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos.

32% say that they have created or worked on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends or school assignments.

22% report keeping their own personal webpage.

19% have created their own online journal or blog.

About one in five internet-using teens (19%) says they remix content they find online into their own artistic creations.

Kids and Teens Spending More Time Online Than Ever Before

Over a three-year period, the top sites among teens 12-17 have shifted from those offering a selection of instant messaging buddy icons to those providing assistance with social networking profiles and page layouts. ... In September of this year, sites offering tools to improve social networking profiles with song lyrics, pictures, quotes and layout designs won out with those ages 12-17. PLyrics.com ranked No. 1 among teens, who made up 68.4 percent of its unique audience. Notably, nine out of the top 10 teen sites either offered content or tools for social networking site profiles, or were social networking sites themselves. Snapvine, which offers a voice player for social networking sites, ranked No. 2, with a 67.6 percent teen audience, followed by WhateverLife.com, with 60.6 percent.

Young consumers, who are just forming their purchasing patterns, gather at community sites.

Scope and scale

Second Life Population Statistics - 5,000,000 registered, 350,000 having logged in during the past seven days

The New New Economy: Earning Real Money in the Virtual World
by Knowledge@Wharton
Wharton School Publishing, November 4, 2005

In the multiplayer online games that make up the virtual economy, currencies such as the Linden dollar trade against the U.S. dollar, companies create markets for everything from magic shields to potions, and the most dedicated players can earn a living by collecting and selling assets that other players want. While the market for virtual asset trading is estimated at anywhere from $200 million to $1.5 billion, its actual size is debatable because transactions are generally undocumented and unregulated. What's clear, however, is that the virtual role-playing games are increasingly popular, profitable and controversial.

$6.5 million USD in transactions took place in the last 30 days since March 7, 2006.

240,000 distinct objects were sold in the last 30 days since March 7, 2006. Transactions each average $1 USD.

70% of SL's population create things using 25% of their time in-world.

Popular press coverage

Musicians, audience reach out to each other without radio's link (available only behind a paywall)
by John Boudreau
Knight Ridder, Buffalo News, October 17, 2005

GarageBand.com started in 1999 as a dot-com that was supposed to be a record label, but went bust in early 2002. Ali Partovi, whose previous start-up, LinkExchange, was acquired in 1998 by Microsoft for $265 million, bought the Web site's assets. Though he won't divulge revenues or investment details, Partovi said he has invested less than $1 million on reviving the operation so far. The company has four full-time employees and six part-timers. It has been profitable for about year.

GarageBand.com has more than a half-million registered users, and a catalog of well over 200,000 songs.

Apple Computer pays GarageBand.com for the rights to use the GarageBand name for its software that is used to record and mix music.

GarageBand.com added podcast technology this spring, allowing artists new ways to reach listeners. Musicians can podcast messages to their fans. Listeners can have music from favorite bands automatically downloaded, or podcast, to their digital music players. And amateur DJs can assemble podcast "radio" shows.

Since the podcast launch, GarageBand.com's monthly traffic has nearly doubled to about 2 million unique visitors a month, Partovi said.

Choice. Competition. Diversity. Equal Opportunity. Free Expression. Equitable Access. Self-Determination. These are among the basic values that must govern our communications systems in the digital age.

an online community that lets you meet your friends' friends.

Create a private community on MySpace and you can share photos, journals and interests with your growing network of mutual friends!

In the absence of radio play, garage bands all across America are establishing a presence on MySpace, a social-networking site popular with young adults.

According to MySpace, more than 240,000 artists of every kind -- from unsigned amateurs to international rock stars -- are using MySpace as a way to market themselves and build a fan base.

Artists are using the site to build massive social networks and spread the word about upcoming shows and CD releases.

Startup bands like My Chemical Romance have launched careers exclusively through MySpace, collecting more than 100,000 fans through the service.

Home to the web's biggest collection of fan-made videos related to ABC's Lost. Our goal is to provide Lost fans with an easily accessible listing of every lost video on the web. You can read the History of LVI page to see more of what LVI is all about.

Anyone can submit a video listing to LVI! The only requirement is your video must be somehow related to Lost and must comply with the LVI Rules. It can be a music video, a humor video, or even a Lost fan film!

Powerful computers and easy-to-use editing software are challenging our conceptions of authorship and creativity. As usual, the entertainment industry doesn't like this one bit. ...

While there have been odd pairings, match-ups and remixes for decades now, and club DJs have been doing something similar during live sets, the recent explosion in the number of tracks being created and disseminated is a direct result of the dramatic increase in the power of the average home computer and the widespread use on these computers of new software programs like Acid and ProTools. Home remixing is technically incredibly easy to do, in effect turning the vast world of pop culture into source material for an endless amount of slicing and dicing by desktop producers.

So easy, in fact, that bootlegs constitute the first genre of music that truly fulfills the "anyone can do it" promises originally made by punk and, to lesser extent, electronic music. Even punk rockers had to be able write the most rudimentary of songs. With bootlegs, even that low bar for traditional musicianship and composition is obliterated. Siva Vaidhyanthan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University and the author of "Copyrights and Copywrongs," believes that what we're seeing is the result of a democratization of creativity and the demystification of the process of authorship and creativity.

"It's about demolishing the myth that there has to be a special class of creators, and flattening out the creative curve so we can all contribute to our creative environment," says Vaidhyanthan. ...

They are all combining elements of other people's works in order to create new ones, in effect challenging the old model of authorship that presupposes that the building blocks of creativity should spill forth directly from the mind of the artist. ...

Technology has not only expanded who can create; in blurring the distinction between consumers and producers, these new digital tools are also challenging the very ideas of creativity and authorship. They are forcing us to recognize modes of cultural production that often make it impossible to answer such once simple questions as, Who wrote this song? The cultural landscape that emerges will be a plural space of creation in which it may even become pointless to designate who created exactly what, since everyone will be stealing from and remixing everyone else. The results might be confusing, but it'll probably be a lot more fun and worth listening to than a world where only those with the financial resources to pay licensing fees (e.g., P. Diddy) get to make songs with sampling.

remix culture

Remixing can be seen as a major conceptual leap: making music on a meta-structural level, drawing together and making sense of a much larger body of information by threading a continuous narrative through it. ... The importance of this cannot be overstated: in an era of information overload, the art of remixing and sampling as practiced by hiphop DJs and producers points to ways of working with information on higher levels of organization, pulling together the efforts of others into a multilayered multireferential whole which is much more than the sum of its parts.

Remix culture is a term employed by Lawrence Lessig to describe a society which allows and encourages derivative works. Such a culture would be, by default, permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of copyright holders. Lessig presents this as a desirable ideal and argues, among other things, that the health, progress, and wealth creation of a culture is fundamentally tied to this participatory remix process.

Sampling in musicmaking is a prime example of reuse, and hip-hop culture's implicit acceptance of the practice makes it a remix culture.

This term is often contrasted with permission culture.

Documentary Cookbook
The Center for New Documentary
Graduate School Of Journalism
University Of California, Berkeley, February 20, 2002

Watercolor instead of oil paint, mimeograph instead of linotype, garage bands instead of stadium rock, guerrillas instead of armies. The aim is to find methods and stories that are so naturally inexpensive that they can slip below the radar of financing.

A teenager in her bedroom can with cheap digital audio tools and self-taught ingenuity (re)produce powerfully re-signifying works made out of intercepted bits and pieces from the hypersaturated mediated environment in which she exists.

Lawrence Lessig

Lessig went around the country giving talks about Free Culture while he was writing the book. This Flash presentation would be a good introduction to his ideas and to his voice.

on the current state of intellectual property and its ramifications on creativity and culture timed against the audio of his OSCON 2002 keynote address

He is probably the most influential thinker involved in the copyfight debate because he has been writing about it for almost ten years and his books have been widely read. In addition, he started Creative Commons. The USB drive I passed around the first night of class had a video file, getcreative.mov, that explains Creative Commons.

Lessig is usually thought to be on the side of the "new", but if you read and listen carefully, you'll hear someone who is really on the side of the "old" but trying to prod them to not be so stupid about change.

I would like you to read Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, lessig_free_culture.pdf. It is a book in terms of length and it may be a severe challenge to you in terms of the major ideas, so don't put off starting it. Lessig means "free" as in liberated or unencumbered rather than free as in no money. He also means "free" as a verb, to free our culture from the constraints being imposed on it. You can also get it online:

http://Free-Culture.cc/freecontent/

http://Free-Culture.cc/remixes/

The multiple versions linked to the remix page demonstrate the concept of "free" as in liberated as well as "free" as in no money. The PDF versions are closest to the look and feel of printed ink on paper. You can format the HTML and plain text versions any way you want to. Printing is always an option. If you really get into these ideas, you will find the Referenced HTML version the richest:

http://eAsylum.net/freeculture/

In addition, you may want to explore Lessig's previous two books, The Future of Ideas and Code Is Law. The best place to start is his personal site:

http://Lessig.org/

and Google is always worth doing. The search phrase "Lessig copyright" (without the quotation marks) will get you more than you can digest easily.

I'm not interested in peer-to-peer surviving for the purpose of enabling copyright infringement. But I am really eager that the technology be allowed to exist so that the many legal uses that it will encourage -- including uses that will support the remix culture -- will be able to take off.

This is not a constitutional question in the Grokster case at all. The Grokster case is just a question of whether the court should apply a secondary liability on the manufacturer because the product was used illegally by a customer. And that secondary liability in the context of the copyright arena has been narrowly construed, because in the Sony Betamax case the court said that as long as a technology is capable of substantial noninfringing uses, the technology itself would not be considered an infringement. Congress, of course, is free to decide that a particular technology does more harm than good. But the principle of Sony is that it is Congress that should make that judgment and not courts.

Now the real reason that is an important principle is that courts are extraordinarily expensive places to adjudicate these questions. And the best example of that is the case of ReplayTV. They produced what looks like a modern version of the VCR and they spent two years in litigation with content owners who claimed that they were producing a technology that people used to create copyright infringement, and that they should be held responsible for it. Two years of litigation is enough to sap out all the resources of a startup company, and they were eventually forced into bankruptcy. I think the case stands for the obvious points that the Sony Betamax case was trying to make--if you can pull somebody into court under some vague standard of liability just because the tools are being used by people to create copyright infringement, that's a very good way to block new innovation that might change the way copyright material gets distributed. So it's a strategic opportunity to exercise control over the future of content development and distribution, and not so much as a way of protecting copyrights.

Now again, in that case, as in the VCR case, as in the peer-to-peer case, it's open for the copyright holder--which, of course, is one of the most powerful lobbies in America--to go to Congress and get them to address the specific problem that they complain about. And we can have an argument in Congress about whether some law should be passed banning a particular technology, but if you make the courts the arbiter of whether a technology should be allowed or not, then the courts become a tool, a weapon to be used in the marketplace. And they will stifle new innovation and new creativity because manufacturers are afraid of losing their money to lawyers. (my emphasis)

The OCA represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. Content in the OCA archive will be accessible soon through this website and through Yahoo!

The OCA will encourage the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the content owners and contributors.

Remix Fight! is a remixing community open to everyone. We get people to send us source files for their songs and then make that source available for download. People download that source, make a remix, and then e-mail an mp3 of their mix to us. Then, we post all the mp3s we’ve received and set up a poll so that visitors to the site can listen to the mixes and vote on which one they like the best. After a couple weeks, we close the poll and announce a winner.

That sounds great, so what do I win?

The respect and admiration of your peers (we hope), a shoutout on the front page, and a little bit of text (soon to be a snazzy graphic!) next to your name on the archive page for the fight. No money changes hands, no fancy gifts are mailed out, Hollywood producers probably won’t be calling you to collaborate with the next Britney Spears.

Sampling, Mashing, Sharing

This is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons, where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.

Remixers If you're into sampling, remixing and mash-ups grab the sample packs and a cappellas for download and you can upload your version back into ccMixter, for others to enjoy and re-sample. All legal.

Podcasters, directors and music lovers If you're into music, browse this site to hear some of the great remixes people have built from sampling music on this site, all licensed for use under Creative Commons license.

The BBC Creative Archive ... will allow people to download clips of BBC factual programmes from bbc.co.uk for non-commercial use, keep them on their PCs, manipulate and share them, so making the BBC's archives more accessible ....

However, the initiative also has broader public service ambitions to pioneer a new approach to public access rights in the digital age.

Paul Gerhardt, Joint Director, BBC Creative Archive explains: "We want to work in partnership with other broadcasters and public sector organisations to create a public and legal domain of audio visual material for the benefit of everyone in the UK.

"We hope the BBC Creative Archive can establish a model for others to follow, providing material for the new generation of digital creatives and stimulating the growth of the creative culture in the UK."

Access to the BBC Creative Archive will be based on the Creative Commons model already working in the United States, which proposes a middle way to rights management, rather than the extremes of the pure public domain or the reservation of all rights.

America's entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe's biggest broadcasters -- the BBC -- is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it.

Unlike Hollywood, the BBC is eager and willing to work with a burgeoning group of content providers whose interests are aligned with its own: its audience. ...

With Backstage, BBC's online department takes all the goop in its content-management system -- sports scores and TV listings, breaking news and editorials, conferences and weather -- and exposes it as a set of standard programming interfaces. Anyone who can hack a little Perl or Python can mix these into any kind of service they can imagine.

The crowning glory of the Beeb's openness is the Creative Archive.

The Creative Archive is an attempt to digitize all the programming the BBC has commissioned, clear the copyrights and post it online with a Creative Commons-like license. This will allow Britons to download the BBC's content, distribute it and noncommercially remix it into their own films, music, gags, projects and school reports. ...

Practically every country in the world needs to come up with a strategy for the "analog switch-off" -- the day when the analog TV towers go dark, leaving only digital TV behind. To get there, citizens need to get new digital receivers, or risk having their TVs stop working after the switch-off. In most countries, the switch-off will be sometime before 2010.

In Britain, the BBC led the charge with something called Freeview, a system for transmitting 30 free digital TV stations and 20 free digital radio stations to the nation's analog TV sets.

A digital receiver sits on top of the TV, attached to a set of rabbit ears, and provides as many channels as most Americans get on basic cable, for free, forever.

Britons have embraced Freeview in spades, and the United Kingdom will likely effect the first major analog switch-off as a result.

Who will be in charge of culture?

This is not a philosophical question, it's a practical one and it could be decided in the next few years. The internet is making a new kind of culture possible: one where individuals can be a part of creating the mainstream. Hollywood is doing everything it can to stop that from happening and the next few years could define the next few decades. Fort Culture is a homebase for understanding and discussing this fight.

San Francisco's KRON recently became the first major-market TV station in the US to supply much of its newsoom staff with laptops and digital video cameras, then train them to shoot, write, and produce stories on their own. KRON calls them VJs. Others in the biz sometimes refer to the combo role as "sojo" (solo journalist) or "one-man-band," while a producer + editor mashup is a "preditor." ...

Television is the ultimate 1.0, 'We talk, you shut up and watch' industry. That means the business model of local television news is fundamentally out of date. It's based on the concept that you're going to wait until 6:00, then we'll show you some things you may or may not care about, show you some commercials, show some more stuff you may or may not care about, show you some more commercials by which time it's quarter after the hour and lucky you, Scott, now we'll tell you the weather. ...

So now we have a choice as an industry. We can sit around like many of the people quoted in this article, break open the scrapbooks, and pine for the good ole days of local TV news' mythical golden era. Or we can try to create something new that makes sense within today's economics and that at the same time fixes many of the existing problems with the genre.

eBay's Secret Ingredient (no longer available online)
by Erick Schonfeld
Business 2.0 , March 2002

If your customers gladly held your inventory, shipped your products, and did all your marketing, you'd make money online too. Only question: Can eBay keep growing and not destroy the social capital that is its unique competitive advantage?

collaborative, mobile radio ... that allows anyone to have their own radio station, broadcasted among wirelessly capable devices, some in cars, in an ad-hoc wireless network. The system can become aware of individual preferences and is able to choose songs and podcasts that people want to hear, on their own devices and car stereos and in devices and car stereos around them.

Roadcasting provides a set of methods to transform radio into a community-driven interactive medium. Using collaborative filtering technologies, it enables rich passive and interactive experiences for 'DJs' and listeners in a way that has not previously been possible. Roadcasting matches you to radio stations that play the content that you want to hear.

With Roadcasting, it becomes incredibly easy to have your own radio station heard by others in their cars, homes, and offices within the reach of your ad-hoc network, determined by the wireless technology used.

Sharing music experiences between people in vehicles in the immediate surrounding. This is accomplished by streaming MP3 files between nodes in an ad hoc network. Since the application is based on handheld computers, the usage of the tool is accommodated in a wide variety of settings.

a handheld ad-hoc radio device for local music sharing

tunA is a mobile wireless application that allows users to share their music locally through handheld devices. Users can "tune in" to other nearby tunA music players and listen to what someone else is listening to. Developed on iPaqs and connected via 802.11b in ad-hoc mode, the application displays a list of people using tunA that are in range, gives access to their profile and playlist information, and enables synchronized peer-to-peer audio streaming.

remix culture

Sampling, Mashing, Sharing

This is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons, where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.

Remixers If you're into sampling, remixing and mash-ups grab the sample packs and a cappellas for download and you can upload your version back into ccMixter, for others to enjoy and re-sample. All legal.

Podcasters, directors and music lovers If you're into music, browse this site to hear some of the great remixes people have built from sampling music on this site, all licensed for use under Creative Commons license.

Technology is shifting the balance of power between big media and regular people. The rise of “personal media” is throwing the old rules into disarray.

We are no longer couch potatoes absorbing whatever mass media may funnel our way. We produce, publish, reinvent, and share personal media. We make our own movies. We create digital photos, animation, niche news sites, hyperfiction, and online picture albums. We program our personal video recorders so that we watch programming not on the networks’ schedule but on our terms. We capture TV shows and stream them from one room to another on home networks. We listen to Web radio or satellite stations that cater to our personalized tastes. We download music from the Net to our MP3 players and burn music to our own CDs. And some of us record music and distribute our works on the Internet.

We make our own media. In many ways, we are our own media.

Remix culture has hit the browser. Just as you can pimp your Scion with snap-on parts, you can modify Web sites to suit your tastes - whether the authors like it or not. The enabling technology, called Greasemonkey, was created by Aaron Boodman, a software engineer who got sick of dealing with the Web on other people's terms. "I would often encounter a Web page that didn't work the way I wanted," says Boodman, who now writes code at Google and still tinkers with the software. "And I'd think to myself, I could easily fix it if I could just run my own JavaScript in the page."

Greasemonkey is an extension for the Firefox browser that lets Boodman's Java�Script - or anyone else's - alter a Web page as it's downloaded. The site serves the same old data, but you get to decide what Firefox displays. Greasemonkey junkies have posted more than 600 downloadable site mods, or user scripts, at www.greasemonkeyed.com.

What is Greasemonkey?
Greasemonkey is a plugin (referred to as an 'extension') for the Firefox browser. It allows you to change how your favorite pages behave and look. There are many scripts that have already been written, and if you know javascript you can easily create your own! This site is a repository to download and install Greasemonkey scripts.

What is tagging?
Userscripts.com uses tagging to organize scripts on the site. If you are logged in, you can assign any given script keywords (referred to as a tag) that it is then associated with. For example, you might give a script that modifies Google's GMail the tags google, gmail, and email. These tags will then show up in the tags box on the main page, and you can also search based on any of these tags.

A POD is a small button that you add into your website where ever you feel actions will speak louder than words. Once you sign up for an account, you can then go into your admin area and very simply record a short movie about your product. ...

Imagine scattering these PODS around on all pages of your website and have them play video messages about your product. Now, anytime you want to update a particular POD you enter your admin and record a new updated video message! It is that easy, one admin area for all your PODS and your website is updated and the new message is instantly viewable!!

Publish your videos into channels

Broadcast Machine is software for your website that can publish fullscreen video files to thousands, using torrent technology to reduce or eliminate bandwidth costs. It is free, open source, and designed for easy installation.

While you have surely read about HP Media Centers and new DVRs from cable providers, the real action is underground: a slow and steady invasion of incredible products created by slick young coders who are sick of products designed not to make life easier but to appease a Hollywood preoccupied with digital rights management. The leader in this effort is MythTV, perhaps the most powerful DVR yet devised.

MythTV is all the rage among high-level engineering types in Silicon Valley. It's the brainchild of 26-year-old Isaac Richards, who told me he started it two and a half years ago because he "was bored." MythTV is a free software system written in C++ that, when combined with various TV tuner, audio, and other cards, will turn a small computer into a slick, powerful, feature-rich DVR. Do you hate commercials? You can set it up so that it doesn't just skip commercials in playback but never records them in the first place, so there's nothing to skip. ...

There are other implications of all this. In a changing universe, technologists will refuse to be hemmed in by artificial roadblocks created for the purpose of maintaining the status quo. Microsoft and Hollywood and whoever else can create all the DRM schemes they want; they can sue college kids for tradingsongs, block trading networks, shut down BitTorrent systems—but it won't do them any good. The forces of "We want it our way" will overpower them again and again, because that's the way technology works.

And this will all be shared. In a networked, computer-based world, the sense of community breeds a socialistic desire to share, not covet. This mentality is at the root of all the open-source activity and cannot be ignored or denied. I want my MythTV.

modified: September 15, 2008
by Douglas Anderson
http://toLearn.net/gen230/usercontent.htm

User-Generated Content

GEN 230 Creative Expression: Literary Arts - Fall 2008

Rip, mix, and burn

Formal research

Scope and scale

Popular press coverage

remix culture

Lawrence Lessig

remix culture