Vader's Law
Dean
The BBC is reportedly upset because an advance copy of the new Doctor Who has been making its way all over the internet, a full week before it was first scheduled for broadcast in the UK, and without plans even having meen made yet for U.S. distribution.
Lair over at "the blog is full of crap" has formulatd something he calls "Vader's Law," and it's not full of crap. As he notes:
* Content demands to be free of the bonds of platform. Transfer from one platform to the next is nearly seamless and instant these days. Any attempt to interfere with convenience and conversion will result not in security but resentment from those needing to resort to those measures.
* Content is growing increasingly independent of schedule and time. When the content is ready for distribution, it will escape to the public one way or another. No programming manager, distribution entity, or marketer can prevent it from happening to fit their business plan. The longer a delay between completion and release, the greater the chance for leak.
* Content does not respect artificial barriers like political boundaries. If you release content in one market and delay or prevent it for another, that content will make it to the other "embargoed" market through any possible platform and transmission method available.
* People deliberately starved of content for a decade or two as Who-Heads have been will attack it with the fervor of a pit bull on a baby covered with barbecue sauce dangled in front of him.
* Someone on the inside of your organization will take sympathy on those starved people and sneak "just a copy" to a friend. In this age, all it takes is one unprotected copy to get out.
* Same goes for a single reviewer or critic with a copy of it. (This happens with Oscar-nominated movie review copies getting ripped and BitTorrented every year now.)
* No matter how smart your engineers are at encrypting and licensing your content, they're always at least one person at university smarter than all of them combined who will show you up in a heartbeat.
As Lair points out, "the more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers." It strikes me that companies which do not adapt to this reality and find ways to work with it rather than against it are making a huge miscalculation.
Anyway, his entire post on this is good: Click here to read the whole thing.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Who's On First
- Eccleston Quits
- Vader's Law
- Cool Old Music
My gripe on the entire “intellectual property” model for businesses is that so many countries have little concept or tradition of intellectual property. One of the Iraqi bloggers posted that he'd just got a copy of The Incredibles—before it was released anywhere, for example. This is the norm in much of the world.
Having enforceable copyrights here places American consumers (and businesses) at a competitive disadvantage with consumers and businesses where copyrights either are not enforced or not enforceable.
So the place intellectual property rights are enforced is where a big share of intellectual property comes from?
I am shocked! shocked! to learn that places where property rights are enforced produces a lot of property.
Be careful with triumphalism in Vader's Law. If property rights cannot be enforced, you have a whole new set of problems, starting with, "Who'll invest?"
Dean is onto something with the marketing, but if companies cannot protect their intellectual property, they'll stop investing in it.
Just as I sometimes have to remind bloggers just how dependent they are on professional journalists to do the legwork for them. Be careful not to kill the golden goose.
I am shocked! shocked! to learn that places where property rights are enforced are also place that produce a lot of property.
Jebus I can't proof when I'm doing two things at once.
So Dean, which one was your favorite doctor?
If Eccleston's performance stays consistent with what we've seen in this first episode, however, he'll be a very close second at least.
Honestly I'm not an obsessive. I've always liked the show quite a bit but I don't live and die by it. It has a quirkiness to it that I enjoy. The most important thing about the show, though, is whoever's playing the Doctor. The special effects have alwasy been on the lowball end and really that's not the point since the show is more about ideas than the "gee whiz" effects. So if the central character isn't both funny and compelling, the show just doesn't work.
Princess Leia's comment, "the more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers," was made to Governor Tarkin, not Darth Vader.
Yes, I am that big a geek.