Free Brianna LaHara!
Sept 11, 2003
Gee, who could have predicted that bringing the full weight of the court system down on the head of a 12-year old girl would result in some pretty bad publicity? I agree with this writer: "what we've seen in the last couple weeks, on stage and in the courts, is the exposure of the current spiritual and creative (and perhaps soon, financial) bankruptcy of the pop music industry." And more: "we are seeing is an upwelling of mass desire (or mass frustration) by an entire generation." Now OLDaily readers may wonder why I keep returning to this story again and again: it's because I see the exact same scenario playing out (albeit on a smaller scale, with less publicity) in the e-learning industry. Do you still think you can lock up educational content and force people to buy special viewers or software? Several people sent me this item observing that MIT's Open CourseWare project has attracted more than 100 million hits in the last year. How can we make this any clearer? I have been up to my ears in DRM discussions over the last year and I've seen no evidence that the people at Microsoft, at Adobe, at Thompson or at Elsevier are any smarter than the people at the RIAA. That makes me sad, because there are hundreds of millions of people who need an education now and the only thing preventing them from getting it is a bunch of people with the same mentality as those who would sue a 12-year old honour student from the projects. And make her pay $2000.
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