Digital Rights Management for the Printed Page?

"I was somewhat shocked when I looked recently at the statistics regarding the volume of digital content being posted to newsgroups. As one would assume -- since these are newsgroups -- pornographic content (alt.binaries.pictures.erotica) still leads the list in newsgroup topics, and the most active posting of conventional content is in the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.complete_cd group. But right behind music CDs is alt.binaries.pictures.comics, in which ad hoc groups of individuals are working together to digitize the entire output of the comic book industry. And I'm not talking about teenagers scanning last week's issues of Marvel comics, but rather complete volumes of material being dilligently scanned by people who know what they're doing. For example, there's a massive project underway to digitize every issue of every title published by DC Comics (then the industry leader) during the 1950s.... The group has scanned the complete content of almost 400 superhero comics, including covers, at what appears to be 400% of actual size -- in other words, good enough for reproduction. Almost every one of the scans I looked at was exceptional. Each page is posted as a JPG in the newsgroup, which also carries the output of similar projects devoted to virtually every genre and most publishers in every decade of comics history. This says, to me, that a digital archive of the history of comics will exist at some point in (nearer rather than more distant) future, accomplished entirely by readers, not the comic book business itself.

Now, consider that virtually the entire output of the last several decades of recorded music has been digitized by listeners and fans, not by the recording industry, and you'll soon understand how content archives (sounds, images, motion pictures) are, almost by themselves, being rendered in digital format. This is a remarkable cultural fact, and, indicative of just how content owners no longer control their own holdings. As I was fond of reminding at the Studios, if you can see it or hear it, you can copy it. Add 'read it,' I guess, after hearing about the comic book projects. Now, how long do you think it will be before someone proposes digital rights management for the printed page?" [The Wednesday Morning Quarterback]

[The Shifted Librarian]
9:31:33 AM  #  

Mobile IM: SMS the American Way. Google's now-annual ranking of the Zeitgeist is out! For those of you who haven't seen this yet, it's Google's redaction of the year's most popular search terms. As usual, I find the whole thing fascinating: Which men, women, news events, games, TV shows, and memes dominated the English-speaking, Net-using world? Search engines have become the evolving rorschach blots of the age; hell, I wish I could view a real-time scrollbar of Google's top searches on a daily basis.

Here's the trend I find most interesting in this year's Zeitgeist: Trillian hit number 13 on the "Top 20 Gaining Queries" -- queries that grew the most this year. Trillian is, of course, the instant-messaging killer app: It lets you connect to ICQ, AOL IM, MS Messenger and Yahoo Messenger (as well as IRC, for all you l33t d00dz) all at once. It's a great indicator of how messaging is becoming the de facto way people keep in contact -- by pinging each other all day long, instead of composing back-and-forth emails.

It probably also foregrounds how important the "presence" aspect of instant messaging is becoming: The ability to know which of your posse is online, at any point in time. I use my Danger Hiptop a lot for that reason. When I'm on the road and want to know where everyone is, I zip for a second onto AOL IM and see who's online; it gives me this nigh-ESP-like sense of my location in the datasphere. [Smart Mobs]

9:20:23 AM  #