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There is much stuff on the Doc Searls blog on the whole question of PageRank, blogs and paid news archives. Here's one place to get you started.
This got me thinking about a whole number of things that might be related. Where intellectual property is concerned, there is a war beginning between creators and owners. The general public is often caught in the middle, but owners use them for target practice far more than the creators do.
Consider:
- The New York Times and other professional media outlets try to charge users for access to their electronic archives. When freelance writers complain and demand a share of the profits, and the Supreme Court agrees, the Times removes the content from the archives. Losers: creators and the public.
- The Unix operating system is created by the pioneers at Bell Labs. It is enhanced and broadened by a large community of coders. Some years later, another community of coders create a Unix-like and POSIX-compliant operating system called Linux. A decade or so after that, SCO announces that Linux has some of the Unix code it now owns, sues IBM for $1 billion and tells Linux users that they are at risk of lawsuits, too! Not surprisingly, Unix (and Linux)'s biggest rival puts its money on the owners. As above, the feeling appears to be "You may have created it, but we own it now. Tough luck, suckers!" See Eric Raymond and Rob Landley for the sordid history.
- Musicians create music for themselves, mostly, and they hope people like it. It's possible to make a nice living from making music, but to reach the most people and live the rock star fantasy, you must sell all the rights to your recordings to one of the megacorporations who market recordings. In the event that you want to distribute electronic copies of your music on the 'Net...guess what? "You may have created it, but we own it now. Tough luck, suckers!"
- Ever more concentrated media ownership narrows the options for journalists, authors, producers and performers to reach the public. Alternative voices ever more silenced. Losers: creators who don't tow the line and the public.
These are just a few examples. While "the media" isn't the whole problem, fighting for a media that reflects everything that happens in our society and culture(s) is a good thing.
So I look forward to Dan Gillmor's next book. I also look forward to the National Conference on Media Reform, sponsored by Free Press.
11:22:05 PM 
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