Clay Shirky: Why SOPA is a bad idea
“The 20th century was a great time to be a media company, because the thing you had on your side was scarcity. If you were making a TV show, it didn’t have to be better than all TV shows ever made - it only had to be better than the two other shows that were on at the same time. Which is a very low threshold of competitive difficulty! Which meant that if you fielded average content, you got a third of the U.S. public for free. Tens of millions of users, for simply doing something that wasn’t too terrible. This was like having a license to print money and a barrel of free ink.
But technology moved on, as technology is wont to do.”
And:
“It turned out we’re not really couch potatoes. We don’t really like to only consume. We do like to consume, but every time one of these new tools came along, it turned out we also liked to produce, and we like to share.”
There’s more. It’s great. And so useful. Watch.
(Also, 939,627 views in a week. Not too shabby.)
