Open-source entertainment

Dana Blankenhorn of Corante and ZDNet and I are two of the ringleaders of the Media Bloggers Association's ethics and standards team, currently deciding whether the MBA needs an ethics code, what (if anything) it should contain, and so on.

So it was cool to see his column today in ZDNet about Darknet: Open source content is theme of J.D. Lasica's Darknet. Excerpt:

Over the weekend I read J.D. Lasica's (right) book about the Copyright Wars, Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, and was surprised to find open source as an underlying theme.

In breaking down the boundaries between consuming and producing media, people really want an open source model for it, he writes. ...

Lasica describes some ways in which the open source media attitude can be monetized in the same way. Things like D.J. Dangermouse's Grey Album, fan fiction sites, and clubs where D.J.s sample snippets of music and film to create new experiences. The problem, he writes, is that copyright owners seek to ban these forms of expression, rather than profit from them.

Think of a Fred Astaire move, an Eric Clapton riff, or a Giorgio Armani design as a piece of code, then see how these are being combined to create new forms of art and experience, he writes. All we need are new business models and entertainment conglomerates can profit like IBM.

Why should we care? It's because the absolutism of the copyright industries prevents open source from even being used to play these works, let alone manipulate them. As computing increasingly moves from being the manipulation of letters and numbers to the manipulation of sounds and images, this absolutism could stop the open source software world in its tracks. ...

It's a good, thoughtful post about how the entertainment industry should open up its business models and profit from a more open-source model.