A Causality of the Information Revolution
May. 11th, 2008 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatLast night ran into my favorite professional movie reviewer, Glenn Kenny, at our local bar, Abilene. Asked him how the movie critic biz was going, and he told me, not so great - turns out he was laid-off this week. Yet another casuality of the massive critic lay-offs happening at area newspapers and magazines over the last few weeks. Not sure you heard about it? Probably not. Which is really sad, because unlike amateur film reviewers, these guys actually have time to see a wide variety of films and have the training to critique them. They've honed this skill. Without them, we wouldn't know about those tiny foreign and indie gems such as Little Miss Sunshine, or Babett's Feast or even Remains of the Day. Whose to blame? Ah, we are. Or to be fair, the amateur writers who review films, music, television, and books on the internet. The internet, Glenn tells me has changed professional writing. His friends, freelancers, have to work twice as hard to get the same amount of money they did for their work several years ago. To make a living on the net, he advised, you have to work overtime, constantly, just to get nickels and dimes from advertisers. Yes, those advertisements you despise are paying the rent of many professional magazine and newspaper writers who can now only get work writing for online zines.
None of this surprises me, I sort of predicted it way back in the late 90's while I was on two different copyright listserves. One was for professional writers, copyright managers, and attorneys - the other for libraians and copyright specialists. The library listserve was scared that the copyright act under negotation at the time - DCMA or something or other - would kill fair use and make it difficult for people to access content without paying lots of money. The writer/attorny copyright listserve - was scared that their content would be up for grabs and people would be able to steal it without them knowing. Of the two, I found myself agreeing with the writer/attorney listserve. They were right. The internet or what I like to call the information revolution would change intellectual property law not to mention professional writing, and not necessarily for the better.
Premiere Magazine was amongst the first of the casualities. My favorite entertainment mag, which had great articles on the process of filmmaking, has now been regulated to a website. And not a great one. It's articles more or less free, with the writers making very little. The same thing is slowly happening to Entertainment Weekly. The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly may be safe for a while. But I've watched Newsweek and Time dwindle.
Part of the problem is so much of the content of these mags is readily available online. People don't have to buy the mag to read it any more, so subscriptions have gone down, so has revenue.
Movies, tv shows, comic books - easily downloaded from the net, often before they end up in theaters or on sale. People trade them much the same way they do music. Turns out Napster was just the beginning.
I look at what fans do with other's intellectual property and often cringe. I often wonder how these people would feel if someone took their work and did to it, what they do to someone else's?
There are times, much like this week, that I find myself hating the net, missing the 90s or early 2000, when we didn't have YouTube or LiveJournal or the ability to create icons, when magazines were still readily available, and vids were impossible to download. And during those times, it occurs to me that this must have been what my parents and grandparents and great great grandparents thought during the industrial revolution. Change is often violent, always painful, and not always good.
None of this surprises me, I sort of predicted it way back in the late 90's while I was on two different copyright listserves. One was for professional writers, copyright managers, and attorneys - the other for libraians and copyright specialists. The library listserve was scared that the copyright act under negotation at the time - DCMA or something or other - would kill fair use and make it difficult for people to access content without paying lots of money. The writer/attorny copyright listserve - was scared that their content would be up for grabs and people would be able to steal it without them knowing. Of the two, I found myself agreeing with the writer/attorney listserve. They were right. The internet or what I like to call the information revolution would change intellectual property law not to mention professional writing, and not necessarily for the better.
Premiere Magazine was amongst the first of the casualities. My favorite entertainment mag, which had great articles on the process of filmmaking, has now been regulated to a website. And not a great one. It's articles more or less free, with the writers making very little. The same thing is slowly happening to Entertainment Weekly. The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly may be safe for a while. But I've watched Newsweek and Time dwindle.
Part of the problem is so much of the content of these mags is readily available online. People don't have to buy the mag to read it any more, so subscriptions have gone down, so has revenue.
Movies, tv shows, comic books - easily downloaded from the net, often before they end up in theaters or on sale. People trade them much the same way they do music. Turns out Napster was just the beginning.
I look at what fans do with other's intellectual property and often cringe. I often wonder how these people would feel if someone took their work and did to it, what they do to someone else's?
There are times, much like this week, that I find myself hating the net, missing the 90s or early 2000, when we didn't have YouTube or LiveJournal or the ability to create icons, when magazines were still readily available, and vids were impossible to download. And during those times, it occurs to me that this must have been what my parents and grandparents and great great grandparents thought during the industrial revolution. Change is often violent, always painful, and not always good.