CLASH OF THE TITANS

We are definitely in a period of battles when it comes to the technology world. One of the problems is that this country is still living off of old laws and as technology grows, so should the laws. But they don't!

Ironically the top three items sold on the internet are also the three battles going on in the technology world. Music, Movies, and Books.

CLASH #1: MUSIC
This is the most famous of the three. I run an artist management company and all my artists were doing well launching their careers. When Napster hit the scene at the turn of the century, my new artists couldn't even make a living off of CD sales. Music was being stolen by the billions. Since then, our company has chosen the path of Hollywood. Music definitely is not a good industry to be at this time.

Once the music reaches all time piracy levels, here comes the OLD gate keepers (RIAA) who are living by the OLD laws. They begin suing everyone. They strong armed ISPs for private information on users. They even sued innocent people who didn't even know how to turn on a computer. It was quite embarrassing.

If I buy a CD, am I allowed to have one copy as back up? Why can't I make many copies. I have not stolen anything. It's like a photograph. I can scan a photograph that I bough and send to all my friends with out any consequence. The moment I do that with music, forget it!

There is so much wrong with the music industry. WHY DO WE STILL PRODUCE ALBUMS. Now that everyone is on iTunes, why not just produce individual songs. I will tell you why. Because no one would by 9 out of 10 songs from an artist. Every CD I own has 3 good songs and 7 bad ones. The music industry is still run by 60 year old men who remember having lunch with Sinatra in the good old days. Technology will force that to change.

CLASH #2: MOVIES

The only reason movies haven't been pirated as much as music is because of bandwidth. Why do you think your ISPs are going all "Big Brother" on us. We will soon be capped on how much we can download on the internet. Time Warner and Verizon are already doing it. You only get about 40 Gig a month. That's about one movie's worth in download terms, depending on the quality of the movie. If you want HD, forget it.

The day a movie comes out in theaters my sister can walk her street and buy a dvd copy for only $10. Can you believe that???? I won't tell you that she lives in New York, because she might get in trouble. Sometimes she can get them before they hit theaters. That's pretty bad.

My family stopped going to theaters years ago. I won't spend $50 for the family to see a movie, when in 4 months I can own the movie for $19.99. This year we stopped buying DVDs altogether. There is no reason to buy the movie for $19.99 when we just watch it once or twice. We could rent it twice for about $10. We have over 1000 dvds in our movie room and half are still in the wrapper. Once again technology will change the OLD ways. I predict DVDs will be gone in less than 5 years.

CLASH #3: BOOKS

This fight just started today. Two days ago, Amazon's Kindle 2 came out with a feature that reads a book out loud for you. How cool is that. It was only cool for two days. Today the OLD gate keepers from the Authors Guild told Amazon that reading a book to people makes it an audio book and that is against copyright laws. I can't wait to see how this clash turns out.

Google was scanning all books for the worlds biggest online library. Oh no!!! Don't make books electronic. They can be copied as quickly as music, if not, even faster. It's just text.

All of these fights are about money, of course. OLD gate keepers who have been chosen to control the money for the big three industries are losing control. Their towers are crumbling by the hammer of technology. It's going to happen. Don't fight it, because Goliath will always lose in the public eye.

The next CLASH coming is patents. It's not here yet, but it's coming. Round #1: Apple vs. Google?