I'm at the Progress
and Freedom Foundation's annual Aspen Summit.
This year much of the emphasis is on content, so my level of interest is
even more intense than usual.
At the opening reception, Sun's president, Jonathan Schwartz, gave a compelling presentation and announced Sun's new "DReaM Project," which seems to be at the very least an open source DRM solution, and perhaps more.
Here's a news story on the announcement, which also quotes yours truly as he awkwardly attempted to frame a useful question during the Q&A.
Much of what Mr. Schwartz said was compelling, and some of it was fairly incomprehensible. There was quite a bit of discussion at private receptions afterward as to exactly what Sun is pushing.
At the end of the evening, I'm still not sure, however, it does seem to me that the right context in which to view this announcement is Sun's competition with Microsoft. My guess is that Sun is worried that Microsoft's proprietary DRM solution, with the cooperation of the content producers, will become an industry standard, and Sun wants to do what it can do to keep that from happening.
Perhaps I'm wrong.
I enjoyed Mr. Schwartz's comments, although I was troubled by what seemed to be a lack of appreciation for the capital-intensive nature of content production. He belittled, for example, what he called the model of "I have a movie and you have some money; if you want my movie you have to give me some money." Schwartz said that he doesn't think that this is what people want.
Well, for sure, people would prefer a world where they got stuff for free. But that world doesn't exist, although Schwartz seems to think it does, since he mentioned Google and free checking accounts as things that consumers like that are free. This is what provoked my question, namely, that these things are NOT free. Just because consumers don't have to pay for them doesn't mean that NO ONE has to pay for them.
So we'll see. Given my bias, I'm always troubled when someone tries to cloak what they're doing in the glorious utopian world of the commons.
At the opening reception, Sun's president, Jonathan Schwartz, gave a compelling presentation and announced Sun's new "DReaM Project," which seems to be at the very least an open source DRM solution, and perhaps more.
Here's a news story on the announcement, which also quotes yours truly as he awkwardly attempted to frame a useful question during the Q&A.
Much of what Mr. Schwartz said was compelling, and some of it was fairly incomprehensible. There was quite a bit of discussion at private receptions afterward as to exactly what Sun is pushing.
At the end of the evening, I'm still not sure, however, it does seem to me that the right context in which to view this announcement is Sun's competition with Microsoft. My guess is that Sun is worried that Microsoft's proprietary DRM solution, with the cooperation of the content producers, will become an industry standard, and Sun wants to do what it can do to keep that from happening.
Perhaps I'm wrong.
I enjoyed Mr. Schwartz's comments, although I was troubled by what seemed to be a lack of appreciation for the capital-intensive nature of content production. He belittled, for example, what he called the model of "I have a movie and you have some money; if you want my movie you have to give me some money." Schwartz said that he doesn't think that this is what people want.
Well, for sure, people would prefer a world where they got stuff for free. But that world doesn't exist, although Schwartz seems to think it does, since he mentioned Google and free checking accounts as things that consumers like that are free. This is what provoked my question, namely, that these things are NOT free. Just because consumers don't have to pay for them doesn't mean that NO ONE has to pay for them.
So we'll see. Given my bias, I'm always troubled when someone tries to cloak what they're doing in the glorious utopian world of the commons.