One is silver and the other’s gold…

As the new media vs. old media battle continues to unfold, it has been interesting to watch how each vacillates between courageous innovator and meek victim. First we had the DMCA and the proliferation of semi-hidden, contract based schemes of reservation and denial of traditional rights. Then the old media guys started suing their customers. Then the old media guys started suing the new media guys. And now this: The Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade group consisting of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and others, has filed a complaint with the FTC, asserting that the old media guys have, for years, been making deceptive statements to their customers about the scope and nature of their intellectual property rights. Go Team! The motivation for this complaint, according to the CCIA, is protection of consumers. Copyright statements warnings made, say, at the start of a ballgame or movie are, to the CCIA “…an assault on free expression and force consumers to continually forgo lawful activities to which they are entitled under federal law and the Constitution.” Dag, y’all. Lets think on that a minute… Stormy nights, they say, make for strange bedfellows…and Google and Microsoft are certainly strange bedfellows. In one corner we’ve got the quintessential digital media giant– strong proponent of a brutal regime of copyright power. In the other corner, we’ve got those friendly upstarts at Google, who want free access (and the ability to freely transmit) all digititalizable information that is…including the contents of your own hard drive. So why the love? Neither one of them has a track record of making anything particularly interesting by way of content. For content, they have to reach out. As poor quality snippets of teenage guitar wizards , jackass wannabes, and video game superstars can only take them so far, they’d like to continue to bolster their content libraries with assets provided by the old media guys who take the time, spend the money, and have the experience to do it right.

Don’t buy it! Though I agree with many of the principles of the complaint–especially those asserting the problems with limiting statutory and constitutional rights–many CCIA members are guilty of the same and worse. SO what do they want? More on that later…

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