Offmessage

…finally makes it to offmessage. Personally I’ve been very slow to pick this one up (given it was written in November 2002), but one of the guys I work with at EMI sent me this… The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution. An incredibly well thought out and argued paper from 4 researchers at Microsoft discussing the impact of P2P networks and the way they will mutate and affect content owners in the future. Its dismissal of DRM is particularly refreshing. From the conclusion:

In short, if you are competing with the darknet, you must compete on the darknet�s own terms: that is convenience and low cost rather than additional security.

Well worth a spare 15 minutes.

…and they’re finally here. Laser projection keyboard. Very very pretty.

It’s amazing what has passed for offensive so recently.

No great surprise this one, really – more bandwidth, a new digital format and lo and behold people start copying and distributing it… (and thank you Bit Torrent, while you’re at it).

Two things strike me though – one of the items mentioned as being downloaded (and by inference being money lost to the ‘industry’) was The Office… Surely the BBC was about to give it away on the ‘net anyway? Also I particularly love the following quote from the BVA (the video industry equivalent of the BPI):

“As long as we can continue to make our traditional product attractive and future online offers affordable and easy, we hope to avoid the worst of the damage.”

Haven’t we heard almost exactly those words from the music industry? What makes them think they’ll do any better? Lucky DVD sales are on the rise I guess.

…more’s the pity.

Cunning plan for movie funding… make actors bid for roles on ebay.

Very nice, very real feeling site promoting the NS-5 domestic robot… Only a rather sadly detailed knowledge of Isaac Asimov pushed me to think that this was in fact a site promoting the new movie I, Robot. Not quite as convincing as Blair Witch (or even Katz Cohen Phelps – promoting Laws of Attraction), but only because it involves really rather advanced robots… But then again, they aren’t that far off, are they?

…from Lego. He wants you to rate them. Some of them are quite good. What’s bothering me is that yet another offmessage fixation appears to forming. Modded cars and Lego? I’m sure I started out with all sorts of intellectual goals… Hey ho – at least I haven’t sunk to mud wrestling yet, I suppose.

Mmmm…. Harley Davidson (or if the Harley isn’t your style, try one of these instead…)

Are you, like me, prone to spending hours on conference calls listening to people you’ve never met drift on about things that don’t affect you? Put ‘em on speaker phone and try some of these (just remember to listen out for your name)