Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
The battle between owning vs renting our content… and between endless/infinite streams of “muzak”-type music and tv vs limited, curated and meaningful choices.
Highlights
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The fact that you’re free to do whatever you want with the things you buy seems very obvious and intuitive from our perspective, but the truth is that copyright holders have been trying to erode these individual rights granted by exhaustion from the very beginning. Over the years, book publishers have tried to punish students for reselling expensive textbooks at lower prices, and record labels have launched unsuccessful crackdowns on stores selling used CDs. Hollywood tried to shut down the video rental market multiple times after it first emerged in the 1970s, and video game industry lobbyists have repeatedly claimed that used game sales will herald the apocalypse, with some publishers calling second-hand stores like GameStop a “bigger threat than piracy.”
✏️ The history of the propaganda centered around fighting our rights to the things we’ve purchased. 🔗 View Highlight
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“The basic principle of exhaustion—the notion that owners have rights that are not contingent on copyright holder permission—can and should survive the transition to a digital copyright economy,” explain Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, in their book The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy. “Rights holders have always fought against this principle, but the digital marketplace gives them their best chance to kill it.”
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copyright holders finally found two ways to get past the exhaustion principle: Digital rights management (DRM), which locks downloaded content to a centrally controlled platform with varying degrees of success, and streaming services, where companies fully control access to all media and users pay fees to access it with an internet connection.
✏️ The modern day answer to taking away our rights in the guise of “fighting piracy”.
- Streaming
- DRM 🔗 View Highlight
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Netflix has even started dictating that producers make TV shows less engaging, so that people can passively consume them as “second screen content” while scrolling on their phones.
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“Muzak-ing”—the conversion of media from discrete works of art with a discernible context and author to anonymous background noise meant for passive consumption at the gym or while relaxing at home.
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Digital Packratting is the antithesis of this trend. It requires intentional curation, because you’re limited by the amount of free space on your media server and devices—and the amount of space in your home you’re willing to devote to this crazy endeavor. Every collection becomes deeply personal, and that’s beautiful.
✏️ Fighting back against the glut of consumption and content that has gotten so out of control, they want to make shows and music more like background noise. 🔗 View Highlight