evolution

Wired 12.03: Some Like It Hot:

If piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission, then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of big media today – film, music, radio, and cable TV – was born of a kind of piracy. The consistent story is how each generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Each generation – until now.

Interesting. Haven’t read the book yet, but it will be worth reading to learn more about how the media companies are so outraged by someone doing to them what they did to others. It seems to me the big media companies of today — Time Warner, CBS, Disney — go back far enough to have profited from one or more of these waves of change. Now they shocked, shocked to learn there’s copyright infringement going on . . . .