The Internet is based upon an expansion of possibilities, thanks to ever increasing computational power and bandwidths to match. Right, so you go from putting text on a very spartan website in the mid-nineties, to publishing your video creations online while listening to an Internet radio station.
But along that way, there’s always been the unwitting de-evolutionists known as copyright protectors. I don’t call them creators, because often they’re not. And these guys are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, their content is being reproduced without their consent. On the other, they’re killing innovation. They’ve rendered services that allow for the free, unfettered, exchange of files illegal. They sued the Google search engine. Search engines – the absence of which would render the Internet unnavigable. They’ve sued sites that allowed kids to share videos. Essentially, they want to de-evolve the Internet, or at least make it regulated in their favour. That’s what they’re doing by not going after those who cause infractions, but the technologies that permit it. They might not mean to, but that’s what they’re doing.
These are interesting times we live in. It’ll be interesting to see how things evolve (or not) in the future. Is the Zune, with all it’s restrictions to reverse the new possibilities granted by this technological evolution, an accurate representation of the ethos we expect to deal with in the future of the Internet?