I'm a bit busy this week, but I wanted to post a link to this post about a comedy group who had their video taken down from YouTube. The group claims the takedown was a mistake, and while I can't judge the veracity of their claim, what happens when they try to appeal is frightening.
This is what happens in a connected world when the things we do don't belong to us. Amazon can lock you out of your Kindle account, YouTube can delete all your videos, Apple can keep you from viewing purchased movies and music, Blogger can erase years of work, DropBox can take all your documents hostage.
We've moved into this world where we license all our stuff; where we give big corporations our ideas and our content and let them dictate the terms. There's a great comment in the post that sums it all up. The gist is that we toil under the assumption that we have rights because we are the customers. But we're not.
We are the product.
Facebook, Google, Yahoo. We're commodities to them. We think we're the customers, but the true customers are the corporations who buy ads.
We are the product.
If that doesn't scare you, you're not paying attention.
I've been scared ever since reading Manufacturing Consent, but it is useless to resist.
ReplyDeleteEff that, man. RESIST! Whenever I buy something from somewhere that has DRM, I strip the DRM off of it. Books, movies, music. And if I my livelihood depended on being able to stream my videos to people, I'd be damn sure to make sure that I had full control over the content.
DeleteI think we're becoming so accustomed to giving our freedoms away that it barely makes a dent when a company pulls crap like this. I, for one, will never use YouTube to share video again.