Is Kevin Rose Guilty of Theft for Pirating iPhone v3.0?

Kevin Rose posted the following tweet:

So, here’s the question: Did Kevin Rose just admit to a legally punishable crime?  We all know how easy it is to go to a bittorrent site and download anything from the latest U2 album to Sims3 and many take it for granted that, while it is technically illegal it just isn’t that big a deal. Everyone does it.  It’s like smoking pot.

However, the fact remains that smoking pot is illegal and one would be foolish to puff a blunt in front of a police station.  In fact, if one did that and was arrested there would be little public sympathy.

Now, here comes Kevin Rose bragging about what is, unless the laws have changed, the illegal posession of software that he could not have acquired with violating copyright laws at the very least.  Technically, this could be seen as simple larceny.  And if Kevin has shared his ilegal copy of the sotware with friends he is now an illegal distributor – a far more grave crime.

My point is not that Kevin Rose should be arrested.  Instead, I think this is a clear sign that, much like the growing support for marjuana legalization, it is time for a major overhaul of the law as it relates to the posession and distribution of digital content.

That, or the jails will soon be full of kids who just couldn’t wait to hear the latest Jonas Brothers album.

Bloggers V. News Sites

On Publishing2.0 There is a look at the way TechCrunch, Digg and the NYT each decide to “publish” the news on their websites.

TechCrunch is a tradition blog in that you will always see things with the newest post on top.  Digg is similar but it also allows you to reorganize by number of “diggs.”  Then there is the NYT:

“Here’s the problem — if you visit the New York Times throughout the day, and no important news has broken, the homepage remains largely unchanged, static, like a print newspaper.

Organizing news by importance as the default makes sense when you’re only delivering the news once a day (and the “default” is all you get). But when news publishing is continuous, it’s not the best way to server frequent news consumers.”

It seems so obvious from this side of the monitor…

Digg Does it Right

A few months ago there was a big kerfuffal over at the link-aggregater DIGG. I won’t go into the details of that event. I’m not really that interested in why the users were upset but I am totally impressed with DIGG’s response. As reported by Mashable:

“…arrangements were made for a quarterly show, of sorts, to be conducted in a Town Hall styling. Questions and interaction will take place between Jay, Kevin and the general userbase of Digg that will take place regularly (the exact frequency has not yet been nailed down any more specifically than every ‘three to four months‘). ”

DIGG will be using the site UStreamTV to host the meetings. Not only does this say to its users that DIGG actually cares but it’s neat to see them using other cool internet technology to meet everyone’s needs.

RevShare, Blip and the future

There are lots of sites out there that offer the chance to post your video and receive some portion of ad-revenue in return.  How well these sites have done is still hard to judge but a number of the players in this world are worth looking at.

Over on Beet.tv there is an interview with Dina Kaplan, the co-founder of Blip.tv.  As described in the post:

“Blip has played an essential role in helping independent online video producers to distribute clips in a number of file formats and to make those clips searchable.

Like YouTube and other sharing sites, the service is free to content creators.  The company’s monetization model involves selling advertising around the video clips and sharing revenue on a 50/50 basis.”

Meanwhile, Mashable reports there is lots of noise over at MetaCafe where recent policy changes have brought a lot angry comments.  According to MetaCafe they will no longer share revenue with:

Videos that have sexual arousal as their primary purpose
Videos that are primarily promotional vehicles for a product or service
Videos that merely feature a person who is not doing anything entertaining or exceptional

Mashable tries to make sense of this policy change but ends up with a lot more questions than answers.  He closes with this:

“Perhaps we’ll start to get some straight answers from some of the large video distribution outfits soon, when they run out of  excuses for why they can’t continue to pay the people producing all the content that makes their sites popular destinations. The producers are starting to demand these answers, and it won’t be long before they realize they must follow the lead of other large internet communities like Digg and communicate with their users.”

Sounds like the Pirates are knocking at the door.

Digital Curator

Great piece in Micro Persuasion on the idea of the need for, a growth of, the Digital Curator.

“Information overload makes it difficult to separate junk from art. It requires a certain finesse and expertise – a fine tuned, perhaps trained eye. Google, memetrackers such as Techmeme and social news sites like digg are not curators. They’re aggregators – and there’s a big difference.”

Goes on to further define what a Digital Curator is and the role they will play in our futures.