braintag

Let's jump midstream to a different log: since I've worked in media I've been obsessed with the idea of archiving and permanence. Unless we deem a particular piece of media "important", even our own videotapes and notes and photos will probably disappear within our own lifetime. Collier's was one of the most widely read American newsweeklies of its time and yet I can't find a copy from the 1920's without a good amount of sleuthing. How do we provide content permanence in a world of dark distribution.

Our content now exists in a world of weightless ones-and-zeros, where a master has little value but we continue to legislate our activities as if our content are made of objects. We put ridiculous warnings at the beginning of DVDs and videotapes and film reels stating that if we don't continue this folly, this act, this charade, we will do bad things to you for not pretending that it's an object. We erect complex smokescreens called DRM that ruin the user experience and prosecute anyone who finds a crack it its facade. A lot of people who sit outside of the profit centers of the established content industry look at everything that's going on and label it absurd. They realize that the problem isn't with the users, the problem is with the implementation. The problem is with Gutenberg.

If you excuse the assumptions, in a near-future world of near-ubiquitous wireless bandwidth and increasing processing power, perhaps it's not so important to cache audio and video anymore. Perhaps content can sit permanently in one place, always reachable with a single IP address, CRID, url, ID, ASIN, whatever, authenticated per user with citations and derivatives works enabled through SMIL-like schemas.

Perhaps we need to stop thinking of our content as media and instead start thinking of it as discrete content objects.

A content object is audio, video, or text intended for distribution such as a movie or a song. It exists online in one place and one place only. It can be reached anywhere by any device that can facilitate your user authentication (biometrics for user auth instead of device auth?) and can decode and play the file. The content object transcodes a stream in real time appropriate to processing speed and bandwidth available to the device are connecting with. The content object remembers where you last left off. You can start watching a video on your computer at home, pick up on your mobile then continues on your big screen TV at home. A content object is platform agnostic in the sense that it uses the internet. If the content producer chooses the right licensing, the content object can use SMIL like technology to allow users to cite and "use" portions of the video in derivative works. You can play your favorite scene in a blog post. You can make your own non-destructive remixes of the work. You can create open source edit decision lists (thx, revgeorge.). All without the need to hand out copies (yeah, I haven't figured this out for the "offline" world, I know.)

I'm still trying to flesh all of this out as a single idea. Of course, the first steps are already being implemented through processes like open authentication systems and music library subscriptions.