Granted, the current Hollywood moguls are not the same people who built it, but they most certainly do know where it all came from.
I missed this nugget the other day, until it showed up on an investment website:
Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.
Because of Edison’s patents for the motion pictures, it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North American east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent….
The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the Internet into a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers.
By far, I am not the only one who sees TPTB want to turn the Internet into another one-way content delivery system. Right now, it’s a world of equal ends, and only the speed of your connection limits your output. And anyone anywhere on the system can read your content, so that it stands on its own merits.
Which brings up an odd thing: Yesterday my traffic here spiked to 600 hits. Most Sundays it’s less than 100. I’m guessing either someone visited a selection of my pages and hit “reload” a bunch of times, or the same group of folks visited a large collection of my posts, because I’ve got a ton of 5-hit counts. But then, that’s after they taper off from some 40 hits on my home page — exceedingly rare. I’m waiting to see what today brings. I seriously doubt I’ve suddenly become famous, but it just goes to show what’s possible.
There’s not much I can do to prevent the Net becoming a fancy delivery system for smart phones and tablets. If that’s what folks want, let them eat cake and rot their teeth. I’m praying the folks who actually know how all this stuff works will keep the doors open for those of us who have something to say.
