Junk Drawer

kiamatthews:

I’m trying to be a good consumer here and actually buy this album, so what the fuck with the barriers? My current options to purchase Jamie Cullum’s The Pursuit are:

• buy a physical copy from Amazon.co.uk, paying insane shipping charges, wait FOREV to get it
• get my old roommate who lives in the UK to buy it for me, then FTP it to me, then I’ll pay her 10 bucks via PayPal
• just pirate that shit and be done

The whole point of everything going digital these day is instant gratification and I want the album NOW. The only option that affords me that is stealing it. YOU DUG YOUR OWN GRAVE YOU ASS BACKWARD, RELUCTANT TO CHANGE MUSIC INDUSTRY

As frustrating as arbitrarily enforced region/market restrictions are, I believe there are legal and business rationales for them, especially with digital goods and services. While the web is basically borderless and expands the reach of commerce and culture to almost the entire world, laws and the contracts enforced by those laws are limited by geography. Regional monopolies also protect local businesses from remote competition, and to an extent local economies, which can access a market on the other side of the world as easily as in their backyard.

E-commerce enables a one-world market, but we don’t have a one-world government (thankfully), so we have this patchwork of agreements, treaties, and carved up fiefdoms.

DC will be kicking off DC Earth One, a  new line of comics with its own continuity not as floppies(or monthly issues) but as a series of ongoing graphic novels. This is an attempt to be more accessible to new readers and free creator from decades of continuity.

The line will start off with two series, Superman: Earth One and Batman: Earth One.

I like the idea, although some are saying that this basically Ultimate DC, much like what Marvel did early 00’s (and basically undid with this years Ultimatum). The mainstream comics industry needs a new strategy, other than current set of gimmicks to extract more money from a shrinking audience of comics patrons.

via newsarama