Back on the 26th of May, Mike Lynton, the Chairman and and CEO of Sony, published an article entitled: “Guardrails for the Internet: Preserving Creativity Online”. Lynton has gained a little bit of infamy for his line "I’m a guy who sees nothing good having come from the Internet. Period."
He and his ilk hate to see their positions as arbiters of power being stripped away by the internet.
Slashdot commenter Moryath put the ultimate beat-down on Lynton’s head. It was so spot-on, and so well spoken, that I feel compelled to re-print it here.
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by Moryath (553296) on Tuesday May 26, @09:15AM
Quoting Lynton: “And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content — music, newspapers, movies and books — have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.”
Obviously what he really means is that the Internet is stopping the gatekeepers from controlling who can get published. There are more people publishing their own books independently – rather than having to go through, say, Del Rey – than ever before. The comic pages of the newspaper have been replaced by web comics but that’s not necessarily a bad thing either – either you adapt, like Scott Adams, or you don’t and you perish.
Quoting Lynton: “The Internet has brought people with no regard for the intellectual property of others together with a technology that allows them to easily steal that property and sell or give it away to everyone, with little fear of being caught or prosecuted.”
He doesn’t give a sh!t about "theft." He hates the idea of the Internet because it removes the need to keep his dumb ass as the distribution "gatekeeper" and skim money off of the hard work of others.
Prior to bittorrent, there was Samba sharing as enabled by several crawler-search setups. Prior to those, there was Napster. Prior to those, there were a zillion sites running FTP (ratio or otherwise). Prior to "the internet", there were BBS’es all over. Prior to that, there was sneaker net.
Go back ~100 years, and dumbsh!ts like this Sony retard were "protesting" and trying to lobby Congress to forbid municipalities from keeping lending libraries (you know, the public library system we all have the right to use for free) because it would "impede sales if people could simply borrow the book instead."
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Wow. You go Moryath. Excellently said, and true, so true.
The web sure has obsoleted a lot of oligarchic old white men, and they hate it.
Too bad, times change, and their reign over publishing is over.
Go cry in the corner, emo Sony CEO. Cut yourself a little bit while you’re over there. There’s a plastic bag in the kitchen, if you tie it over your head real tight, all your whining, sniveling little problems will just go away.
I promise.