Intellectual Property Law

Futurama

By Susan Crawford

Saul Hansell writes today about Comcast’s “Fancast” service, which is aimed at making it easier to find high-priced content that is being distributed through tightly-controlled windows (e.g., in the theaters, heading to video, being broadcast on cable).

In the future, Fancast wants to tie platforms together:

If you see video on the Web that?s not on cable at all ? from a movie on Netflix to a silly clip on YouTube ? you might be able to capture it online and send it to your television. For that matter, you might be able to take content from a television broadcast and send it to a personal computer or mobile phone.

It’s smart to make it easier for people to find things they want (or might like, based on their patterns of interaction). But I had the feeling reading this piece that this prediction (particularly in Comcast’s hands) is something like the GM set of predictions for the world of 1960 that people absorbed at the 1939 World’s Fair - intensely exciting, somewhat naive, highly-organized, and driven by particular corporate plans.

“Residential, commercial, and industrial areas all have been separated for greater efficiency, and greater convenience…displacing outmoded business sections, and undesirable slum areas, whenever possible.”

Why Comcast, why emphasize “platforms” of distribution windows?  It’s true that cheap and great is better than free and lousy, and it’s true that convenience in finding online material is needed.  But GM’s vision of the 1960s depended on more public infrastructure being built - Comcast’s vision, by contrast, may depend on its own private control as a network operator continuing.

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on May 30, 2008 (boomark / email).