The Digital Entertainment and Content Ecosystem (wow, what a name) has announced a consortium that will put the customer at the center of the content universe. Well, isn't that nice of them? It is headed by Sony (uh oh), which as everyone knows has been at the forefront of open technologies and interoperability. Not.

If Apple and Amazon aren't on board (and they aren't), this will go nowhere...

Pioneer announced that they can/will make 400GB optical discs. Of course everything is getting bigger/better/cheaper (well, at least the first two...hmm...maybe only the first one), but this is about 8x the current optical Blu-Ray disc. What does that mean for the consumer? Well, there could be a backup/archiving story here. God knows that I've now got a bunch of hard drives sitting around with backups, photo libraries and video captures. It would be nice to have some of that in a more "permanent" archive. Of course the permanence of optical discs is still a question mark. But the Buddhist in me counters that there is no permanence so it is what it is.

I suppose from a content standpoint the bigger discs would mean that you can fit a whole season of Hawaii 5-0 on a single disc instead of multiple discs. And you can go higher rez for movies...but then the display is the limiting factor. Of course then we'll just have to buy the next generation display to take advantage of it. By which time the next generation optical will leapfrog again. Can you hear your consumer dollars going away?

The Viacom vs. Google battle heats up a bit, with more rhetoric about the end of the web. I think we've been here before, but the playground was audio rather than video. I remember ranting back in the late 90's about the need to totally revamp copyright. At that point I was mostly worried about academic "fair use," but the increase in amateur cultural production rendered the academic qualifier...somewhat academic.

I have a dog in all the fights here. I produce content. I write these words and others, take photographs and make them availably in digital and analog formats, and create music. In some cases, I . In others, I think that people should pay for my efforts. The key point here is that I believe that *I* should be able to choose rather than someone else. I've been a proponent of Creative Commons for many years, and my personal blog has used a CC license since it started in 2003.