On the Long Tail blog, Wired Magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson lists ten reasons why Mark Cuban is "today's Long Tail hero." Incidentally — I wrote a profile on Mr. Cuban's digital cinema plans ("The Cuban Revolution") for this month's issue of the magazine. Excerpt from the ten-point list:
# He's promoting HDTV the right way, by commissioning and distributing content.
# He's funding the Grokster defense.
# He's a real blogger, warts and all.
# He says that he won't use the broadcast flag.
# He got the idea of reinventing TV a decade ago, and his work lives on in Yahoo!'s excellent video search and music video services.
# He doesn't believe the RIAA.
# He sent a team to cover the Iraq elections, live, in high-def.
# >
He has a successful reality TV show.# He really gets the Long Tail: "Popular items are just that, popular. My guess however is that in absolute numbers, the long tail of the download distribution curves, both in terms of number of songs and in number of songs downloaded, overwhelm the number of copyrighted songs illegally being downloaded."
Link to blog post. Mr. Anderson also has an op-ed about MGM v. Grokster in today's Los Angeles times, and it's well worth a read. Snip:
What's at stake is the realm of ideas, sliced and diced a million ways. The peer-to-peer music sites are the closest current approximation to the celestial jukebox we all want. Kazaa, for instance, has 25 million unique tracks, dwarfing iTunes' measly 1 million. BitTorrent has more videos than Blockbuster. Much of it is pirated, to be sure, but a significant portion of it – videogame highlights, say – was never intended to be moneymaking in the first place. The problem is that we don't know how to stop the piracy without chilling the creativity.
The main flaw in the case against Grokster is that the action attempts to criminalize a technology rather than a specific use. It also fails to distinguish between commercial content and noncommercial content. Restricting these powerful new distribution tools to fight piracy would hobble the new emerging creative class too. The potential collateral damage to legitimate users is much higher than in the Betamax case.
