Porntifications

Posted by mikezillion at November 8th, 2007

According to an article in Forbes, Sumner Redstone, the Chairman of Viacom believes that copyright protection is the incentive which drives the creation of content. To me, that seems backwards.

I would say that copyright drives the production of much mediocre market-driven content (including a lot of pornography) but is actually a disincentive to true creative content creation.

If someone has something to say, and wants to get it said, any limitation on how many people are exposed to it will just frustrate the creative process. This is unlike child protection legislation, which filters an audience by the appropriateness of the message for the viewer. A creative artist wants everyone in the appropriate target audience to see. It is the folks who market the expression as a product who benefit from copyright protection.

On the other hand, if someone has nothing to say, but wants money for saying something people enjoy hearing, copyright is a true friend.

Perhaps this has implications for the writers strike?

Posted by mikezillion at March 17th, 2007

Thanks again to Guy Kawasaki for pointing out this interesting article on effort. The point that really sparked my thinking: people who believe that they are either good or bad at a task see no value in trying to be otherwise. If they are good, there is no need to improve. If they are bad, there is no point in trying. In either case–and this is where it gets interesting–investing an effort would risk invalidating that basic belief. So effort is avoided in favor of maintaining a consistent self-perception or public image. However, people who see their goodness or badness as a trainable quality are more likely to put in the effort necessary to obtain or improve abilities.

This reminds me of the General Semantics principle of E-Prime as an alternative to standard English for writing. If we eliminate the passive voice by avoiding forms of the verb “to be” in analytical writing, we may avoid a mindset in which we assume that things “are” other things. If we “are” bad, or good, that’s the end of the discussion. If we do well, or poorly, we have the opportunity to explore the root causes of our perceived ability or lack thereof.

Posted by mikezillion at January 24th, 2007

I do have an MBA. Whoopee! One of the most valuable lessons I learned while I was earning that sacred degree was a quip from a classmate. He said, “Planning is everything, but the plan is worthless.” The point of business planning is the thinking that goes on during the planning process. Getting locked into a plan–a snapshot of the thinking process at a moment in time–is one of the biggest mistakes businesspeople make. I just read another great riff on the subject by Guy Kawasaki, whom I worked with briefly during the late 1990’s. We can all stand to learn more about stuff like this.