ip skeptic

Piracy has become to unsuccessful media what the Chupacabra is to lost sheep - an easy way to both absolve yourself of any responsibility for your failures while simultaneously bolstering an overarching narrative that is either overblown or completely untrue. I mean, there are many things that could cause some project to fail, and even multiple definitions of failure, but it's just so much easier to simply say "because piracy" and skip the whole introspective post-mortem process.

I am a little dismayed that whatever fervor Silicon Valley had for copyright and patent reform has long since been replaced with ire towards other industries and entrenched monopolies. Fifteen years ago, or very close to that, we were seeing startups getting threatened by the music industry and taken down for infringing actions. The technology industry had a clear existential threat in the music and movie industries, and every corner of the industry hated it. We wanted things to be fixed. But that's gone now.

So what happened?

So let's talk about HTML5 - the much touted "open web" that kicks proprietary, insecure plugins like Flash, Java, or Silverlight to the curb. Specifically, it adds audio and video handling functionality to the browser specification so that you don't need to use Flash anymore. You just add a <video> tag and bam, you have a functioning video player in your browser. It almost makes handling video and audio in the browser as easy as handling images.