"I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past…"

Digital Culture

Allow me to reiterate…

…how exactly fucked the media conglomerates are. To be more specific, the RIAA and the MPAA’s of the world who are still desperately attempting to control content in an age where it is beyond anyones control.

The latest brilliant idea? LaLa, a CD trading site that lets you post your wants and haves, matches you up appropriately with other LaLa subscribers, provides postage paid mailers, and lets the USPS do the swapping. It’s like P2P without the digital. The cost? $1.49 per disc that you swap, giving you the ability to trade old music for new at prices that almost rival AllofMP3. For less than $20 a month, you could have more new music than you could comfortably listen to, all DRM free and with the ability to control it as you see fit.

Just another thing that the RIAA can’t stop. Just wait until some rolls this up with some open source social software that allows small groups to do this without the need for postage. How could they respond if Facebook provided this functionality?

Tags copyright, legal, Music, web2.0

By griffey

Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of IT at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently AI & Machine Learning in Libraries and Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design from 2018. His newest book, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, will be published by MIT Press in 2024.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

Jason can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.

3 replies on “Allow me to reiterate…”

Remind me what would stop someone from sending a burned and making a $1.49 a pop (minus the cost of a CD-R)?

LaLa acts as a reputation intermediary, and insist that each end of the transaction verify that they got what they wanted. Plus, LaLa is collecting the money, NOT the individual.

There is another cool site where you can trade DVD’s for 99 cents, called PeerFlix.

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