Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I have been investigating Crypto-Kitties as part of my wider work looking at distributed ledger technologies. So I found interesting to read Eric Hellman's discussion of our digital feline friends in the context of digital rights management. "What if were possible to 'CryptoKittify' ebooks?" he asks. "Would that mitigate the sins of DRM, or even render it unnecessary? Would it just add the evils of blockchain to the evils of DRM? Two startups, Publica and Scenarex are trying to find out." Good questions. What is it that we even want to record - the sale of the book? Or the relation between the reader and the content. "Once Publica understands that memorializing readers supporting authors is where their success can come from, I think they'll realize that DRM, by restricting readers and building moats around literature, is counterproductive."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

Copyright 2024
Last Updated: Mar 28, 2024 09:33 a.m.

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