{"id":1315,"date":"2006-08-08T17:17:33","date_gmt":"2006-08-08T15:17:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/2006\/08\/freedom-and-a-broken-market\/"},"modified":"2006-08-08T17:17:33","modified_gmt":"2006-08-08T15:17:33","slug":"freedom-and-a-broken-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/2006\/08\/freedom-and-a-broken-market\/","title":{"rendered":"Freedom and a Broken Market."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Photos<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\t\tI’ve had quite some fun lately. First to mention is a three week-long vacation in the
\nSouth-West of this lovely continent. Portugal has quite some nice things to offer, most memorably
\nits famous Port wine<\/a>. Having gotten into it
\nalready some time before the vacation, those three weeks took care of a decent addiction — an
\naddiction that might get pretty expensive in the long term, as Kim noticed while tasting different
\nsorts at a winery where mostly wines from smaller wineries are being sold. Most of Portugal’s (or
\nmore specific, the Douro region’s) wine is being sold by bigger corporations, Sandeman for example.
\nThere are about 30 of those. Lately, there is a trend towards more independant distribution, and
\nVinologia (the shop we visited for a couple of times to taste and learn more about this special sort
\nof wine) specialises in this. As a result, they’ve got some very fine “single quinta” wines (wines
\nfrom one particular winery). I’ve came to think about a business model that allows those smaller
\ndistributors to circumvent the big corporations and in the course make the Port wine experience in
\nthe rest of the world more special and diverse. I’ll most probably get back to the owner of that
\nstore with my ideas, since they were planning for making better use of online shopping anyway.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\tLast weekend, I’ve been to Haldern Pop<\/a>, a small
\nmusic festival in the west of Germany. Nice about this festival is that it’s pretty
\nnon-commercialised. Sure, they have a main sponsor, but that’s a local brewery. Most of the needed
\ncommercial stuff (think food, drinks, t-shirts) there is being done by locals, a bar that took care
\nof an ‘Open Air Music Bar’ at the camping site, local food stores supplying the music fan with good
\nfood and drinks, and pretty much the most exciting thing is a small lake amid the woods, horse farms
\nand right next to the festival where you can swim in the summer sun. Pure relaxation.<\/p>\n

\t\tAt the festival, I talked with Thorsten, a friend of mine (and obviously a big fan of music)
\nabout his relationship with the music industry. Thorsten collects vinyl records and I think he puts
\nquite some money into that hobby. Yet he’s completely fed up with how the music industry deals with
\nhim as a customer. For example, he wants to listen to music in his car but not necessarily take the
\nspecial edition CD with booklet in his car to save it from damage, being stolen or covered with
\nlemonade accidentally. If he’d bought the CD, he would’ve been forced to break the law by copying
\nthe CD and using that cheap copy in his car — while he paid for it. Or even worse: he gets a virus
\non his PC for free, or is not even able to play the CD he bought on his computer.
\n\t
\n\t\tHe has also not the slightest problem with paying for a nice CD or vinyl record, yet the
\nmusic industry does it’s very best to criminalise his way of using the product he bought and in the
\ncourse of that, pissing him off.<\/p>\n

\t\tA festival such as Haldern Pop offers a way out. At those festivals, and at a lot of smaller
\nconcerts as well, you can buy CDs or records directly from the artist. Often, those CDs are produced
\nby smaller lables which do not (yet?) act in the same way as Sony, Warner, Bertelsmann and all the
\nothers big companies that are seriously ignoring what the customer wants for more than a
\ndecade<\/strong> already. Personally, I’ve been a good customer of the local CD store quite some time
\nago, but completely refrained from buying music some years ago. Right now, I’m getting my fix from
\nservices such as Last.fm<\/a>, Simuze<\/a>
\nand also buy CDs at smaller concerts, but I’m just not anymore picking the kind of crap the music
\nindustry (and in pretty much the same extent the software industry) is trying to push through to its
\ncustomers.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\tClearly, the way everybody would’ve preferred it if the industry would’ve used the new
\npossibilities that arise from globalisation and the rise of new technologies such as the Internet to
\nmake products the customer wants? Why is it so much easier to download a movie from an illegal
\nsource than paying for it, getting it in high quality and be able to play it? Note: I’m
\nwilling<\/strong> to pay for it, it’s just not possible, while the technology is there for
\nseveral years already. One would assume that if there’s a demand in the market, an offer will arise
\nquickly. The fact that this has not happend shows one thing very clearly: The system is broken in
\nthat respect, it just does not work in situations where large corporations can decide not to offer a
\nsolution for a demand. Corporations that do not act in reponse to a demand have — in our current
\nsystem — just no right to survive, and that’s a good thing. This principle takes care of the supply
\nof the people, be it music, software or even food. And that means that one of the very basics of the
\nsociety I’m living in — and the society itself — is being undermined.\n\t<\/p>\n

\tSo why did I write down these three anecdotes?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\t\tI think that Free Software projects such as KDE should make use of that feeling of being fed
\nup and ignored by the big industry and at the same time use the distribution channels offered by the
\nInternet to change the way things go. The way the industry is dealing with consumers will cause this
\nvery feeling of not being taken seriously as a customer to grow, and to grow more. With companies
\ngetting bigger and bigger, they also seem to take less care of their customers.<\/p>\n

\t\tKDE as a free software project and other projects such as Simuze<\/a>, Wikipedia<\/a> and all
\nthose free content providers out there should stick their heads together and give the user back what
\nhe deserves. His freedom<\/strong>.\n\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve had quite some fun lately. First to mention is a three week-long vacation in the South-West of this lovely continent. Portugal has quite some nice things to offer, most memorably its famous Port wine. Having gotten into it already some time before the vacation, those three weeks took care of a decent addiction —… Continue reading Freedom and a Broken Market.<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kde"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}