Last week's catch up! Have you ever read an entire EULA? Radiohead's 2008 decision.

This week I caught up on the material I missed out on in week 5 whilst I was overseas. Whilst wading through the relevant lecture and reading sources, I realised what the statement "Information wants to be free" really means. It is information that not only wants to be free of charge, but free of restriction and limitation.

I ended up being extremely amazed that the Happy Birthday song is actually owned by a company, and that filmmakers must pay to use it in their scenes. Could you imagine a family sitting around a table with a birthday cake and singing the song, only to have the Warner Police bust through their window and arrest the family for infringement?

I was also surprised that every single account in existence on World of Warcraft is owned by Blizzard. How is this possible? That hundreds of thousands of players have spent months, if not years, accumulating currency and character gear which is still not theirs. I think it's tricky of companies to include such statements in a way that is so visually unappealing to read, yet they can argue that its the only right and 'legal' way for them to distribute the EULA. I can confess that out of the hundreds of times I have opened the World of Warcraft client, I have never once read a word of their mandatory pre-game EULA.

I personally think more bands need to act as aggressively as Radiohead, who decided to slap a "Pay What You Want" option on their recent album In Rainbows in 2008. Although the stats say three fifths of their fanbase chose to pay nothing, their profits still exceeded those of their previous album. I admire Radiohead's ability to make bold moves like these - they chose to realise the magnitude of the copyright problem and embrace it rather than fight it. Although their success was mainly due to their pre-In_Rainbows large fan community (thus allowing them to gamble their money like this), it shows that true inspiration still exists, and not every intelligent-content producer is a smug caterpillar wrapped in a cocoon of copyright armour.

Thanks for the read and let me know what you think!

Converdex. Deuze still doesn't cut it. What is grassroots media?

Convergence: the word that has been popping up all week.

Many of Ted's points this week really struck a chord. Honourable mentions go to media platform extinction/mutation, as well as the evolution of how we perceive text.

Platform extinction was the main topic that caught my attention. It was a way of organising how different information carriers have boomed and died throughout the media timeline. From vinyl records to cassette tapes to compact-disks to mp3 files. The practical implications of each level were clear in their context, yet a new form of data-holding physicality has inevitably emerged. What's even more interesting though is the mutation of old platforms: the vinyl turned into an art of disc jamming (ie DJ'ing) for a whole new outlook on the production of sound.

Papyrus scroll to "codex" to web hypertext also gets a mention. Again, the physical organisation of words on a flat surface has evolved throughout time until we now have access to multiple texts in an order we choose. Also the fact that the name "codex" far outshines "book". Why did we ever ditch that term? Think about it, guys:
'Hey man, are you excited for the Harry Potter movie?'
'Yeah, I've already gone through my entire Harry Potter codex collection!'

With regards to the readings, some of you may know I'm not much a fan of Deuze. Again, he was too verbose, and it's hard to express my thoughts on his reading because he covered so many issues in the one article. I will say that I did like his point on how news corporations these days rely somewhat on public feedback (polls, hotlines and amateur photos/videos) in order to relay much of their information, rather than the old style of playing media filters.

Jenkins managed to make me laugh when he told the story of trying to find a phone that wasn't a "Swiss army knife equivalent". It was also great to understand the importance of individual blogging as a way to distribute immediate information about current affairs. One term I'm not quite sure about is "grassroots media" - does anyone want to explain this one to me?

Thanks for reading!