I’m a fan of the “just works” concept (I mean, I use Mac OS X instead of Windows, right?) but A warning for the bazaar nails it.
I’m seeing it from a different perspective though, one of a media creator. Just yesterday I had to deal with the fact that people don’t care about their rights or freedoms, as long as it will work. We’ve had this discussion in the videoblogging community, where most are advocates of creators rights. What does this mean? It means we encourage people to put their video (audio, text, etc.) online where they can maintain their rights over it as the creator. Some people just don’t care about that. They just want what they create to get online in the quickest and simplest fashion possible. YouTube and MySpace are often the conduits for this “I want it now and I want it to work” mentaility. Neither give enough control over the content to those who created it.
It’s also been noted that often times the attitude of “I want it now and I want it to work” is taken by younger people, the under 30 crowd, who haven’t yet got a long term view, or a sense of history with the things they create. This may be true, I see it in other things as well, and I often am not sure how much of my view is shaped by the length of time I’ve been involved in the things I care about, versus just my strong opinions on certain subjects.
1 reply on “I Hear the Warning”
I’ve started to save every Terms of Service that I agree to one sites that I sign up on. You’d be amazed at how many assume Copyright of the content you upload — whether you created it or not.
That’s what you trade in order to benefit from their “free” service.
Unfortunately ignorantus legis would prevail — just because you didn’t read the ToS but hit “I Agree” anyway doesn’t protect you from the effects of the agreement. Those “I Agree” pages represent the modern-day shrinkwrap and it’d be wise for everyone, especially those under-30 folks (like me!) to be very wary of what rights you’re handing over in exchange for access to the latest and greatest online tools.