Strong Opinions @marksbirch: Ownership and Middlemen in a Digital Age

Let me go contrarian on this and say the following: there’s middlemen and there’s tools or platforms to organise markets. Think of websites. In the early days it was all Altavista, AOL, Yahoo - hierarchic arrangements. Only a few winners benefited - those with ties to these middlemen. Then came search - and the long tail became much bigger. This is something we think and prototype a lot around over at Xyologic.

marksbirch:

What does ownership mean in an age when any piece of art or information is simply an arrangement of orderly bits? There was a time when we thought the question of ownership seemed clear cut. While the general public could buy the medium, it was artists and/or middlemen that controlled the…