I love innovations like these:
Copyright Business Model
- Google finally found a way to deal with copyright-violating uploads to YouTube that doesn’t involve the alienation of half the user base by sicing a team of lawyers on users who just want to share their favorite music (remember the Napster lawsuits?). At the moment, their brilliant crawlers flag copyrighted content and take it down. But a new system will give the copyright owner the ability to benefit from the upload rather than their current instinctive fear of loss (which may or may not be real, but that is a discussion for another time). Instead, YouTube can run ads around the content and give share the revenue with the copyright owner instead of the illegal uploader. Imagine – the artist not only allows her loyal fans to upload their copyrighted works without complaint, but has an incentive to encourage it. The uploader is now her “partner” with all of the warm and fuzzy feelings that this engenders. The uploaders gets the additional social status benefits when their friends access the content and the artist gets in front of a whole social network of potential new fans.
- Developing nation challenge #1: the developed world exports all kinds of electronic (toxic) waste to their landfills where it leaches into the groundwater.
- Developing nation challenge #2: many people in rural areas do not have affordable access to sufficient power supplies, either through the electric grid or through expensive batteries.
- Can you make 1 + 2 = 5? How about a new device that takes old discarded laptop batteries that can’t power a laptop but still have some leftover juice and rigs them to power a light bulb for about a year?
