Taking The Fun Out Of Fun

[Greetings to Instapundit readers. There seems to be an awful lot of you. I bet you could get matching leather jackets and beat up the rest of the Internet if you wanted to.]

I read that Adobe is going to sell a method of applying Digital Rights Management to Flash video. For those of you to whom the previous sentence is Greek, Flash is a format for video that is pretty much everywhere on the web. YouTube videos are in Flash format.

The purpose of the DRM applied to Flash is to allow the content generator to encode the video so that the end user doesn’t have to watch it solely as a streaming signal. You could download it and watch it later. The DRM part decides what you could do with it, and how long you would be able to view it, and so forth. I imagine that it will make it much more difficult to take video off the web, cut it to pieces, and make sweet, sweet, mashups out of it. I dabble in that sort of thing myself, and anything that makes it harder to do, or perhaps impossible, bums me out.

Because to tell the truth, the source material is all garbage. You can make it seem wry and funny, or poignant, or interesting. But the bits you assemble to do that are 99.9% barnyard nuggets. It’s bad enough Yoko Ono or Prince or somebody sending an army of lawyers after you if you even reference them in passing. Now every damp fart on video will be locked down like a woman’s prison on Brad Pitt visiting day.

Admit it, Hollywood: The amateurs are better at it than the professionals.

Red Alert from Capucha on Vimeo.