From The NY Times Mag from last weekend, an interesting piece about copyright law in the 21st century. I’m glad to see this topic getting some real attention in the press, especially since the spin is heavily on the side of the Copy Left people, the Creative Commons, Larry Lessig, etc. Of course, producers and consumers are both vital to keeping the media industries alive, so a solution must balance the needs of both. That’s economics. What remains to be seen is how much further the noose will be tightened wrt. distribution, reuse, and redistribution. Can the Internet still save us?

This article doesn’t take packaging—one of the precious few physical manifestations of all this data—as seriously as consumers do. You’re not going to get packaging on the iTunes Music Store. We’ve gone from live performances (the most visceral option) to LP records (with big 10”x10” or so images) to CDs (much smaller) to little web pages about the music. I guess people put up with the transition to CDs, out of convenience, so maybe they’ll put up with no physical manifestation, out of convenience. But this just isn’t a complete musical experience, in my mind.

So I think packaging’s value is on the rise, at least during the transition period from CDs to downloaded MP3s. Maybe I’m just paying more attention to it, but aren’t companies are putting a lot more effort into their packaging these days?