It's easy enough to criticise the government for being out of touch with the web - I frequently do - but without the industry explaining to them the needs and issues at play, it's hard to blame them entirely. In other words democracy only really works if we all play our part in contributing to it (or attacking its weak points, such as these brilliant spoof paranoid transport police adverts over o…

Danah Boyd, currently in the news over her blog-essay theory that Facebook vs MySpace represents a social divide, gave an insightful talk at Cannes 60 about the future of film consumption and the changing habits of young people's relationship to media. Thanks to OffBrand's Neil Maguire for the headsup - copied below. Danah's area of expertise is not so much film or technologoy as on…

"What's really amazing is that TV had the perfect test case, seeing the music business practically destroying itself and totally alienating their core fans for the past six or so years — and they look at that and say, 'Yeah, that's the way to go.' " John Rogers Piracy - no, not the eye-patch type, but the copyright infringement variety. Product piracy…

"We have lost the online equivalent of parks... where the limits on what we can reasonably say and do are set by society as a whole and not by the commercial interests of one company." If almost every independent musician, and an ever increasing group of filmmakers have a MySpace page, assigning NewsCorp copyright in the process, are they all technically still independent…

If YouTube can show video that streams without jumping and stalling, why can't the brains of the BBC? Ever since I saw BBC Head of Innovation Matt Locke descibe the BBC's scary 'Creative Commons = collapse of society / DRM walled gardens = good', strategy at the B.Tween conference a few years back, I've been worrying about Auntie's web future, an…