Tag: technology

Techie Lawyers

From You Can’t Make Lawyers into Techies: 3 Lessons About LPM:

Certainly, lawyers are not Luddites, determined to resist progress and deny any change. It’s that they are lawyers, not IT types. So that’s Lesson One: You can’t make lawyers talk IT; IT has to learn to talk lawyer.

Lesson Two is that lawyers insist on immediate gratification. They will happily sacrifice technological sophistication with its attendant steep learning curve for instant utility.

Lesson Three is the need for patience when introducing any sweeping change that seriously impacts traditional behaviors.  Lawyers don’t welcome transformative changes, but they will accept sequential phase shifts if only because their competitors do.

Anti-DRM T-Shirts

I would classify myself as an anti-DRM person. I like my MP3s to work when and where I want them to. And I want to play them as many times as I want to on as many machines as I want.

That’s greedy, but it’s also the mainstream thought process when it comes to digital music, which has proved very difficult to protect (from the label’s perspective). And very easy to obtain from the “listener’s” perspective.

However, I also fall into a group of people who don’t mind that Apple has a vice grip on my media, players, computer, etc. etc. I’m OK with only being able to play my music on iTunes and my iPod because I really like the iPod. But, as you may have heard (because Steve Jobs made it abundantly clear) that Apple is not the one behind the iTunes DRM, the labels are.

I get why. They want to protect music. But it doesn’t work. And because it doesn’t work, and there isn’t a clear alternative other than completely abandoning DRM, which is a scary proposition, they’re clinging to it for the moment. People want expect music (and movies to a lesser degree) for free, now. But that’s hardly fair to the people putting in time and effort to make what we love to listen to and watch.

So, what is the answer? Maybe make some t-shirts like these.