JJJ, ABC and SBS are required: .... because the only way to broadcast, or permeate culture lies in the capital intensive industries of Television and Radio. Both of which have barriers of entry, partly maintained by the sheer start up cost of the infrastructure, but also because the government treats spectrum as a scarce resource. That latter drives up the price and gives monopolies over it. Yet with WiFi we are seeing spectrum being treated as an abundant good, and its price has dropped so quickly, that it is given away free with a cup of coffee.
I am arguing that if the government treats the wider spectrum as an abundant good and opens it up, so that anyone can broadcast, and compete with the likes of the ABC, Channel 7/9/10 for little cost. Then that will encourage the permeation/creation component of culture.
Like that MFC challenge on HuSi, the equipment cost me less than $1500. I did it with a $100 amplifiers, a $25 microphone, a $150 guitar, a $180 bass, a $25 drum machine software, plus a $900 iBook with Garageband.
If the cost of creating content and broadcasting can be reduced so that we all become content creators, rather than consumers, then culture will richer for it. At the moment it is like plumbing, rather than a wetlands. Culture has to be bifurcated through the pipe of the mass-media first. If it is a wetlands, then it is an open-sea that we can wade into.
So dropping the cost of broadcasting through major competition with an open spectrum would aid that.
On the copyright issue, broadcasting, which can also be thought of as cultural sharing, is limited by government granted monopolies over created works. If this is limited to a generation, then it will increase the tempo of culture by making cultural memory reside closer to the present.
WWII historians are limited in their ability to publish as copyright now covers many of the works of that time. Fortunately my area of interest, WWI is not covered, even in the US copyright only goes back as far as 1923, so WWI historians are safe. But it raises the cost of historians of more modern times who wish to preserve that cultural memory through publishing.
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