The battle for control of the mobile internet device market is throwing up problems with satire for cartoonists and publishers. The Pulitzer prize winning American artist Mark Fiore is involved in a prolonged and sometimes acrimonious row with Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, the manufacturer of the iPhone and iPad.
Wired magazine has thorough background details of this running story, here, here and here.
Bloghorn sees the crux of the story as an argument about control of the new publishing platforms (or devices) and of legal responsibility for the material which is published on them. Jobs and Apple are explicit that they own and control the distribution system. This means the right of control or editorship over the content published there.
Fundamentally, the technology company is now more powerful than any individual or publication that wishes to publish content on Apple’s curated distribution systems. This matters in an era when the print industry, the traditional system of mass-market communication, is in sharp decline and is being replaced by digital distribution. And, potentially, it makes Jobs and his firm extremely powerful as both publishers and censors.
Advocates for free speech, which often include political cartoonists like Fiore, argue that any emerging monopoly is undesirable without explicit transparency and accountability and this is what makes the Fiore-Jobs debate interesting.
Jobs attended the D8 – All things Digital conference this week and was asked about his attitude to acceptable content on his distribution systems – and you may find his words reported at the time mark of 7.12 on this live blog from the event.
You can read Fiore’s response to these words here.
If you have any thoughts and opinions about this story and the new gatekeepers to content, please add them to our comments section below.
Oh say, can you SEE that?
The battle for control of the mobile internet device market is throwing up problems with satire for cartoonists and publishers. The Pulitzer prize winning American artist Mark Fiore is involved in a prolonged and sometimes acrimonious row with Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, the manufacturer of the iPhone and iPad.
Wired magazine has thorough background details of this running story, here, here and here.
Bloghorn sees the crux of the story as an argument about control of the new publishing platforms (or devices) and of legal responsibility for the material which is published on them. Jobs and Apple are explicit that they own and control the distribution system. This means the right of control or editorship over the content published there.
Fundamentally, the technology company is now more powerful than any individual or publication that wishes to publish content on Apple’s curated distribution systems. This matters in an era when the print industry, the traditional system of mass-market communication, is in sharp decline and is being replaced by digital distribution. And, potentially, it makes Jobs and his firm extremely powerful as both publishers and censors.
Advocates for free speech, which often include political cartoonists like Fiore, argue that any emerging monopoly is undesirable without explicit transparency and accountability and this is what makes the Fiore-Jobs debate interesting.
Jobs attended the D8 – All things Digital conference this week and was asked about his attitude to acceptable content on his distribution systems – and you may find his words reported at the time mark of 7.12 on this live blog from the event.
You can read Fiore’s response to these words here.
If you have any thoughts and opinions about this story and the new gatekeepers to content, please add them to our comments section below.
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