On another note, using recorded cellphone footage from a concert to sell future event tickets to other patrons via advertising on cellphones makes sense. The footage is already in the required format and screen size, and can simply be edited for length/content. Slap an official label on it, give credit to the person who captured it, and voila, instant cool ads, shot by an audience member for street cred and an excellent tool for promotion.

Now considering how small the devicies are getting, you can look forward to a time when cameras and microphones get integrated into clothing. Can you see the House of Blues in any town insisting patrons disrobe to see a concert?

In such a world the successful entertainment venues will be the ones that either ignore surriptitious recordings, or actively encourage it. Using bootlegs as a way of advertising themselves and their acts. Some may even go so far as to solicit the better bootlegs, providing them for sale and paying the recorder a production royalty for each copy sold.

Don’t fight your audience, recruit your audience.

As a working photographer, one of the things that I really miss is not having a filter between myself and the actual event. Real life goes by as I spend my day hidden behind the lens capturing it for others

Professionally, this is very fulfilling…but really….there’s something to be said for just sitting back and *experiencing* something w/o all the distractions of “new media”.

The “free publicity” argument is currently not washing with the American Publishers’ Association, who have forced Google Print to suspend its scanning of copyrighted materials. I agree that the future is on the side of the people who understand that the rules have fundamentally changed, but the clueless dinosaurs of Old Media have a lot of accumulated capital and lawyers to spend it on in the meantime.

And the cameras can only get better.

KirkH,

In time people will either realize those with camera phones are providing free publicity and encouraging others to come see the shows. Or they will not. The one will flourish, the other will fail.

MP3-swapping was only the tip of the iceberg. The very notion of intellectual property is about to be challenged by digital technology, from camera-phones capable of recording entire concerts to Google and Amazon’s scanning of every book ever printed. Hold onto your hats!

Then, after waiting in line again, they found my camera phone. I looked at the security guard with savage disdain. They let it slide. The metal detectors worked but at some point there is nothing they can do, people won’t come back. H.O.B. is my own personal Dell.