Rearranging the Type on the Times-tanic

Peter Merholz, in response to The New York Times' idiotic announcement: Microsoft Software Will Let Times Readers Download Paper, writes: Apart from a few designers, no one cares about The Times' "look". (from peterme.com: Let's Put the Cat Back in the Bag).

This isn't new for the Times. I recall that for quite awhile you could get the front page in Adobe Acrobat format (as if that had some sort of value).

Years ago, I was stuck in the dreadful world of literary theory and literary criticism. There was a constant ying-yang argument between proponents of authors (Author's Rights! The meaning of the text is what the author meant!) and readers (The meaning of the text is whatever the reader decides it is). I came to realize that it was a silly notion that the creator of a text, of a speech act, of a communication, could control the interpretation of the creation. Shortly after this realization I decided I wasn't much of a theorist and moved on to more fruitful endeavors.

You can't have it both ways, you can't create something and let it loose upon the world, regardless of its medium, and expect to be able to control how people use it. This isn't an Internet thing, a web 2.0 thing, it's just the way through history humans have reacted to created content: music, literature, multimedia, film, even law: all are created in one context by an author of some sort, and interpreted (read, listened to, interacted with, interpreted) by an audience in completely unpredictable contexts.

It's sad to see The New York Times continue to push for this control over content. As a longtime reader of the site (and subscriber but occasional reader of the weekend paper edition) it's disappointing and a waste of their limited resources. The DRM aspects don't even concern me: I have no interest in using such a thing as an online representation of the printed paper. It's just a waste of money, time, and resources. And it's delusional to believe this will somehow stanch the loss of readers of the paper edition.