Triumph of the Small

The implications are absolutely vast. The success of platforms may well be decided by just how well they respond to this new industry model. Those with low barriers to entry, such as the PC, Facebook, the iPhone and their ilk will become the breeding grounds for innovation, attracting many developers with risky, clever ideas, with the gamers who pursue those ideas inevitably following. The comparatively high barriers to entry of services like PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Arcade will need to be reconsidered - or risk those platforms becoming places where the games everyone else was playing six months ago on Facebook or their phones ends up, which is surely not what Sony or Microsoft would want.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, vested interests in the existing media businesses have no desire to see this transition continue. A world in which valuable IP and culture is owned by a vast range of individual creators is not, after all, what companies like Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom and Sony have been spending their billions on building. One can forgive them for feeling like the rise of digital culture is pulling the rug out from under their expensively shod feet.

Arrogantly, they also assume that this is a transition which can be stopped - not by embracing new business models and placing themselves at the heart of them, but rather by jealously protecting the existing markets. The Digital Economy Bill is a good example of such retrograde thinking, designed as it is to allow large, powerful corporations the power to defend their copyrights with little consideration for smaller companies or individuals (who are, of course, disproportionately affected by copyright infringement and thus deserving of more protection, not less), and even less consideration for the complexity of copyright law itself.

The latter point is important. As we've seen in the USA, where the less draconian DMCA has been in law for some time, media firms are happy to use their newfound copyright superpowers to chilling effect on smaller creators of content, steamrollering over such concepts as fair use or parody and issuing "takedown" demands left, right and centre. Once the Digital Economy Bill becomes law, it is only a matter of time before creative individuals and small firms find themselves subject to spurious, abusive legal actions from large media conglomerates who regard everything from parody to homage as copyright theft, to whom "remix culture" is simply another word for "crime spree", and for whom "injunction first, ask questions later" is a valid business strategy, not a damning criticism.

Yet despite the chilling effect this legislation will have, it won't accomplish anything. Trying to force a generation that has dipped its toes into the seas of content afforded by YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and the wider Internet to go back to consuming media solely from the carefully controlled and lidded sippy-cup of the media conglomerates is like trying to push toothpaste back into a tube. Blockbuster games, albums and films will continue to be profitable for as long as people consume media - but an important and growing portion of the world's media spend is going to bypass big media and instead go straight to those creators of IP who are innovative, clever and talented enough to use digital media to their full advantage.

Publishing executives may lose sleep over the dollars slipping through their fingers on services like YouTube, Kongregate, NewGrounds, Steam or MySpace. They may rage over the idea that some of those content creators are standing on their shoulders, forgetting the giants upon whose shoulders the media business itself stands. They may even influence our shallow, venal politicians with their star power and heavy wallets, leading to the hasty passing of bad laws designed to wrap old, broken business models in cotton wool and protect them from the nasty future. None of those things will stop the fact that for creators and consumers, the two groups of people who truly matter in what are, after all, called the Creative Industries, these changes are positive, desired - and inevitable.