Doctorow on the Demise of the Digital Hub

natpoor writes "Cory Doctorow writes an excellent piece in this week's TidBITS about how Hollywood is out to destroy the digital hub and what it means for citizens and open source. "In Hollywood's paranoid fantasy, digital television plus Internet equals total and immediate 'Napsterization' of every movie shown on TV." Slashdotters will know some of it, but this is the best write-up I've seen, and it is well-linked. Far more important than AOL on OSX!"

Comments

Maybe I don't just get it.

[Rahga]

Hollywood's fears are based on "Napsterization" of exact, perfect copies of digital content... they've seen digital music turn into easily copied MP3s. However, they do not realize that if the industry didn't push CDs, and were still selling tapes and vinyl to the masses, people would take that content and compress it and pirate it instead.

At least immediately, digital content probably will not be the first choice for video pirates. Video capture cards and RCA jacks makes napstering "The Simpsons" and VCR tapes easy. There's no encoding hoops too jump through, and no reason to bother with maintaining integrity of digital content.

In my view, digital video-based content and piracy of digitally-compressed video are two completely different subjects.

Before I quit my record producing job

[Tyrone Slothrop]

...at a Major Media Company back in the very early 80's, I asked for a meeting with the vp of my division. We had lunch.

I explained that the brand new technology of compact disk was a far more flexible medium than we knew, that it could hold any kind of information whatsoever, not only music, but computer data, movies, etc.

I spent a very long lunch trying to get this concept across. It was simply impossible for this vice president to wrap his mind around the notion that a CD could do a lot more than just deliver music.

The article is absolutely correct but doesn't go far enough. Entertainment execs not only just don't get it. They are not capable of getting it.

Not that they're dumb. They just are not capable of thinking about technology in terms of abstract possibilities. They think of gadgets only in terms of already available functions.

Therefore, in order to prevent the demise of the digital hub (because, after all, senators/congressmen have much the same skill set as entertainment execs,which includes an excessive will to power), no argument except a financial one will work.

I would suggest the following:

1. Hold a No CD Buying Day. The day after,

2. Hold a No Movies/Video Day. Next, of course

3. No TV Day >P> Use the time to hug a tree, talk to your loved one, surf the net, read a book, listen to your iPod, etc.

Repeat steps 1 to 3 every month with enough people and anti-Hub legislation will stop cold.

Nothing else will work.

Slogan: "I bought it, I own it."

[dpbsmith]

Yes, I know that even under pre-DMCA law this wasn't true. I read all the fine print. But I think this is the rallying cry under which the public can be engaged. Most people BELIEVE that it is true in some very fundamental sense--and that if the laws say it's not true, the laws are wrong.

Most people think that it IS "theft" if you fiddle with the wires and cable box and watch programs that you've haven't paid for.

But most people think that once you PAY for that television signal, you have a perfect right to invite friends to watch it with you, or watch it on two TV's at the same time, or record it on your VCR.

Property rights go deep into human history, society, and psyche. Congress can pass all the laws they like, and the RIAA can hire all the lawyers they like, and they can get people put in jail and so forth. And they can conduct all the "educational" campaigns they like. People are STILL going to believe:

"I bought it. I own it. It's MINE, and I'll use it as I darn well please."

All I want is....

[delld]

I do not care what anyone says. I do not want to p2p TV, I do not want to steal TV, I do not want digital TV, I do not really want TV in its current state at all. I do not want to organize my free time around someone else's schedual. And, I do not want to pay monthly fees for that privelage. I do not want to own a TiVo or more hardware in my house.

All I want is on demand television. I want to sit down when I want, and watch what ever I want on my TV without restrictions. I want to pay a small fee per show, but I do not want to pay more that I would for cable today[1]. I want freedom of entertainment.

I know this is possible, and not to much to ask. So why can't I have it?

[1] A monthly cap, much like Bell Canada has on my long distance charges would be great.

Why not beat the "Napsterizers" to the punch?

[lythander]

These people rely for a big chunk of their income on ad revenue that they incorporate in programming they then GIVE AWAY (broadcast). Why not offer a service, either for PVR users, or all computer users with a fast connection, a download by subscription service?

Let's say I miss program "A." Right now my choices are 1) Remember to tape ahead of time (yeah, that might happen), 2) Find someone I know that might have taped it themselves, 3) If it has a following on usenet or on the net, watch for a post of the ep I missed (great for scifi, not so much for, say, Good Eats!), 4) Wait for rerun (soon if its cable, maybe 3 months if it's network).

Those choices mostly suck.

Why shouldn't the networks take their content and encode it themselves, commercials and all (or new, different commercials!), and let me download it to my pvr or pc and watch it when I want? Use reasonable DRM if you must. Be cross-platform compatible (DivX or raw MPEGs), turn off my commercial skipper if you must (if I'm watching network TV, I can't skip anyway -- and you can add the numbers to the ad figures). But for $15 /month I'd happily pay for a service like this. I'd prefer to obey the rules if they make sense.

What do you use your computer for anyway?

[the bluebrain]

I see three main areas of use for computers nowadays:
a) old-style number crunching: weather, nuclear warheads and whatnot
b) work: shuffling documents around, making the odd powerPoint presentation
c) play: from iTunes to pac-man

Most /.-ers use their comps for all three. However
Number crunching -- considering that today's desktop is probably more powerful than a comp used for global weather forecast as of ten years ago, there's not much of this going on. Or if there is, 90% of the cycles are probably going into a pretty GUI with translucent whatsits.
Work -- companies are flexible towards legal mandates. There is no specific desire for a general-purpose comp in most work places - it just has to do what it is supposed to, and there has to be a vendor to blame when it doesn't.
Play -- this is where the general population is. Stuff like iTunes is really nice and easy to use, as are xboxes / PSs etc. right out of the box. Very few people look even at all the configuration possibilities, much less anything that has a hex number in it somewhere.

So actually very few "play around" with this stuff. This goes from replacing the sound card & feeling like a 1337 h4X0r about it, to cracking the encryption of the xbox bootup sequence (which I *do* consider to be pretty 1337). And these things are done for the same reason as mountain climbing: because they can be done, and it's fun. So it doesn't get the chicks & studs juiced up, because a byte is something *they* take out of a burger, but it does pass time (and/or get you a degree).

Now to my point: this isn't about the digital hub, but I see the issue as a broader one: it's about the demise of the general-purpose computer. So-called general-purpose comps nowadays are pretty closed-system anyway. How many have any clue what the schematics of their 3/5/7/~ layer moBo looks like? How many have actually de- and/or re-soldered an SMD? You're getting everything from some shop or other. The best you can do is to hack a board with a DSP / Z80 / HC11 whatever for some arcane highly specialised use. And the shops that build even those things are highly specialised in turn. The general-purpose comp of today is already an illusion. Even overclocking is just setting some jumpers and tweaking the BIOS - it's all within the parameters set by the manufacturers. The jobs computers are used for is cut out already. To recap:

- Crunching: use big iron. Not affected by CBDTPA / BPDG /etc.
- Office: don't care. Would use an "xbox office edition" if it increased productivity. Would even welcome P2P-inhibiting features
- Play: a large majority neither care, nor are capable of grasping the issues anyway

Which means that the 1337 are left with closed-shop systems which are likely about to become just a little more closed-shop. OGG will die, and no-one (who matters) will care.

If you read this and are thinking to yourself "but I want my general-purpose computer" (with only a smidgen of "this guy's full of shit" and "his rhetoric stinks" - both of which I am aware of and take pride in, not necessarily respectively ;) - ask yourself what exactly for.
The most positive answer I can think of "I don't know - yet" (to which Hollywood's response will be "great, we're going to tell you").
Any other answer will evoke a response from Hollywood of either "you can still do that" or "that's exactly what we want to stop, because it is / is going to be illegal.". No big deal either way.

signed,

- the Devil's advocate

I pay so much to pirate.

[dasmegabyte]

I have been pirating music digitally since 1992.

The first thing I ever did with my Thunderboard 8 bit mono sound card was buy a stereo to mono step down cable and rip a Weird Al song to VOC format. It took up roughly a quarter of my hard drive. The card was $100.

In 1997, when the first mp3s hit IRC, I pulled them down to my Cyrix-based win95 box with its 1.1 gig hard drive as fast as I could -- 19.2kbit. The line cost me $15 per month and the new and huge 3.5 gig drive around $300.

And when napster came out, I bought new headphones (Sennheisers, $170) so I wouldn't wake up my roommate trading Jiker tracks with Germans.

When I bought my burner ($240, plus the SCSI card), I turned it into a $30 per month CD habit. Mp3s, porno, whatever. Movie clips.

Then, suddenly, whole episodes. Vivo, then RM, then MPG when I got DSL ($50 per month). I got a new video disc array to rip my own hong kong films from the chinese place down the road( 2 40 gig drives, $500, raid card $170, videos $1 each plus $3.99 late fees).

Eventually, I started burning everything as VCD. To reencode I needed more ram and a dual processor machine ($800 plus cooling devices when I o/cd). VCDs played like shit on my player so i bought a new comb filter ($75) and a pioneer elite series dvd player ($500 plus 4 year service contract) to go with my AV setup (mostly McIntosh and Sherwood tube stuff, around $5000 in all).

Did I mention that I also bought everything I burnt to VCD the minute it came out on DVD? That I burn songs to CDs, then like the albums so much I head to borders and buy the originals (I call it "voting for good music")? That I have budgetted over $700 per month for CDs, books, movies, new hardware and internet lines?

If computer hardware companies think they're going to make MORE money when piracy dries up, they're fools. They should be fighting the CBDTPA tooth and nail.