Slashdot Mirror
Darknet: Hollywood's War
War ain't pretty, and this book delivers the goods as a primer on how digital technologies and "personal media" (podcasts, videoblogs, digital stories, Internet television, video games) are "throwing the old rules into disarray" and "shifting the balance of power begween big media and regular people." I would have liked to have seen more about Linux and open-source software, but the author is clearly aiming for a mainstream audience.
Darknet sounds at times like it could have been written by a team of Slashdotters, ripping to shreds the entertainment cartel's claims that the locks they're putting into our digital devices are for our own good, their claims that this is a fight about theft and piracy, and other distortions that the author exposes to devastating effect. (Larry Lessig, Ian Clarke, the president of Sony's Columbia TriStar studios, DVD inventor Warren Lieberfarb and a number of digital lawbreakers are just a few of the interesting characters parading through the book.)
While big thinkers like Lessig, Doc Searls and Howard Rheingold (who wrote the foreword) have constructed the intellectual scaffolding that alerted us to Hollywood's goals of fencing in the Internet and keeping the public domain from expanding, it is left to reporters like Lasica to uncover the depressing specifics of the copyright cartel's actions.
Fascinating stories abound, like the cross-industry meetings between Hollywood lawyers, gutless wonders from the consumer electronics industry, and reps from the tech sector discussing how to divide the world into region codes like the powers at Potsdam. (one studio went so far as to propose that GPS chips be placed in all computers with a DVD player so that Hollywood could enforce region coding from the sky. It's reported here for the first time.)
Or the story of what Hollywood was after in its litigation against Sonicblue's ReplayTV. According to former CTO Andy Wolfe, the studioswere intent on decreeing how long viewers could keep a program after it was recorded on a digital video recorder. They wanted to limit how many episodes of the same show viewers could record. They wanted to ban 30-sec skip buttons and to prevent fast forward from reaching a certain speed. They wanted to cap how much programming anyone could record -- a level that Wolfe's personal laptop already exceeds.
The tech industry comes in for some bruising too, as the author demonstrates how Microsoft, HP, and a raft of other tech companies are more than willing to sell out their customers (as long as all the other big boys in the club do it too) in return for allaying the fears of paranoid Hollywood studio chieftains whose nightmares consist of piracy, piracy, piracy. Lasica says it's too early to tell whether the "trusted computing" initiative is merely a Trojan horse foisted on PC manufacturers and chip makers by the silver tongue of Jack Valenti.
Anyone with an interest in how our digital freedoms are being whittled away, how the music, movie and television landscapes are about to change forever, or how a new, empowered generation of users (mostly young people) see media differently than the older crowd, would benefit from marking up their copy of Darknet (bring two yellow markers). As the author Media will change more in the next five years than it has in the past 50 years."
Lasica has been writing about citizens' media for years, and he recently founded the grassroots media site Ourmedia.org with the help of the Internet Archive. (Remember when Slashdot brought down the site on its first day?) Last weekend I heard him interviewed on NPR's On the Media, talking about why the RIAA and MPAA don't have a clue in hell about remix culture.
But don't believe me. Decide for yourselves. Check out Darknet.com, where the author has been blogging for a couple of years. (His blog readers provided the book's subtitle and they helped edit the book.) Lots of goodies on the site: a free mini-book, including new material and chapters from the book. (Especially noteworthy are The teenage filmmakers for a look at copyright law's absurdities and The Prince of Darknet for a fascinating glimpse inside the movie underground.) Also, you'll find a backgrounder on what the hell darknetshave to do with all this (I don't know, Darknet seems like a book publisher's idea of a sexy title) ... and something I've never seen from a mainstream journalist before: tons of links to sites like doom9.net, SmartRipper, Region-Free Guide, Total Recorder, Daemon Tools, isoheaven and more.
Some of this turf is no doubt familiar to Slashdotters. And, as I said, the book could have benefited from a deeper look at the history of open source software. But it's good to see these ideas getting some serious play -- finally -- in the mainstream media, and Hollywood getting some much-needed pushback.
You can purchase Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I oppose the illegal war in Iraq and the wiping out of my fair use rights and privacy rights by the demons spawned from DRM.
I also see where DRM can be a backdoor for corporate and government thieves to sneak in and steal a huge portion of even more important civil rights.
Check out Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read":
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Nice how restricting peoples rights is compared to restricting peoples rights and the deaths of millions. Really glad we care about DRM so much that we'll wage a war on it, yet happily ignore the illegal war raging in Iraq.
View it this way. If people can't fight for the "little things", what makes you think they can fight for the big things?
Tell me, if someone's getting robbed, is he supposed to stay quiet just because people are getting killed in Iraq?
And FYI, we DID have stories on Iraq here on Slashdot. It seems you need to research a little before posting your opinion.
Forget buildings and trees: GPS receivers do not work too well when placed inside metal cases. For once the tin-foileys are not even needed.
I really hope it was proposed in a brainstorming session and quickly shot down. The popular stories are always the really stupid ones...
Nice one about the chemical weapons, particularly mustard gas. You do know that the United States supplied him with those chemical weapons he used on Iran and the Kurds? Good ole Donald Rumsfeld himself visited Saddam while he was gassing the Kurds. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename= article&node=&contentId=A52241-2002Dec29¬Found= true
sorry couldn't get auto-link to work.
The statue of David, for example, was comissioned by the Wool Guild.
Mozart made good sums for many of his works, but spent much of it living a foolish and extravagent lifestyle. He still did not die penniless as the romantic retards like to believe, but still had a court appointment and was receiving comissions from all over Europe.
The world has never been a rosy happy-joy socialist utopia.
OTOH, claiming that fair use allows unfettered access to creative works with the excuse that "True art comes from creative desire, not the profit motive" strikes me as equally fallacious.
But Big Al B is also incorrect when he writes, "Fair use is media backup or transfer once you have paid for the original media presentation of a work."
I devote quite a few pages in "Darknet" to fair use in cyberspace -- and, indeed, I have to wrestle with this almost every day at Ourmedia.org, deciding what media items have to come down because they go too far.
The kind of fair use I'm interested in helping to enable involves borrowing snippets from Hollywood movies or recorded music -- for commentary in a home video that you want to share online, for inclusion in a podcast that talks about the blues, for a brief educational or artistic touch in a nonprofit digital story, for a student report on how biased network news may be (from the political left or right).
Last week, I received a pretty good set of fair use guidelines from the SF law firm Fenwick-West and posted them at Ourmedia here. It's a good, straightforward set of fair use rules for the digital age.
- jd (the author)
one of the original paper authors was actually on the MS trusted computing groups, peter biddle.
What this paper says is what is clearly MS-internal knowledge, that flawless DRM is impossible. They know that because whenever they try and copy-protect software, all it does is delay the inevitable and inconvenience the legit people. If you can't protect software (which is the only data which can integrate its own legitimacy checks), what hope do you have against passive content like music or video?
MS (and the PC vendors) come in for inordinate amounts of grief from the media companies, those vendors who still beleive that DRM is workable, and if the PC people dont put it in voluntarily, then the government will have to mandate it.
darknet says that all you do is increase the effort required to produce a rip (routing via a good A/D & D/A conversion setup, for example), and that content sharing is so integral to the network, that you cannot stop ripped data being shared.
It sounds like the book exposes some of this war that goes on behind the scenes. One thing that worries me is that as the PC/OS vendors make more money from content sales (music, video), they will be more motivated to add DRM in, whether it is required or not. the Mac/x86 will be the metric: will the TPM be used just to stop MacOS being installed on other boxes, or will they try and lock down all itunes content.