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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.
Why has the DarkNet paper gotten this much attention? My guess is that there are two reasons. First, the paper was written by guys from Microsoft Research, and Microsoft has previously taken a pro-DRM position. The paper includes a standard disclaimer saying that it is the opinion of the authors and not of Microsoft. But still it reflects a change. In past years, conference presentations from industrial researchers, both at Microsoft and elsewhere, have shied away from anti-DRM statements, so as to keep their employers happy (although vigorous anti-DRM language could often be heard at dinner afterwards). So non-techies will put more weight on the paper because of its authors affiliation.
Only three remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years! OpenBSD
Hey sure, why not. However, executives are just the type who hear about something theoretically usable and immediately start dreaming about how it's something magical. I would most certainly not put it past them to think that GPS were some sort of a work-always magical location technology.
It's worth to point out that the large media and proprietary software interests have pretty much made this an all or nothing game. Either all information will need to be digitally controlled for all time, or it will need to be free to copy unrestricted for any purpose or reason.
And a Hollywood studio who only proposed the idea would know that how?
See, Hollywood distributes there stuff over satellite. They would think, hmm, people need to have a dish on their property to receive that info.
Maybe a glimmer of a thought process would cross their minds and it would click that just maybe they'd need to have a clear view of the sky to use a GPS too?
But I wouldn't expect you to think of that...
It will be interesting to see how much:
1. The book sells
2. The book's topic is covered and/or promoted on more mainstream media outlets.
And then, if he's labeled either positively in a Woodward/Berstein way or "agenda" reporter way that discredits his point-of-view.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
For only about £16 or something, depending, this book sounds well worth it and I shall be buying a copy as soon as I can.
All these new technologies really do require a complete rethink of how media should be delivered as at the moment we seem to be stuck with an old model that refuses to make it easy for the consumer whilst overcharging for the inconvenience of such a service.
I don't watch TV any more because I have to then schedule my life around shows I want to see rather than just sit down and watch what I feel like, when I feel like it. Of course, to be able to do that, we seem to have to resort to bittorrent because otherwise content is simply unavailable, unless we remember to go out and buy a whole season on DVD first, which we can of course all afford to do..
to use something like those The Truth smoking commericals.
MPAA exec 1: Let's put GPS chips in all computers so were can track if they are playing their (well really ours ) DVDs. If they don't play it in the right region, be know the exact location and can order congress to bomb it.
RIAA exec 1: Well GPS isn't selling albums right now, they can't even break into the top 100...all because of piracy. The CD has 3 songs on it and at $18.00 with our "shifty" copy protection we should be making billions. Instead some kid holds down the shift key when he played it on his PC and now it's all over the internet. We only sold one copy because of this.
RIAA exec 2: I think he meant those tracking thingies, not the group.
RIAA exec 1: Have you even heard of GPS...they are the bomb, here, I just got their album torrent from suprnova.
MPAA exec 1: dumbasses
Closing: It wouldn't be so funny if it wasn't true
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
"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."
I beg to differ with Lessig and the rest on the benefits of public domain. Let me suggest to you the biggest benefit is not some vague cultural gain when an item goes into public domain. The big benefit is MORE JOBS MAKING NEW STUFF.
How much public domain stuff is on television, radio, books? Almost none. It doesn't make sense to promote a public domain work because anyone could come along and release the same item, leeching off your marketing and undercutting you on price.
So public domain works are available to use, but not worth marketing because you can't get an exclusive on them.
Now consider the other extreme: infinite copyright & perfect DRM. Sony/BMG/Vivendi etc. simply sells music recorded centuries earlier by long dead musicians, endless re-releases from one generation to the next. For the next gazillion years. No work is done, computers send out the files, and take the money -> no jobs.
You have to let works expire into the public domain (free from DRM) to force companies to make new stuff because 'new stuff' = jobs.
If you want to do some real good, go out and put your money where your mouth is, and buy a copy of this and send it to your senator or representative. Enough of these copies show up, and either the legislators themselves or their staff will read it. From what I've seen on the Hill, having the staff aware of it goes a long way towards the legislator being aware of it, as no one has their ear like their own staff.
It's said that a handwritten letter gets more attention, as it clearly conveys the time and effort the sender put into it. Well, purchasing a book and sending it takes not only time, but money as well, and will get attention.
We have to make sure that Congress understands the truth of what's going on.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
To which I say, "GOOD!"
If they want a protected file format, let them create a digital format of their own. Let them try to sell it and watch the public refuse to adopt it. Will they? No. More likely insist on crippling current industry standards and equipment to suit their paranoia.
It's been said before but bears repeating. This isn't about reality. Logically they know every copied file is not a loss of money as most people would not have spent their money on it in the first place because most of what is being traded is craptastic fluff to distract them from their lives.
As long as they can keep repeating their lie long and loud enough however, they know the short attention span and lack of dedication to careful thought on the part of their audience will let it essentially become the truth and allow them the coveted mantle of victimhood.
The people who resisted the VCR for the surface reason that it would result in piracy and financial loss but in reality did so because they feared having to meet a new standard in product quality to avoid their materials being rejected at the theater and sent straight to video with lower immediate proceeds are not victims.
I must get around to buying this book for the amusement.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
A very good arguement, and I hope you don't mind if I nitpick about one point:
We don't just give creators a temporary monopoly, we (meaning taxpayers) pay the costs of enforcing a temporary monopoly, especially now that many copyright violations are criminalized.
This is one reason our greatly lengthened copyright law is a bad thing.
1. Works typically bring in most of their money in the first few years. The benefit to the author usually declines as the works age.
2. Costs to enforce go up with age, and often go up non-linearly. When you have to start researching what company sold what rights to whom, 40 and 50 and sometimes 80 years ago, and when a work has passed through, say, 5 or 6 now defunct company's hands, proving who has infringed on just what becomes very expensive.
Repeatedly scaling up costs to get repeatedly decreasing benefits is a stupid solution at best to just about any problem.
Who is John Cabal?
I think the end of the drama is written upon the wall. The digitally connected masses will soon remove the mass from media. Here's why:
1. The balance of power has already shifted to the masses in a sort of first mover advantage. The backlash coming from the entertainment industry is reflexive. It happens *after* networked mobs creatively, unexpectedly, disruptively take technology into their own hands. The tension between the entertainment industry and the online world simply represents that shift of power and control away from mass media.
2. What will the entertainment industry be when consumers en masse, produce their own "as good or better than" diversions? Blogs spontaneously exploded news into millions of niches, leaching the mass from news media. Cheap high tech multimedia production tools will soon provide grass roots entertainment more riveting than Hollywood fare. The imagination and creativity of crowds is absolutely capable of producing open source, distributed entertainment exponentially increasing in novelty. The mass entertainment industry will soon compete with high quality virtually free grass roots alternatives from the digitally connected masses, and take its rightful place as another niche. What "mass" will be left to market to?
3. Litigation takes a lot of time. Since technological advances also accelerate events, inflexible, knee jerk systems will eventually be overwhelmed with the speed of disruption. There will soon not be enough time to react before the next volley. Future shock paralyses the most inflexible systems first. So, ultimately, in a digitally networked world, control is distributed to the masses. But the question keeps returning: Is Big Brother a Possible Future?Will some central organization, representing narrow interests be able to control what citizens share electronically? I don't think so. The imminent emergence of open source personal self-replicating fabricators will spit out an ever growing complexity of items, all of which will be embedded with personalized computational intelligence. So, no consistent control over hardware standards will be possible. Chips will not answer to a centralized institution.
As self-replicating fabricators rapidly spread to thousands and then millions of people, they will mutate and evolve; enlisted to upgrade and propagate their own next generation. Mobjects from the collective creative energy of Smart Mobs. This spells the end of the consumer/ producer divide. What will mass marketing be without a mass market?
P. S. The rise of personal replicating desktop fabricators is one of the trends I've followed closely since October 2004. I was pleased to see CNN cover the emergence of desktop fabricators only a few days ago. The blogosphere scooped CNN by many months :)
Ted
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence
Well put. I think you're absolutely right. The record labels could make considerably greater profits if they were less obsessed about piracy and more open to inventive new business models, even if they are "leaky" as the iTunes model. Same for Hollywood, with its crippled Movielink and CinemaNow services. Perfect protection is impossible in the digital age. Get used to it.
- jd (the author)
So we compromised. I'm releasing a mini-book online -- excerpts from the book, along with interview transcripts and new stuff, every Monday at Darknet.com.
Some day, book publishers will release all new works onto the Net in some fashion (perhaps with ebook DRM, perhaps not). But, alas, we ain't there yet.
- jd (the author)
No.
Not only would iTunes make less money if the had more DRM, but Microsoft is also clearly committed to dragging their feet on DRM as well because they know it's bad for business and they always have known that which is why things are the way they are and this is why Apple is said to "get it".
But it's not just Apple and Microsoft either. Everybody knows DRM is lousy for business, even justices of the Supreme Court.
Court procedings are public documents with a GPL-alike character in that they are publicly owned.
So perhaps it's no surprise that even members of the court might "get it". I forget who it was but one of the justices going into Grokster gave quite a bit of opinion on what a good idea he thought the iPod was and that such devices need to be protected against litigation. That was after pointing out that the real reason to use an iPod was not because of the iTunes store, but because of the fact that people could fill it up with free data off the Net and plenty of it. And by free, he acknowledged both Net Radio and P2P as sources of getting free data to listen to on the iPod and that this was the key benefit of the iPod. Pretty straightforward.
That was a justice of the Supreme Court. So, a lot of people "get it".
The issue they're looking at in this session is P2P obviously and I guess we'll be hearing about that any minute. But without P2P there's still NetRadio. It's all there. In fact, the variety is stunning and that's not going away fast even in the US. And even if it did, it will never disappear internationally because laws about the use of airwaves vary dramatically across nations and the legitimate tie-in with existing radio laws makes it simply a fact that has to be accepted until those laws change and that's just not going to happen, even in the US. Given that there wasn't even such a thing as web radio just a few years ago, the odds of this happening internationally in a timely manner are negigible.
So, as long as there's net radio broadcasters and people have the legal right to make back-ups of radio station broadcasts then it is legitimate to have an enormous music collection. That will fill up an iPod or even a fatboy iPod with one of these 160Gig 2.5''notebook drives for the car. And with wireless so you can just pull in and download music from inside the house.
Hell, Apple had better move on a few new products in the near-term because if they don't the cell phones are gonna beat them to it with nothing but RAM. Shoot, and why not. You won't need WiFi with a phone that does WIFly mobile. Just stream from home and up or download whatever plalist you like wherever you are anytime. At that point you can just stream it off your desktop or home file server. If you get out of range for awhile you can buffer four gigs or so onto the local cache till you get back. I mean hell just look at the idea of a file server at home. There was no consumer product categoy for file servers a few years ago, but now there you see such things being sold in retail stores along with the related category of very cheap NAT routers. Those things tend to be especially fond of notebook drives and no wonder. They're often plug-and-play. Running them together with a little SOC package makes a cute little value added toy but they're as big as a terrabyte. And look at the prevalence of GigE in the consumer market. If GigE isn't going to be helpful to someone with a major media archive, I don't know what is. Ineed, what else are you using that kind of bandwidth for in the home environment? Writing e-mails?
So the answer is definitively no. Apple would not make more money with better DRM and neither would Sony or Samsung or Toshiba or Matsushita or Benq or Tatung or Hong Hai or Flextronic. Note that Flextronics is among the sponsors of OpenCores.org and has written up some interesting SOC work that they've done using OpenCores designs. None of those companies can benefit form greater DRM and they are all aware of it at many levels. That doesn't mean the
I absolutely agree with you. Once we are in a war, a commander (Lt -> CIC) has a responsibility to his or her own soldiers first. But maybe we should weigh the likely number of civilian deaths before we decide to go to war. Shouldn't knowingly entering into a conflict where we are likely to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, when you are not defending yourself against an attack, be a war crime?
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain