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.
From the review:
Damn....that's harsh...
Seriously, though, it looks like a fascinating read (especially the part about GPS chips in laptops). However, with a price tag of $25.95 list ('B&N' price: $20.76...'member' price: $18.68...why so many prices?), I think I'll just grab the torrent. ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.)
Fascinating for sure but more like science fiction or out and out bullshit. GPS units don't work so well inside buildings. Hell, they don't work so well in tree covered areas (depending on the unit and antenna).
Darknet sounds at times like it could have been written by a team of Slashdotters.
That's a pretty mean thing to say.
I've tried to see things from your POV, but can't get my head that far up my butt.
So, where is the torrent for the book download?
Seriously though - why isn't this book released under creative commons?
I'm teminally incoherent
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.
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
Except that: 1. It's Hollywood's war against us, the consumers, so it matters to me; 2. Can you really justify to the purple-fingered Iraqis that we never should have removed Saddam?
At any rate, while the reviewer may or may not be accurately representing the book, his description of the original paper as "shoveled dirt onto the coffin of DRM as a business model" is nonsensical.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
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
One for each of the Internets.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
It's really pretty simple from Hollywood's point of view: control the distribution mechanism, something they are used to, and control access, something else they are used to. Just because it is the internet does not mean that they will not try to apply the business model that has worked well for them for nearly a century. In fact, given their history, it would be surprising if they did not.
Keep in mind that Hollywood has largely tried to stifle technlogical innovation outside of their control: they complained about television, because it would keep people from the theatres. Then, they mastered that medium and made even more money because of it. Then, later, they complained about VCRs, because it would allow people to record films and not pay them for the privilege. Then, as with television, they mastered that medium and made even more money because of it. They resisted DVDs initially because it would be easy to make "perfect" copies from a DVD, and they put on an exceptionally weak encryption scheme to thwart that from happening. Of course, the 'DRM' was thwarted, people now copy DVDs, and guess what: Hollywood makes more money because of DVDs.
Now comes the internet. As usual, Hollywood is resisting this new technology and are saying what they usually say: it will cost them money. However, if history serves as a guide, they will eventually master this medium too and make money because of it.
There is piracy, there is little doubt about that. While it does prevent some sales of DVDs or movie tickets, in some cases it has gone the other way and has drawn interest into a film or a TV show. There is much speculation that the producers of Battlestar Galactica conducted a quiet stealtht marketing ploy by allowing their show to be distributed via BitTorrent and other P2P vectors -- and it worked. BG gained an audience, and surely some of it came from those who had downloaded earlier episodes. Now, the same is being said of the new Doctor Who. Surely, few Americans would see it if it were not for the illegal distributions. There is a lot of interest in this new show and it is surely because of P2P, because the show is not available in any form (legally) in the USA.
At the end of the day, all of Hollywood's fighting will turn to gradual acceptance. Whether or not it is on their terms is their and the market's choice. The internet is here to stay, and so is piracy. Instead of focussing on preventing piracy, perhaps Hollywood should add enough to the value propostition that piracy is an afterthought. Many would gladly pay to get electronic distributions of shows via the internet, and it is up to Hollywood to get out of their office chairs and to figure out how to profit from it. History says that they will, but it does not foretell WHEN they will.
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."
The innocent (non-combatant) Iraqis killed by American troops might have preferred to be, you know, alive. Of course, most of them were killed before the purple ink came out, so I guess you wouldn't have us justify anything to them.
Can you really justify to the purple-fingered Iraqis that we never should have removed Saddam?
Can you justify to me why we're *not* currently enmasse in Sudan stopping what is clearly a genocide in progress?
Afghanistan had at least legitmate reasons for being attacked, but Iraq? no there are no legitmate reasons for the war we are currently in there. Are those purple fingered Iraqi's better off? time will tell but most likely yes. That does not JUSTIFY the invasion of a sovereign(sp?) nation that wasn't attacking anyone else at the time.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
"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.
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.
very Machiavellian of you...
The problem is that you can't look at Iraq in a nutshell, it affects just about every other issue we face.
As you said we have other problems to deal with and didn't need this one right now. But because of this overextension of ourselves, we aren't able to contain North Korea, we aren't able to contain Iran, we aren't able to do much of what we'd like globally because now everybody is against us.
Long term this is a bad thing, not removing Saddam, but doing it WITHOUT the world's support, WITHOUT provocation, and WITHOUT thinking enough about the consequences/aftermath, and will only hurt us more.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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.
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.
As a supporter of fair use, I always try to download a free copy of a song or movie instead of paying for it.
What an f'ed up definition of "fair use". Fair use is media backup or transfer once you have paid for the original media presentation of a work.
The war on corporate greed (RIAA etc) will not end until artists come to realize that it is wrong to gouge money out of people just for appreciating a creative work.
Artists have always either been commissioned for works, or charged for uncommisioned works displayed for sale in galleries. This has been true since long before either copyright or fair use existed conceptually.
True art comes from creative desire, not the profit motive. Michelangelo did not make his masterpieces with the intent of charging admissions, and neither did Mozart.
Pure. Unadulterated. Crap. Both Michaelangelo and Mozart were both commissioned to create most of their works; even the most famous examples were for profit. Mozart particularly earned box office revenue for symphony presentations.
And, again, that is typical of artists throughout history, prior to "intelectual property" law. The first plays and musicals were done by roving acting troupes who would "pass the hat" afterwords.
Please keep your mucked up version of history private from now on.
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'd really like to see a book on the similarity between big corporations, especially in the U.S., and Soviet ministries. There was a technology pundit on Charlie Rose this week who applied just this label to:
- Cable and satellite providers
- Cell phone companies in the U.S.
- The baby bells
It could easily be extended to movie studios, media giants, Clearchannel, GM and Ford, Boeing and Lockheed, etc.
The excellent documentary on Burt Rutan and SpaceshipOne, "Black Sky: The Race for Space", is playing on Discovery Science this week, a mnust see if you haven't. Towards the end of the second part the aero engineer made the point increasingly everyone is made to feel they can't do anything amazing unless they are part of a big corporation or government. They wanted to show 20 guys, with a little of Paul Allen's money, could do something only 3 giant governments have done previously, put a man in to space(and they broke the altitude record for an air launched vehicle dating to the X-15 in 1963). There are numerous barbs at NASA, Boeing and Lockheed and the role they've played in completely wrecking the U.S. as a space faring nation since the end of Apollo.
Anyway the gist of the proposed book would be that all of America's giant corporations keep touting free enterprise and free markets while they in fact want no such thing. They want free markets but only for them and they WANT any potential competitors snuffed out. They dont want any government regulation of them but they are delighted with regulation, or holes in the same, that allows them to destroy their competitors and to protect their dominant position. They increasingly have more politicians and lobbiests than inventors and engineers. They want to snuff out competition with patent law, regulation, government subsidies(loans, tax breaks, contracts), and predatory monopolistic practices, all the while ranting that there is to much government regulation and they are fans of free markets, though increasingly they write all those regulations. Increasingly there one and only innovative business plan is to move their work force to the cheapest possible labor market to cut costs, so they can continue to be rpofitable for a time though the increasingly don't invest in developing new and innovative products.
The conclusion of the story. In many mature industries the U.S. has ceased to be a free market economy. Free enterprise wasn't a victim of government regulation or Socialism. It was the victim of a few giant companies that came to dominate each market, and now use armies of lawyers and lobbies to destroy competition. American corporations in particular are starting to atrophy and can't compete on a global stage against companies who are really innovating and doing real R&D. John McCain recently pointed out how sad it is that innovative technology like hybrid vehicles is all happening in Japan and not Detroit(who are instead just licensing Japanese technology). Detroit in particular has a long history of innovating only when they are compelled to. American companies no longer compete through innovation, they only vie to protect their position with lawyers and lobbyists.
You can still have stellar new companies like Google but its typicaly only in very new markets with no entrenched players. The only counterpoint I can think of at the moment is in the airlines. The totally corrupt big three have been virtually destroyed by new competitors like Southwest who observed U.S. airlines were brutually inefficient and not providing the service people wanted, and created a new lean economic model and managed to succeed in spite of the entrenched position of the big three, and frequent government subsidies which keep them afloat.
@de_machina
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
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)
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
Why should we pay any attention to theives when there are still murderers walking around free!!
Presumably both issues deserve some attention.
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