Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation
by J.D. LasicaWhat happens when the irresistible force of technological innovation meets the immovable object of big entertainment? For starters, Hollywood moguls start shooting themselves in the foot. It's easy to forget now that the big media companies were against VCRs in the '80s and CDs in the '90s. They're currently working on dumbing down your TiVo, iPod, and DVD burner. We've entered a new age of Prohibition, like in the 1920s, but with your home entertainment system at stake instead of your home bar. In both cases, the laws are so senseless and out of touch with the public that they're turning millions of us into digital outlaws.
J.D. Lasica argues that many of the future gadgets we long for might already be here if we were better able to balance the needs of Hollywood and the public it supposedly serves. Darknet takes you behind the scenes and into the trenches of this widening conflict, pulling back the curtain on the Hollywood insiders, tech innovators, and wily provocateurs who lurk in the darkest corners of cyberspace. He reveals how profoundly technology has shifted the balance of power between corporate media and regular people, and how determined many media powers are to turn back the clock, lock down our devices, and curtail fair use.
Rapid-fire advances in technology have transformed home entertainment. Not only can we store hours of television programming and music on hard drives, software has made it easy to create our own movies and songs, splicing and sampling professional-grade material into amateur productions. Entertainment conglomerates are understandably concerned, but in online journalist Lasica's reporting on the culture clash over digital distribution and remixing, corporations are simplistically portrayed as dinosaurs intent on stifling the little guy's creative freedom in order to protect their profit margins. The characterization is not entirely unmerited, but the deck feels unfairly stacked when Big Entertainment honchos are juxtaposed with a preacher who illegally copies and downloads movies so he can use short clips for his sermons. Similarly, Lasica infuses the allegedly inevitable triumph of participatory culture with a sense of entitlement and anti-corporate bias that he never fully addresses. Lasica's interviews are far-ranging, and he provides a cogent analysis of the broad problems with America's outdated legal framework for dealing with intellectual property rights and the need for the entertainment industry to adapt to new technologies.
