Doctorow on the Demise of the Digital Hub 312
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!"
Re:film at 11 (Score:3, Interesting)
What are they going to miss out on? (Score:2, Interesting)
So my question is, after audiences have had a chance to see (and potentially record) the film at the theater, then see (and more-than-potentially copy) from blockbuster video (or any rental place) or even buy the film, what else is there for hollywood to worry about? pay-per-view? honestly, who orders something from pay-per-view and doesnt record it already? is the fact that its not a *digital* copy keeping hollywood in business?
Maybe I don't just get it. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:With due respect to /.ed TidBITS... (Score:2, Interesting)
Consider that far more than half the world population is 1) unable to afford the internet connection or even understand it and 2) not ready to switch the good ole TV set/VCR pair for an all-digital medium that they'll have to get used to.
What does that mean ? That means internet-based live feed will be used by very few people (us) for many years to come (my rough estimate: 6 to 10), and so won't be as relevant to Hollyw00d as the immediate near-global threat of digital broadcasting.
That also means, IMHO, that 'common people' are not ready for digital either. There will be many years before everyone can afford/accept a digital equipment. If they really stop manufacturing analog devices in 2006, then people will keep their old stuff. My TV is 10 years old,and with the proper cable it accepts PS2 NTSC input like a charm. I trust it to last at least 10 more years
So what's the point ? The point is : Hollywood has the media power, we have the internet power. If internet streaming becomes common, and your grandma starts using it, we win. If Hollywood-emasculated devices become common, and your grandma starts using them, we lose.
At least we know the rules.
Before I quit my record producing job (Score:5, Interesting)
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." (Score:5, Interesting)
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."
Re:To hell with 'em! (Score:3, Interesting)
Not a very nice thing to think of, where I don't have the right to record my own history.
All I want is.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
What do you use your computer for anyway? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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
- 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
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
If I'm hooked on a Show, who am I really helping? (Score:3, Interesting)
So, while I'm helping the creators brand their show into my mind so that I can buy the video game and watch more episodes, I'm hurting them because I don't watch it through the distributed channels complete with commercials.
Sorry folks, I LIKE catching missed episodes cause I had to work late, I LIKE showing them to my brother so he can enjoy the show as well.
Illegal? Probably, but my mentality is the same as everyone else. It was aired, why can't I watch it on demand?
Family Guy realized this, and have their eposides downloadable off their website. BRAVO I say. Wait here's a money making opportunity, SELL the episodes for a couple of bucks each off your site, LET ME have the episodes I missed, but charge me a convenience fee. Like everything else, I'd pay a little a lot of times, rather than a lot once.
So wake up **AA, give us what we want, when we want, charge us a small amount for it and make a lot.
- Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering.
Re:why is this coming out of a DB in the first pla (Score:3, Interesting)
Now we have the article cached on our main server, so all the database server has to do is redirect hits to the main server. That's working fine - even the 128K ISDN line can do that. Our main server is handling 75 simultaneous connections at the moment - I had it up to 100, but brought it back down after a crash. That will remain the bottleneck - digital.forest has an OC-12.
Keep in mind, folks, that our hardware, software, and bandwidth solutions have arisen in a situation where we're trying to do things in a way that's as cheap, appropriate to our primary audience (savvy Mac users), and simple as possible. As such, all this was put together over the last four or five years and is changed only when necessary, not just because there's newer hardware or software available.
So the database server is a Performa 6400 running WebSTAR 3.1 and serving data out of a FileMaker database (don't get me started) via Lasso; our main server is a Power Mac 7600 running WebSTAR 3.0 and serving static files.
And yes, we'd like to move everything to a coherent Mac OS X solution running on an Xserve, but when you've built a huge amount of infrastructure using strings, twigs, and baling wire, it's not an easy thing to do while still trying to put out a weekly publication.
cheers... -Adam
I pay so much to pirate. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Maybe I don't just get it. (Score:3, Interesting)
But this phrase has turned out to be very effective in getting votes in congress. It was used to get copy protection put into DAT in 1992, and "solving the digital copy problem" was the basic philosophy behind the DMCA.
Count on both the MPAA and the RIAA to milk this term as long as it remains effective, even though it is really nonsense. Basically, they are both going to continue demanding government hand-outs as long as they can. They don't care about the damage to society damage, so long as they can steal power and money.
Re:You do get it, and so does Hollywood (Score:3, Interesting)
You're thinking of things wrong. People don't trade WAV files of cd audio data (a "perfect copy" of cd audio). They trade MP3s of cd audio data. They aren't trading a perfect copy, they are trading a good enough copy that can then be copied infinitely perfectly.
The same thing with video is the concern here. dvd ripping software takes a 5gb mpeg-2 movie (720x480 @ 29.97fps) and converts it into a 700MB DIVX avi file (720x480 @29.97fps), conveniently sized to fit on a 80-min cd-r. And that's a size that people can and do trade on the net.
They aren't worried about people trading perfect copies. They are concerned about people trading "good enough" copies that don't degrade with each copy generation.
That is a serious concern. I don't think they are trying to fix it the right way, but it is still a serious concern.