Napster, MPAA, AOL, and how stupid people in power will kill the first amendment

Part One in a series (of 3?): A history lesson

DISCLAIMER:As factual as I try to be, I'm far too lazy to research some of
the details of this article. Feel free to b*tch at me for it, but please have mercy on
my poor arse and keep your lawyers at bay. This is but a mere opinion.

You've had your ear talked off about Napster. You're sick and tired of hearing about
America Online. Hearing about the MPAA doesn't bother you quite as much, once you
finish yacking up your lunch. Well lucky be, I’m going to talk about all 3 - how
they interrelate, and how, unless the trend changes, the first amendment (or
other such freedom of speech laws, if your country has them) will suffer.

Once upon a time we had an Internet free of rules, free of spam, a place where
anyone could dial up with their 14.4 or 28.8 modem and speak their minds. Most importantly,
we could connect and exchange files of any type, with little fear of getting in trouble, even
if the files weren't approved of by certain standards. Ok, so many might argue that even back then there were limitations on what could be done and said, but I say it was about as
free as it could get. If I were a school teacher in Florida, I could send all the
kiddie porn I wanted to some guy in Arizona. (No, I’m not a school teacher). But then the net got popular. Popularity brought commercial interests online, ever in search of the next biggest market. Once this happened, things were never quite the same.

Jump ahead to a couple years ago. Napster was quickly becoming the rage on college campuses. We loved Napster because we could download songs that our friends told us
about without having to wait for it to play on the radio, or buy the CD and with our
precious money that we'd been saving for Wings (a UMass thing). Those lame bands that
put one good song on a CD and filled the rest with crap would no longer sucker us
into buying the whole CD to find out.

Administrators began moaning about the bandwidth Napster was taking up. Record companies
starting sh*tting their pants because people could download songs for free, and they
feared no one would buy CDs anymore (never mind the fact that the year Napster enjoyed its
period of greatest growth, record companies also enjoyed an increase in sales something to
to the tune of 1.4 billion dollars – (http://slashdot.org/yro/00/02/27/1549234.shtml).

Meanwhile, over in slime city Virginia, America Online head Steve Case decided he wasn't
content with being the largest ISP... he wanted everyone to have an experience in some form with the magical world of AOL. *pauses for a severe coughing fit*

Case, riding the wave of the stock market boom, wooed the aging chicken-faced Gerald
Levin, mostly by performing many sexual favors for him (Levin has a thing for shrunken
heads). No, i'm just kidding. I really don't know what got the 2 talking, but they did,
and they decided that together they could create a company that not only controlled a
monstrous amount of content, but a huge chunk of the vehicles to disperse this content.
Together, they envisioned a combined company that would immediately be the single largest
source of music, news, entertainment, AND Internet access - essentially be source and
provider of every communications medium in existence.

Now, you might think that this might not be such a bad thing. After all, couldn't the
other companies in existence keep this AOL-Time Warner in check? Wouldn't we still be
able to get our information and entertainment from other sources? I'm glad you brought
that up, actually. Unfortunately, we're out of time for today. Tune in next time to hear
about how AOL and Time Warner are going to love being your center of attention - and
how you won't have a choice in the matter. (spoiler [and shameless plug]: much of what
I’ll say about AOL can be found on my AOL sucks page (http://come.to/boycottaol).

Next: The present: how Big Company is selling its soul (and our freedom) for a buck, copyrights, MPAA, and the immediate future.

Part 3: A bleak look at the future: The logical consequences of this trend

--unfrgvnme

1.) The Return of the Shadow Legacy - druid
2.) Rampant Piracy on the Sea of Information - xearthed
3.) Napster, MPAA, AOL, and how stupid people in power will kill the first amendment - unfrgvnme
4.) Copyright Law - Aleanor
5.) Hacking vs Sysadmining - madirish
6.) State of the Hack Awards #4 - madsaxon
7.) Somethings Never Change - UberGeek
8.) It's Not about Change - darlene
9.) Programming your PSX (part 1) - OZONE