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

By: unfrgvnme

Part Two in a series (of 3): Bloating Corporate, Shrinking Freedom.

Last time I blessed you all with a brief history lesson on Napster, AOL, and the freedoms we once experienced online (though online was certainly a different beast than it is today). This time i'll talk about how those freedoms are being methodically stripped away from us.

In our modern society, there is little reprieve from the Corporate Republic. Nearly every ritual, every action we perform has been commercialized if it becomes popular enough. As commercialization grows, variety eventually dwindles counter-proportional to the cost of the activity (have you been to a modern movie theatre lately? Notice how many more there used to be?). Like the plague, Commercialization sucks the life out of everything enjoyable and then moves on to a new target. As the Internet became popular, so did it's attraction to big company.

Big Company's goal is this: to acquire ownership over as much property as possible, and then only allow others to share in it if they have enough cash to pay for it. The more a single company owns, the more it feels it can charge for it's property usage.

RIAA

Because the record companies own the best and brightest musical talents (or at least the ones we ever hear about), the availability and useage of this music is traditionally controlled by Big Company. Radio stations are forced to pay Big Company for playing their music. The only way they can make it up is by playing what Big Company suggests, for which they receive a small kickback. Music purchase availability is determined by the companies, for which consumers buy CD's at $15-$20 a piece. How much of this goes to the talents who created this music? Around a buck, if they're lucky. The companies that don't even have to use an ounce of creativity to construct this music receive a ludicrous amount of the profit. When you go to the store to buy music, you are throwing a grossly disproportionate amount of money at a company so that it can choose what music you have have access to, and in the end, what music you will listen to.

At first, digital music seemed like the answer. Any type of music, whether it be something that Big Company put out, or your local garage band recorded with a microphone, could be and was freely disseminated. With Commercialization's arrival to the Internet, however, came the walls and bulldozers. What once was freely available and accessible has become restricted or non-existant. The filters arrived, and now a site that hosts "unauthorized" material must hide to remain alive. What is considered "unauthorized"? Why, any digital copy of any form of video and audio that Big Company has ownership of. Because of it's stranglehold on all forms of media in the pre-internet era, Big Company is waging a successful war on the availability of entertainment online. (In the next issue I will discuss how this crazed ownership scheme will ultimately deprive us of our freedom to enjoy a wide variety of music).

MPAA

The Motion Picture Association of America last year took legal action against a small program called DeCSS, used to decrypt the transmission of DVD movies within a computer system. See, one of the main "features" of DVDs is that they're designed in such a way as to try to circumvent copying, one of the main problems with VHS tapes. Without a program such as DeCSS, the data is designed to be unreadable to unauthorized hardware and software. The wants you to only be able to watch their movies by owning or renting your own copy of the DVD. Well, the MPAA has won its little battles. For all intents and purposes, the DeCSS code is considered illegal. So much for fair use.

Big Brother

Did you hear about the recent (American) football game, where the faces of every fan was run through a computer system? Cameras were set up to capture pictures of every fan that walked in the gates, and the computer systems in question analyzed their faces, comparing them with a database of known criminal offenders, and alerted authorities to possible matches. What made such technology possible? Yep you guessed it, Big Company selling it's soul. A fringe holding of an unnamed Big Company developed this technology. Similar fringe companies are developing such technology as geological border limitations on the web. The way that technology works is like this: When you're on the internet, you have an address... an IP address. Databases are being compiled that can match these addresses to your geological location. In short, based on your IP address it can be known where in the world you are. Big deal with this? Digital fences (more in the next issue, however).

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

--Dan

1.) The Plague - bonghittr
2.) State of the Hack Awards #5 - madsaxon
3.) Part I: CISC and Windows the Hardware Weak Link - Knighty Knight
4.) Napster, MPAA, AOL, and how stupid people in power will kill the first amendment - unfrgvnme
5.) NetBios Shares -- Cracking Windows Machines - madirish
6.) I want my MTV - L33tdawg