Hollywood is terrified of your computer. Movie industry bigwigs know your PC can help you create your own movies, or, worse, copy and tweak theirs. So, like a jealous lover, the entertainment industry worries: Is your computer offering you the fulfillment we can't? Are you going to buy fewer of our movie tickets, DVDs and CDs?
Author J.D. Lasica says Hollywood is waging battles on several fronts to make sure that doesn't happen. In his comprehensive, sometimes chilling new book, Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, Lasica details the entertainment industry's strategies for maintaining control of content in the rip-mix-burn age.
Darknet (read an excerpt) paints a picture of a culture war that pits Hollywood, which wants to lock down every byte of content, against its technologically empowered audience, which enjoys manipulating and sharing digital info.
While researching the book, Lasica interviewed hundreds of experts, including industry executives, lobbyists, lawyers and Silicon Valley insiders. He visited "darknets," the illegal file-sharing networks that have turned pirating Hollywood movies into a global sport, and checked in with regular folks who just want to pull a Disney film clip for their home videos.
Lasica spoke with a sprawling cast of characters. Jack Valenti, the silver-tongued former head of the Motion Picture Association of America, helped frame battles over content flow as being solely about piracy. The pseudonymous "Rev. John" uses pirated movies in his weekly sermons. Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala, two Mississippi kids, spent seven years making a feature-length tribute to Raiders of the Lost Ark in their backyards. And David Clayton created the MovieMask software to snip out R-rated content from Hollywood films.
The software provided by MovieMask and its rival, ClearPlay, quickly came under attack by Hollywood, which argued that even in the privacy of their own homes, consumers don't have the right to mess with trademarked films. Though Congress came down on the side of ClearPlay (the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, passed last April, kept scene-scrubbing software legal), Hollywood's aggressiveness surprised even Lasica.
"(Hollywood's) view still is in the vein of, 'We are the artists. We are the creative professionals. You are the audience, and you don't have the right to change anything that we do in any small way,'" he said. "But that's just a holdover. It's 20th-century analog thinking -- that there isn't a place for the audience in the movie-viewing experience, that we are just passive receptacles for the artists. That won't work in the digital age."
Turf wars between the entertainment and technology industries are nothing new. Music companies sued to thwart the player piano in 1908. AM radio broadcasters marshaled their forces against the coming of FM. VCRs very nearly went extinct in 1984 until a 5-4 Supreme Court vote (with Sandra Day O'Connor passing the tiebreaker) kept them legal.
But the stakes have never seemed quite this high or the entertainment industry this proactive. Members of the public are learning to personalize, create and share their media. Hollywood, meanwhile, has all its chips invested in a top-down model of information and entertainment distribution.
"We are moving from a text-based culture -- where people have been allowed to borrow and take snippets from books and magazines and journals -- into a visual culture," Lasica said. "Those same kind of rights, to quote from a movie or TV show and annotate it or comment on it, have been stripped away."
Darknet outlines Hollywood's multi-pronged strategy for locking down content. The tactics include using technological advances (DVD encryption is one example) and strong-arming or co-opting tech companies.
Lasica finds that Hollywood also wields huge influence in Congress. In the book, he describes the 1998 passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which makes cracking encryption a federal offense. The DMCA, Lasica argues, overwrites fair-use laws, which protect scholars and artists who appropriate materials for purposes of education and political expression.
"That's a good example of how the public doesn't realize how their rights are being whittled away," Lasica said. "I'm pretty sure that even members of Congress aren't fully aware of what they were passing."
Lasica is confident that what he describes as the "digital rights" of consumers will eventually carry the day. Until then, Hollywood will resist. And finally, if history is any measure, Hollywood will prosper.
"The entertainment industry has always fought new technologies, and the technologies have eventually won out," Lasica said. "And then Hollywood benefits. Today, they think peer-to-peer technologies are a huge threat. In fact, it is more likely an unparalleled opportunity for the industry to expand its market share, to get movies and music in everybody's hands."
